The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (19 page)

“‘The chair,’ the one with the gloves said to another
.

“‘The chair,’ the other replied.

“Image number seven is a color freeze frame of a packed stadium at night in the rain, and what at first appears to be spectators up on the enormous light poles turns out to be workers of some sort, perhaps repositioning the angle of the lights so they shine more brightly on Gutman.

“My accounting of the Gutman imbroglio now catches up to the present time. I remain in the room with candles, writing this on my knees, the open notebook before me on the floor. For some reason, I feel that I should use my remaining words not to speculate about the meaning of the chair, or my fate in it above the blue aquarium, if that is indeed what awaits me, but rather on Gutman himself, whose life I took. My mind goes back to that degraded video tape of Gutman speaking at the stadium laying out in modernist abstractions his structuralist vision for the total control of our society, and the hints that he gave regarding the coming ‘third purge’ which would be so annihilating that it would usher in a new Enlightenment.

“I struggle to recall the frames in question from that short video and what I remember most—as Gutman spoke with surprising force in the heavy rain—was the bright lights, lights that reminded me of a soccer stadium at night. But even at the time of the original broadcast I felt there was something about those lights, something terribly familiar. Now, in the clarity of forced isolation, I understand that the lights had been added in later, post-filming, and that Gutman had delivered his speech in the rain in complete and utter darkness, as if the absence of light itself
prefigured the barren hopelessness of our land. I imagined the rain coming down so heavily as to choke Gutman’s words in his throat, and that his colleagues at the university whom he had betrayed, whose carpeted living rooms he had sat in before it all went bad, trading flirting jokes with the flirting daughters who, were they fortunate, had not been raped before being flayed and murdered in the abandoned gymnasium, and how even then, before the purges, he understood this about himself: that he was the sort of man to betray those closest to him for the chance to be a part of history.

“Image number eight, a moving image. Full color. The interior of the room from earlier. It appears that the sandstorm has entered the room itself. The window is blown open. The curtain blows wildly. Bits of paper and sand swirl and there’s a feeling of vertigo, as if the whole thing had been shot in a room that was falling from a very great height.

“If Gutman had indeed given his speech in the dark (the bright lights added later, perhaps to give the moment the thrust and force of an epochal ‘event’) then how had his face been illuminated, post-production? It seems to me now, as I realize that the Messiah Detectives have betrayed me and that there will be no inside man to rescue me, that somehow everything hinges on this question. For if those who made the videotape were truly able to manufacture light—enough wattage to illuminate the black-hole darkness of Gutman—then what else might they be capable of making, both of this world and not-of this world?

“The ninth image is black and white. A person’s hands bound together with rough rope at the wrists. It appears to be a freeze frame until we see an ant crawling across one of the hands.

“Hours have passed. One of the men who dragged me here—the one who pulled my hair—enters the room and sits in the empty chair across the table. His left eye droops. His hands are large. He seems all undercurrent, and no current. There’s a pull of gravity
around him and I’m sure that were he to remain seated for hours eventually the objects in the room would all end up closer to him.

“Perhaps he is, after all, a fellow Messiah Detective, the so-called inside man. He seems to be waiting for me to speak first, but what to say? These thoughts only last a moment, and are quickly replaced with more disturbing ones.

“For I come to suspect—and then at last to understand with certainty—that the man across from me is, in fact, the one whom I was sent to kill. Writing this, as I am, in his very presence, I can hardly bring myself to print his name. There he sits, his hands now clasped together resting on the table as if to signal that he is about to make or has already made a decision.

“Gutman.”

E
PILOGUE

     
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

“According to the deed let the measure of doom be fixed in proportion.”

—Old English saying

OUR LAST MEETING. DAYBREAK.

But before that, I must tell you this. That on my way to my own motel room the previous night I stopped at the tavern because I wanted to see the waitress, who happened to be standing next to the very table where she had served me a few days earlier, except this time she was not wearing her waitress outfit but a blue skirt and a jean jacket and I wasn’t even sure it was her until she turned around, her hand over her mouth laughing at some joke or story one of her friends had told—friends who were standing around the table with her—and looked at me. So she was the waitress, yes (the one who invoked the waitress in the
Destroyer
film) but also a woman whose name was Anna, Anna who took my hand when she saw me this time and led me through the tavern (where men smoked cigars and toyed absently or with secret intent with large rings on their fingers) back into a small dark room where several tables had been elaborately prepared with tablecloths and candles and fine china and silver for guests who were yet to arrive. I think she was drunk. Or else just very happy.

“This is where I work,” she said. “This is who I serve.”

But the small room (a room that I recall now as having stone
walls and in whose doorway hung a large, heavy sheet of white fabric rather than a traditional door) was empty except for us. She leaned into me and then pushed away and then leaned in again and I wondered if she wanted me to kiss her or if in kissing her any hint of sense or meaning about what was happening would be ruined. Then she said something like,
It’s the children who are missing and yet all we can think about is the suffering of those who have lost them
, but she said this in a sort of giddy, smiling way, as if she was simply pretending to be drunk and happy so that her words to me in that room would not arouse suspicion and yet I wasn’t here for the missing children but for Laing. When her friends found us in the room (
there you are!
) and swept her away and back out into the main part of the tavern where I had first seen her I was relieved.

