The atrocity exhibition (13 page)

Fake Newsreels
. Catherine Austin unlocked the door and followed Travers into the deserted laboratory. ‘Nathan did warn me not to . . . ’ Ignoring her, Travers walked towards the display screens. Disconnected headphones hung inside the cubicles, once occupied by the volunteer panels of students and housewives. Fingers fretting at the key in her pocket, she watched Travers search through the montage photographs which the volunteers had assembled during anaesthesia. Disquieting diorama of pain and mutilation: strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy. Until Nathan ordered the experiment to end it had become a daily nightmare for her, a sick game which the volunteers had increasingly enjoyed. Why was Travers obsessed by these images? Their own sexual relationship was marked by an almost seraphic tenderness, transits of touch and feeling as serene as the movements of a dune.

From the Casualty Ward
. Nostalgia of departure. Through the windshield Travers glanced for the last time at the window of his office. The glass curtain-walling formed an element in a vertical sky, a mirror of this deteriorating landscape. As he released the handbrake a young man in a shabby flying jacket strode towards the car from the freight elevator. He fumbled at the door, concentrating on the latch mechanism like a psychotic patient struggling with a spoon. He sat down heavily beside Travers, beckoning at the steering wheel with a gesture of sudden authority. Travers stared at the flame-like scars on his knuckles, residues of an appalling act of violence. This former day-patient, Vaughan, he had often seen in the back row of his classes, or moving through the other students in the library forecourt at some private diagonal. His committal to the Institute, an elaborate manoeuvre by Nathan, had been a first warning. Should he help Vaughan to escape? The dented plates of his forehead and the sallow jaw were features as anonymous as any police suspect’s. The musculature of his mouth was clamped together in a rictus of aggression, as if he were about to commit a crude and unsavoury crime. Before Travers could speak, Vaughan brushed his arm aside and switched on the ignition.

Hard Edge
. Dr Nathan gestured to the young woman to unbutton her coat. With a murmur of surprise he stared at the bruises on her hips and buttocks. ‘Travers . . . ?’ He turned to Catherine Austin, standing primly by the window. Nodding to himself, he searched the broken blood-vessels in the young woman’s skin. She showed no hostility to Travers, at first sight an indication of the sexual nature of these wounds. Yet something about the precise cross-hatching suggested that their true role lay elsewhere. He waited by the window as the young woman dressed. ‘What these girls carry about under their smiles - you saw her little art gallery?’ Catherine Austin snapped shut the roller blind. ‘They’re hardly in Travers’s style. Do you believe her?’ Dr Nathan gestured irritably. ‘Of course. That’s the whole point. He was trying to make contact with her, but in a new way.’ A car moved down the drive. He handed the girl a jar of ointment, happy to be present at a vernissage no larger than the skin area of a typist.

Veteran of the Private Evacuations
. Ahead, stalled traffic blocked three lanes. Oxyacetylene flared over the roofs of the police cars and ambulances in a corral at the mouth of the underpass. Travers rested his head against the mud-caked quarter-window. He had spent the past days in a nexus of endless highways, a terrain of billboards, car marts and undisclosed destinations. Deliberately he had allowed Vaughan to take command, curious to see where they would go, what junction points they would cross on the spinal causeways. Together they set off on a grotesque itinerary: a radio-observatory, stock car races, war graves, multi-storey car parks. Two teenage girls whom they picked up Vaughan had almost raped, grappling with them in a series of stylized holds. During this exercise in the back seat his morose eyes had stared at Travers through the driving mirror with a deliberate irony imitated from the newsreels of Oswald and Sirhan. Once, as they walked along the half-built embankment of a new motorway, Travers had turned to find Vaughan watching him with an expression of almost insane lucidity. His presence sounded a tocsin of danger and violence. Soon after, Travers became bored with the experiment. At the next filling station, while Vaughan was in the urinal, he drove off alone.

Actual Size
. A helicopter clattered overhead, a cameraman crouched in the bubble cockpit. It circled the overturned truck, then pulled away and hovered above the three wrecked cars on the verge. Zooms for some new Jacopetti, the elegant declensions of serialized violence. Travers started the engine and turned across the central reservation. As he drove off he heard the helicopter climb away from the accident site. It soared over the motorway, the shadows of its blades scrambling across the concrete like the legs of an ungainly insect. Travers swerved into the nearside lane. Three hundred yards ahead he plunged down the incline of a slip road. As the helicopter circled and dived again he recognized the white-suited man crouched between the pilot and the camera operator.

Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts
. Travers took the glass of whisky from Karen Novotny. ‘Who is Koester? - the crash on the motorway was a decoy. Half the time we’re moving about in other people’s games.’ He followed her on to the balcony. The evening traffic turned along the outer circle of the park. The past few days had formed a pleasant no-man’s land, a dead zone on the clock. As she took his arm in a domestic gesture he looked at her for the first time in half an hour. This strange young woman, moving in a complex of undefined roles, the gun moll of intellectual hoodlums with her art critical jargon and bizarre magazine subscriptions. He had met her in the demonstration cinema during the interval, immediately aware that she would form the perfect subject for the re-enactment he had conceived. What were she and her fey crowd doing at a conference on facial surgery? No doubt the lectures were listed in the diary pages of
Vogue
, with the professors of tropical diseases as popular with their claques as fashionable hairdressers. ‘What about you, Karen? - wouldn’t you like to be in the movies?’ With a stiff forefinger she explored the knuckle of his wrist. ‘We’re all in the movies.’

