The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (8 page)

“Somewhere in Europe Schneid practices with his flare gun on one of the students Sollors has named in his poems. The bartender makes an alien symbol with his hands and one of the men from the back comes over and sits beside him. There
is sand blowing in through the open door and collecting in the corners of the cafe. The parallel reality surveillance footage still plays on the television. Two men walk across the screen in the bright sun beside a blue pool. One of them wears a white track suit. A voice off screen—a woman’s voice—says, ‘Love among consenting holograms?’ What will become of the North African Unit, without the words, the poems of Sollors?

“And then the other two men from the back approach him, one of them holding an axe. They take him to the beach and in what happens next, there is no poetry to convey the tenderness by which they hold him as they use their weapons, laying their hands upon him, Sollors, the animal they have been given to destroy.”

The cone on the table seems to have grown larger. It takes up more space. Laing doesn’t want to quit. A wall of clouds menaces on the far horizon. I switch out the batteries in the micro recorder. For the first time Laing produces a pack of cigarettes. They appear unsteadily on the table, next to the cone, a soft pack still wrapped in cellophane, Camels I think or some other brand that looks like Camels (“Fritz’s camel” my great uncle used to say) so that the animal appears to have been overtaken by a sandstorm, or as if the camel itself was made out of sand. Laing opens the pack and lays out two cigarettes, one for me, and one for him. I remember thinking that this was a test. In the wind, my cigarette rolls across the table to the left, and then, a few moments later, when the wind changes, back to where it had been. Laing doesn’t touch his, doesn’t even look at it.

Between the cone and the cigarettes some sort of force field emerges. As crazy as that sounds that’s the only way I can put it. Like a dome of outward pressure rising in the space between the cigarettes and the red cone. I think of the fate of poor Sollors, hacked to death on the beach in Africa. And then I think of those missing children, the ones the waitress at the tavern described, and what she said about not being able to turn off
the part of your brain that imagines what might have happened to them, the sharp crease or fold in time sharp like a knife blade that they had the misfortune of falling beneath, and the fact that “missing” always turns out to be the gentler, more abstract term for something much, much worse. And then Laing reaches his hand through the force field and takes one of the cigarettes, lighting it with his chin low against the slight wind. He shakes the match out as if casting a spell and the black clouds just hang there in the sky, and he does so in a way that recalls the snapping wrist action used to open a flick knife, the sort of knife that could be used to carve atrocities on the body of a child.

“Not all of them were films in the proper sense, you know. A few of them came to me on VHS. The only one worth mentioning from that era isn’t really even a film,” Laing says, in the strange time-bending present tense. “It’s footage for a documentary that was to feature one of my old professors—Ephraim—a documentary about the last generation of ’60s campus radicals. He sent me a VHS of the segment that featured him, or maybe it was just footage of him talking that wouldn’t have made it into the documentary anyway. It begins with Ephraim saying
It wasn’t always like this
.

“
It wasn’t always like what?
an off-camera voice asks.

“There’s a very long pause. Ephraim’s gaze drifts into the surrounding forest. He looks like a person who’s been napalmed. His neck is shiny with old scars. His black hair is patchy.”

Suddenly Laing stops talking and tenses, as if he’s heard something. His hand edges slightly closer to the cone. Then, for the very first time, he looks me directly in the eyes. The late Wisconsin sun has cast everything in blood orange. “Were you followed here?” he asks, and I nearly laugh out loud.
Followed
, as if he has me confused with one of the movie characters he’s been telling me about. I begin to say, “I don’t think. . .” but he interrupts me with, “I’m not so interested in what you think.” Then something else happens: a look of pity comes across
Laing’s face, pity for me, and I wish I had never seen that look, I can tell you, not that I attribute to Laing or to his knowing look the losses that I’ve suffered since that time. I’m not that superstitious. Those aren’t the sort of demons I believe in. Then his face relaxes, almost in regret, and he continues.

“
It wasn’t always like what?
the off-camera voice asks Ephraim again.

