The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (18 page)

“The film is heavily voiced over,” Laing’s voice says. “The narrator appears to be making a prolonged confession. A confession that is by turns sorrowful and defensive.

“Like Chris Marker’s
La Jetée
the film consists of optically
printed photographs, as well as some motion footage. Often these are accompanied not just by the voiceover but by a sort of droning, ambient music, very spare and harsh and oddly beautiful. The film was sent to me in 1991 in a package marked GUTMAN. Inside, sandwiched crudely between two torn pieces of cardboard, each, in turn, marked with a black X, was the 16 mm sound film which I watched once and destroyed.”

What follows next seems impossible, but not really if you think upon all the impossible things that happen every day. It’s an audio recording Laing made of the film, with his periodic comments describing the images on the screen. Laing describes each image as it appears, and then simply records the audio, which is voiceover narration by a person we never see.

“The first image is an industrial landscape, in oversaturated color,” Laing’s voice says. “A sandstorm or something even more toxic looms on the far horizon. It’s a still image, although there’s the feeling of movement somehow, as if the image were quietly breathing.” This—like the rest of the images—is followed, presumably, by a simple audio recording of the film’s voiceover during the duration of this image. (For the sake of clarity, or some semblance of clarity, I’ll put the voiceover that Laing recorded directly from the film in italics, and I’ll put Laing’s description of each film segment that precedes each voiceover in quotation marks.)

It’s true that I worked for them during the second purge. It’s not my intention to excuse what I’ve done, though God knows my crimes, if crimes is even the proper word, are far less grievous than those committed by others, the ones now called patriots. As for those maimed by our activities, they will have to speak, if they are still capable of speaking, for themselves. I’m responsible for my actions, and my actions alone. I’ve been promised immunity. But from what? And by whom? I don’t even know who my captors are, only that they have instructed me to commit to writing a true and faithful account of my role in the second purge.

“The second still image is black and white. It appears to be the interior of a large room with a window that looks out onto the sandstorm.”

I suppose I should start with the Gutman case. Upon first glance, the file seemed typical, Gutman having taken certain actions which, in the eyes of the Messiah Detectives, deemed him suspect and unreliable. I was to follow him, trace his communications, and take all due and proper precautionary action should I deem him about to divulge information that would force the agency to reveal, in the process of recovering that information, its existence. For it was true that at this point the agency was still a shadow operation, whose power derived not from visible action but rather from, as they claimed in white paper after white paper, strategic abstinence.

Like I said, there was, upon first reading, nothing atypical about the Gutman file. As customary, it was delivered beneath my door during the night. As usual, stamped in blue ink with a time code indicating precisely when it should be opened. A little heftier than previous envelopes, perhaps, which only whetted my curiosity, even as I felt a noose tightening around my neck, invisible, its rope threading out through my window, down the street, into the sewers, and up again through the vents into the offices of the Messiah Detective Agency where, tied to a heavy iron handle emerging from the floor (much like I imagine an old train switch lever might look) it awaits the yank that will snap my neck.

But all this is speculation. About the rope, the noose. The facts are much less melodramatic. I opened the file at the time indicated by the time code, and began to read. As usual, I jotted down the major points on my notepad and mapped out, roughly, my plan of action. The file was sparsely written, in the minimalist corporate style fashionable during that time. I put the file back in the envelope, poured myself a drink, flipped through the sports pages of the local newspaper, and went to bed. It was only later,
sometime deep into the night after being awoken by a sharp noise that seemed to come from within the apartment itself, that I realized what it was that bothered me about the file.

“The third image is a moving image. Color. An open field in the sunlight. A shadow—or the shadow-like figure of a person—emerges in the distance and gradually spreads over the field. Consuming.”