The next day—at daybreak—I met Laing for the last time. I think I brought him the bottle of nice bourbon not so much out of gratitude for telling me about the films he had burned, but rather out of guilt that I knew I wasn’t going to reveal to him anything about the waitress at the tavern even though he had some connection to her—however tenuous and slight and perhaps imaginary—through the character in
Destroyer
. I understood I had betrayed him, somehow, as unreasonable as that sounds. And yet I was compelled not to mention it because of a strange feeling, a spooky knowledge that in mentioning the waitress and what she said about the children to Laing, I would also be revealing to him the story of my daughter’s immeasurable suffering and death. It makes no sense to say I didn’t trust him with this knowledge about my past, I know. And yet there it is. Something about Laing had sparked a feeling of unease in me, and I felt the need to be protective of my own past, of Emily, as if that was something that he could somehow damage or take away.

Laing has assembled all the familiar, interchangeable objects on the motel room table: the cigarettes, the scarf (neatly folded),
the bottle of bourbon, the red cone-like object. The sun is rising with an intensity that reminds you it is a star so large that a million earths could fit inside it. We leave the door open.

“Now let me tell you,” he says, “what happened, or what’s going to happen. It’s a version of what’s going to happen to you too,” he says, “and that’s why, right now, I need to ask for forgiveness, and as dramatic and silly as that sounds, your forgiveness, your absolution, if absolution is even something that can be granted. It’s not simply that in destroying those films I destroyed art for the terrible, beautiful truths it revealed, and to spare others from ever having to look, but rather that I understand that you came all the way to Wisconsin not just to interview me, but to put some final order to what has happened to you, the sort of order you think can be found by paying such intense, painstaking attention to the details of films that speak the same language you do. But it’s more than that, and I can say this to you (you who are too afraid to use your own name in the narrative you are going to create about your interviews with me, so that even now I must refer to you as
you
rather than by your name), I can say that what it is you have lost—whatever it is—shall not be restored. If I know anything I know that. Like I said, I already know what’s going to happen to me, and some version of that involves you, as well, and if I told you I dreamed it, last night, you must understand that it wasn’t at all dream-like. In fact, it was all too real and for some reason I feel as if I ought to tell you what happens, or what’s going to happen, although in some ways I suppose it’s happened already and you just don’t know it. The beginning of a film already knows its ending, doesn’t it? Do the characters in the first frames understand that it’s already happened, whether they end up in love or trapped burning to death in a car, it doesn’t matter if they glean this or not because those final frames are already printed? The dream I had plays out as if the script was written by Dalton Trumbo in ’48 or ’49, just before he began serving his prison time for
contempt of Congress. Blacklisted. One of the Hollywood Ten condemned in the so-called ‘Waldorf Statement’ of 1947 by the studio heads, a statement that included the line ‘we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives.’ And the dream might as well have been directed by William Wyler over a three-week period during post production on his film
Detective Story
as an excuse to experiment with a new film stock deliberately manufactured for a brief time without the anti-halation backing that prevents a halo-ing effect that would otherwise occur around bright spots in the film. So there’s a strange, eerie beauty to it, but it’s the sort of beauty that ruins it, too, and so it’s not surprising that Wyler would only have one work print made, perfectionist that he was. That’s what I saw in my dream—the work print—given to me by someone who claimed to be Wyler’s great niece, though she was far too young for that to have been true. So this is what will happen, based on the film I dreamed about last night. And of course when I say ‘I’ I also mean ‘you,’ you who have chosen to come to this motel to ‘interview’ me about films, though by now it’s clear, isn’t it, that that’s not really the reason—or at least not the only reason—you’re here? Is it possible for a film (a film in a dream) to be future tense? I can’t talk about the film-dream in the past tense (even though I dreamed it last night) because what was depicted has not yet happened. So, in the future, they’re going to tell me that the big metal box in the other room is the recording machine. It sits empty, with no one to enter it and run it. Its smooth metal casing is blood-smeared, and its thin sheet metal door is bent off its hinges, hanging cockeyed as if frozen in time. The room that it sits in at the university is bombed out, its charred walls that once held the framed title pages of the first stories as black as night. Looters, they’ll say, have long ago stripped bare the bookshelves. There’s been a campus shooting. The first of many shootings, each one out-doing the last, a blood ritual. The university will become toxic, untouchable not
because the violence there is unique but just the opposite: it’s a reminder of who we are, of what we’ve become.

“The Towers will fall, and then this.

“They’ll also say that I was wounded in one of the attacks, and that I forgot who I was, and that I was with them now (or in the future, or in your future) hiding out here in this building (the building in the film-dream), surviving, regrouping, waiting for our chance to move deeper into the city to meet up with the others. What others? We don’t know if they are friend or foe.

“Then I’ll discover that none of them remembers, either. No one knows where they are from, or how long they’ve been here, or who their family is. We are in the building because, so far, it has been safe. They’ll say they are letting me record these things because they want some history, some record, no matter how good or bad. That’s the kind of people they are. They also say that so much is gone now, and that we have to start again, and that since I can’t remember anything (but I
can
) I’m the best one to keep track of what we are doing and what we are going to see, no matter how terrible. Why do they think it’s going to be terrible?

“I’ll remember how to talk, and how to do the things I need to do to survive. I’ll be able to move across the screen as easy as the rest of them. The attack—or whatever it was—will not have made me stupid or incapable or unreliable. And I am not totally clueless about who I am, or who I was. My wallet has my driver’s license, and it shows my face, and my name, and what we eventually figured out was my address. We match the symbols on the driver’s card to the street signs not far from here and I’ll return to where I supposedly used to live, at the place called 933 Woodward Avenue. They’ll take me there, in the back of the falling-apart pickup truck, speeding through the city as glimpses of people hidden away in half-destroyed buildings take rifle shots at us. I curl up under the damp tarp and cover my head and try to stay in the corner as we tear down the highway.
It will be hard to know if this is documentary footage or re-enacted documentary footage or if it’s just the way things will be, mimesis wise.