“
This
, he says, fumbling to light yet another cigarette, nodding to something
out there
, as if the forest itself were an entity. He’s at a weather-worn picnic table. His shirt is Nirvana-era denim, as if grunge had slipped back in time and caught him up for the three-minute-and-thirty-four-second duration of this tape.

“The old professor, dead now to the world. The very world that he had brought into being.
A man of theory
, began the letter announcing his dismissal from the university,
must be at all times vigilant lest his ideas yield actions hostile to theory itself
.

“He’s not particularly eloquent, Ephraim isn’t. It’s only after the fourth or fifth viewing that you realize where the hidden action is. In between the trees. Ephraim’s words are just cover. The sort of bitter, dustbin-of-history philosophizing you’d expect from a man who had predicted punk was the harbinger of a truly revolutionary accelerationist movement, only to see it swallowed like everything else into the networked, invisible machinery of our age.”

Laing stops for a moment, as if he’s heard something. For some reason when I think about it now it seems like he was wearing the scarf again. But he wasn’t. After a few seconds he goes on.

“I watched the tape in Marlene’s basement apartment, with its warped, damp walls, around the time that the Walt Disney film
The Black Hole
was released on VHS (it had to have been 1980), a movie so overpowered by Maximilian Schell (‘you were monitored ever since our sensors first detected you,’ he intones to Anthony Perkins as if reciting for the first and last time in
human history a long lost line from Shakespeare) that the black hole swirling continuously in the spaceship’s monitors becomes an afterthought. The tape was labelled, in black ink,
AXXON N
. It was my last year in southern Ohio, and Marlene (who also went by Arlene) was a teaching assistant for a professor there in ‘art theory’ (no one knew what that meant) whom I had audited a class with a few years earlier, which was how I met Marlene, who had piercings in her left eyebrow before this became common, and who gave off a sort of Patty Hearst vibe, someone who potentially could be vulnerable and very dangerous at the same time. The next year I would be gone, blasted into the heart of Pennsylvania at a college much larger and indifferent and even crueler than where I was at the time of
Black Hole
.

“
Wasn’t always like what?
the off-camera voice asks again, at which point Ephraim twists out his cigarette on the patchy and slanted picnic table and proceeds to remove from his denim shirt pocket a sheaf of folded yellow papers—obviously his well-worn and now irrelevant research notes—and begins to read. But the wind has picked up and in a gust they fly out of his hands, screen left. He moves faster than you’d expect, leaving the frame, presumably, to chase down the pages. The camera doesn’t follow him but remains fixed on the empty picnic table and the tall pine trees swaying in the sun in the background. And in that background, between the trees, there’s a slight blank spot—a gap—that reminds you of its presence, but just barely. Ephraim returns to the frame, pages recovered.

“
It wasn’t always like this
. The nostalgic lament of an ex-academic, or a prophecy disguised as something backward-looking? Ephraim had told us in that art theory class to read
between the lines
and
against the grain
. Wasn’t that what Marlene and I were doing now, with this tape? Reading between the lines and against the grain. Wasn’t that what Marlene and I had been doing for years there in southern Ohio, with each other, pretending to meet for the first time each Thursday at the same quiet spot
by the flat river, just two people who happen to be there at the same moment? That was our plan, to never let our relationship advance to the point of familiarity, to always be experiencing each other for the very first time, an endless loop of surprise and happiness there on that bright green grass made lush and fertile by the annual spring flooding of the river. Rewinding over and over to that moment, so that in time acting or pretending we had just met felt no different than truly, actually just meeting for the first time.

“And where had it gotten us?

“Once, as a professor, Ephraim had thrown a baseball against a closed classroom window to illustrate the spider webbing effect of narrative in
Mrs. Dalloway
, but instead of cracking the glass the ball sailed through it cleanly, leaving a hole roughly the size of the ball itself. He lit a cigarette in frustration and then, in anger, flicked it into the front row of students. This was the visible and symbolic beginning of his end.