The second purge, unlike the first, was less joyous. The public hangings and beheadings were glorious the first time through, accompanied as they were by the high rhetoric and the music. They were spectacles that meant something, confirming a certain iron-fisted tendency of thought that had crept into the minds of even the most liberation-minded of our thinkers. And yet, clearly, the first purge had not done its duty. Five years of gagging violence had still not rooted out the primal attachment to wrong ideas. The second purge would need to purge the purgers, and that’s where it began. All the architects and heroes of the initial purge—Maria, Sergio, Tomás, Annabel, Toni, and the others—were of course disposed of first, their bruised faces the last image-memory any of us have of them. I remember (and even disclosing this is a risk, but I am already doomed) walking along the riverbank with Sergio several days before he disappeared, sharing a cigarette, when, in passing, he mentioned a name to me, which I at first thought (mistakenly) to be the title of a book: Gutman. I remember that the cherry trees were in bloom, so it must have been spring, even though we tightened our collars against a cold wind.

At this point in the tape and for a short while Laing voices the characters, a voiceover of the voiceover. It’s strange: you can still hear the original voiceover but it’s followed almost immediately, like time-delayed sound or an echo, of Laing repeating (mostly verbatim) the original voice. You can picture Laing watching the 16 mm film in the dark somewhere, holding the recorder close
to his mouth, repeating the voiceover in some terribly intimate way, as if he were witnessing some secret ritual that put him in grave danger, for there is an undeniable weariness and even sadness to his voice, as if these were the last words he might ever speak. I’ve italicized Laing’s voiceover of the voiceover.

“‘Gutman, yes,’ I said to Sergio, ‘but it is you for whom I fear. What about you?’

“‘Oh, there’s no hope for me!’ he said brightly, as if saying it might protect him, putting his hand upon my shoulder as he always did to indicate that our conversation had reached a point beyond which it could go no further. I suppose that’s why we had remained friends for so long: we knew when to draw the line, and when not to cross the line, while others drew lines only to cross them.

“I was the one to cut down Sergio’s body, days later, hanging from a cord not much thicker than a shoelace, from a lamppost at the edge of the city park. His trousers were bunched down around his ankles, his hands tied behind his back with his own bandana. There were scuff marks on the rusted lamppost pole where his heels had kicked. Tomás and I carried his body to Maria’s apartment (that smelled of lemons) nearby, and then onto the hospital in the backseat of her car, the air conditioning on full force, him lying there like the flesh that he was.

“Image number four is black and white. It’s a freeze frame. A long, empty hallway in what appears to be a school or hospital. There are gas masks or something scattered on the tiled hallway floor, and a symbol on the wall that I can’t quite make out. Not spray painted like you’d expect but neatly drawn in sharp lines, as if cut into the wall with a razor.

“In the hospital lobby, which stank of formaldehyde and burnt rubber, two men dressed as orderlies grabbed Maria and quickly taped-over her mouth and dragged her away down a fluorescent hallway. Tomás and I fled through the smeared glass doors back out into the parking lot, but as we ran (past the very car that
held Sergio’s body) they overtook Tomás, as well, and would have taken me but for his fighting, which delayed them until I disappeared into the darkness, the night offering its own strange sort of bindings, the harsh hospital lights receding in the distance, the cool blank fields smelling of night dirt.

“The next night Toni didn’t answer his phone at first, and then later he did, except it wasn’t him, and I wondered if it’s true like the rumors suggested that a call can be traced so quickly through the heavy wire lines.

“Which is to come back to what gave me pause about the Gutman file: it was, as I noted right away, a little heftier than the others, something I first attributed to the stock of the paper, which felt slightly heavier in my hands.

“In other words, a forgery.

“Image five switches to color. It’s a slow forward-tracking shot down the same hallway from image four, intercut with brief flashes of another location, what appears to be a stadium at night, under bright lights, in the rain.

“As the principal architect of the second purge, Gutman was a despised (if largely unseen except for the fact of his name) man, widely known to be the author of the so-called ‘Gutter Articles,’ slang for not only where the executions took place, but how. Despite the blood that flowed and splashed in the streets as a result of these orders, Gutman, it was suggested, was really more of an idea man than a man of action. He was not associated with the original junta, but was recruited later from university, where prior to the purges his published critiques of how power is rooted primarily in language and subtle but persistent linguistic ‘codes’ earned him wide acclaim among the very intelligentsia his policies would eventually exterminate.