“He believed in the tunnels. He really did. That they—like the glass he could not transform with a thrown ball—spider webbed beneath these United States, emanating from beneath his feet in that soft border area between Ohio and Kentucky. He assigned his students paranoid, art-themed novels that spoke to this truth. He asked them to underline passages in class, look into each other’s eyes and read them to each other, causing some of them to fall in love, at least for a semester.

“And the VHS tape,
AXXON N
., what new chaos does it portend? Already, Marlene and I can feel our brains curdling, a feedback loop growing between us and the TV set. We pause the tape right at the moment when whatever it is that isn’t there emerges from the gap in the forest behind Ephraim, all frame-dragged and distended, like an avalanche of melting pixels.

“
The force of our generation, that’s what it is
, says Marlene, pointing the remote at the television like a weapon.

“The front part of my brain doesn’t know what she means,
but in the back part of it I do. The tape—and I’ve spent the better part of thirty years trying to rid myself of this thought—the tape can’t seem to shake itself free of the widening gap between the trees, as if that gap had become the subject of the video itself. The gap, it appears when Ephraim leaves the frame to chase down his papers, widening, filling the frame, the blankness pushing against the boundaries of the TV set, cracking it open, expanding slowly against the basement walls. I remember glancing over at Marlene and understanding that everything that we needed in each other was disappearing, evaporating, right there before our eyes as the blank space in that gap widened to expand—impossibly, and yet somehow it was happening—beyond the confines of the television screen itself. The tape cuts back to
The Black Hole
, right at the moment when Maximilian Schell—playing the Dr. Faustus-like captain of the spaceship, Hans Reinhardt, which also happens to be the real-life name of a Nazi general accused of hostage-taking and murder—refers to one of his robots as ‘Maximilian.’ And then it cuts back to the Ephraim portion. The gap in the forest has opened up, like I said, beyond the confines of the television set and into Marlene’s apartment. There’s a small dot of blood collecting around her pierced eyebrow and when I go to dab it she flinches, the first time she’s ever flinched around me, and I think she flinched because of something to do with that VHS, and the exposed blankness of the screen that took over when Ephraim left the frame. It’s the last time we were together, really. After that the distance between us grew greater, at first just a little bit but then more and more, until we regressed from lovers to friends, and then acquaintances, and then colleagues and then, by the time I left for Pennsylvania, strangers.”

The soft light spills out from Laing’s room and illuminates our table. But other than that we’re surrounded by darkness. The storm clouds on the horizon from earlier haven’t advanced, and the night air is pure, as if there is not now or ever has been
a contaminate in the world. I think about what Laing said about Marlene, and the blood above her eye, and about the time, before the disease, that Emily had helped me patch the bottom of our aluminum boat with tar that we had warmed up so that we could spread it over places the metal had rubbed thin from dragging the boat loaded with firewood across the shallow river behind our house, wood gathered from the uninhabited island, wood that we scavenged in the summer so we could burn it during the winter. And I remember the smell of that tar, and how difficult it was to remove the stains from Emily’s hands who, at age seven or eight, pretended they were something like tattoos for a while, or something even more primitive, markings, black markings, streaks and splotches that stayed sticky for days, collecting dust and lint and leaving smudges on her pillowcase and sheets.

A large brown moth lands on the table and begins walking in circles. Laing puts his hand on the table, palm up, and the moth keeps circling lazily and unsteadily and then manages to crawl into his palm. It’s wounded in some way, but who can say how? It’s just a moth, and yet to destroy it… to destroy it would be an unforgiveable act, and it’s as if Laing knows this too and so he gently raises his hand and watches the moth, its antennae twitching as if trying to detect the danger level and then it flies off, first toward the open motel room door and then back out into the black night. It was a small act of mercy, but intended for whom? I only say this because, thinking back on it now, Laing’s gesture—releasing the moth—seems inauthentic. There was something—how to put it?—rehearsed. That’s not the right word.
Forced.
There was something forced in Laing’s handling of the moth, almost theatrically forced, as if to suggest to me,
Look, if you weren’t here to see this I’d smear the moth across the table
.