“‘What does it mean for one to be a prophet of his own fate?’ Gutman had asked in one of his rare post-Gutter public appearances, as if seeking the answer for himself. ‘With modernity, we
enter the age of the production of ourselves as the Other, do we not? All the endless commentaries about the rights of the Self are thus mere folly.’ This brief clip (he seemed to be speaking at a soccer stadium at night, harshly lit, his glasses speckled with rain, the sound of explosions or thunder cracking through his words) circulated briefly, and then disappeared, and returned as an extended version that was so over-copied and degraded that Gutman’s face (if it even was Gutman at this point) appeared as a cubist, pixilated thing. And then, enigmatically: ‘As for hate speech, all speech is hate speech,’ or something like that, as an explosion so powerful it rocked the camera and interrupted his last few words before the screen went static and then black.

“And so yes: it’s true that beginning sometime during the second purge there was no ‘good’ side anymore, nor ‘bad’ side. All sides were equally bad, with the difference being that the more powerful side exacted a more crippling, terrible form of badness upon the less powerful. As I’ve said, at that point the Messiah Detectives were just becoming what came to be known as the Messiah Detectives; two words that did not yet carry the weight or burden of history. They had no context. It was just another shadowy name, mistaken by the resistance as opposed to the junta and mistaken by the junta as opposed to the resistance.

“In truth, my fate was sealed as soon as I opened the envelope, and saw his name. Whether or not the papers were forged was, I came to realize in the following weeks, immaterial.

“The sixth image is black and white and appears to be the same room from the second image. There’s a feeling that we’ve entered this room from the long hallway. The same image that had been carved on the hallway wall is in the room in the form of metal pipes laid out roughly on the floor in the shape of the symbol.

“The envelope contained an invitation to a small private party where Gutman would be in attendance. Taped to the card was
a simple silver ring that I was to wear on my right hand, with instructions to present the invitation card to the doorman with my ringed hand, making sure that my left hand remained gloved and to my side. The ring, apparently, would allow my entry without being searched. I was to seek out Gutman quickly, shoot him dead, allow myself to be swarmed and captured, confess that I, acting as the long arm of the Messiah Detectives, had murdered Gutman for no other reason than to demonstrate that it could be done, and await my rescue by another person, whom the instructions referred to as an ‘inside’ man.

“The plan went… according to plan, as they say. I was ushered into an elegant home, down a long narrow hallway that spilled open to a large ballroom lit by chandeliers that cast everything in a gold hue. On the walls hung enormous red paintings that looked to have been made out of splashed blood. Women in dresses and men in tuxedos drank champagne and marveled at what appeared to be a mummy in a glass box near the middle of the room. One entire wall, floor to ceiling, appeared to be an aquarium, but it turned out to contain no fish but rather a wooden chair with leather straps placed on a short ledge near the top of the tank, just above the water line.

“In the glass, I saw a reflection of Gutman behind me, wearing a red vest as I had been told he would. He too was looking at the tank, at the chair. Without hesitation—before he could speak to me—I took out my gun, turned to him, and shot him twice in the neck. He stepped back, fixed his fox eyes on me, both hands at his own throat, and collapsed in a sputter and gurgle of blood and bone. Within seconds the pistol had been knocked from my hand, skittering like a spin-the-bottle across the wood floor and coming to rest beneath a chair. I was seized by two men, then three, one of whom (wearing black gloves that smelled strongly of chemicals) pulled out a handful of my hair. Another put his palm on my face and pushed my head back with violence. They wrestled me
to a small panelled door that I hadn’t noticed before, punched me through it, and then really began to lay into me until I was on my back on the floor. One of them took me by the ankles and dragged me further down the hall and through another doorway into a small room lit by candles.