The Death of Affect
. He parked the car among the over-luminous pines. They stepped out and walked through the ferns to the embankment. The motorway moved down a cut, spanned by a concrete bridge, then divided through the trees. Travers helped her on to the asphalt verge. As she watched, face hidden behind the white fur collar, he began to pace out the trajectories. Five minutes later he beckoned her forward. ‘The impact point was here - roll-over followed by head-on collision.’ He stared at the surface of the concrete. After four years the oil stains had vanished. These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing. An immense internal silence presided over this area of cement and pines, a terminal moraine of the emotions that held its debris of memory and regret, like the rubbish in the pockets of a dead schoolboy he had examined. He felt Karen touch his arm. She was staring at the culvert between bridge and motorway, an elegant conjunction of rain-washed concrete forming a huge motion sculpture. Without thinking, she asked, ‘Where did the car go?’ He led her across the asphalt, watching as she re-created the accident in terms of its alternate parameters. How would she have preferred it: in terms of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the ’50s school of highway engineering or, most soigné of all, the Embarcadero Freeway?

The Six-Second Epic
. Travers waited on the mezzanine terrace for the audience to leave the gallery floor. The Jacopetti retrospective had been a success. As the crowd cleared, he recognized the organizer, a now-familiar figure in his shabby flying jacket, standing by a display of Biafran atrocity photographs. Since his reappearance two weeks earlier Vaughan had taken part in a string of modish activities: police brawls, a festival of masochistic films, an obscene play consisting of a nine-year-old girl in a Marie Antoinette dress watching a couple in intercourse. His involvement in these lugubrious pastimes seemed an elaborate gesture, part of some desperate irony. His hostility to Karen Novotny, registered within a few seconds of their first meeting, reflected this same abstraction of emotion and intent. Even now, as he waved to Karen and Travers, his eyes were set in a canny appraisal of her hoped-for wound areas. More and more Travers found himself exposing Karen to him whenever possible.

A New Algebra.
‘Travers asked you to collect these for him?’ Dr Nathan looked down at the photostats which Catherine Austin had placed on his desk: (1) Front elevation of multi-storey car park; (2) mean intra-patellar distances (estimated during funeral services) of Coretta King and Ethel M. Kennedy; (3) close-up of the perineum of a six-year-old girl; (4) voice-print (terminal transmission) of Col. Komarov on the record jacket of a commercial 45; (5) the text of ‘Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts’. Dr Nathan pushed away the tray, shaking his head. “‘Fusing Devices” - ? God only knows what violence Vaughan is planning - it looks as if Koester’s film may have a surprise ending.’

Madonna of the Multi-Storey Car Park
. She lay on her side, waiting as his hands explored the musculature of her pelvis and abdomen. From the TV set came a newsreel of a tank crushing a bamboo hut, for some reason an effort of immense labour. American combat engineers were staring like intelligent tourists at an earth bunker. For days the whole world had been in slow motion. Travers had become more and more withdrawn, driving her along the motorway to pointless destinations, setting up private experiments whose purpose was totally abstract: making love to soundless images of war newsreels, swerving at speed through multi-storey car parks (their canted floors appeared to be a model of her own anatomy), leading on the mysterious film crew who followed them everywhere. (What lay behind the antagonism between Travers and the unpleasant young director - some sort of homo-erotic jealousy, or another game?) She remembered the wearying hours outside the art school, as he waited in the car, offering money to any student who would come back to the apartment and watch them in intercourse. Travers had embarked on the invention of imaginary psychopath-ologies, using her body and reflexes as a module for a series of unsavoury routines, as if hoping in this way to recapitulate his wife’s death. With a grimace she thought of Vaughan, for ever waiting for them at unexpected junctions. In his face the diagram of bones formed a geometry of murder.

Internal Emigré
. All afternoon they had driven along the highway. Moving steadily through the traffic, Travers followed the white car with the fractured windshield. Now and then he would see Vaughan’s angular forehead, with its depressed temples, as the young man looked back over his shoulder. They left the city and entered a landscape of pines and small lakes. Vaughan stopped among the trees in a side road. Striding swiftly in his tennis shoes, he set off across the soft floor of pine needles. Travers drew up beside his car. Strange graffiti marked the dust on its trunk and door panels. He followed Vaughan around the shore of an enclosed lake. Over the densely packed trees lay a calm and unvarying light. A large exhibition hall appeared above the forest, part of a complex of buildings on the edge of a university campus. Vaughan crossed the lawn towards the glass door. As Travers left the shelter of the trees he heard the roar of a helicopter’s engine. It soared overhead, the down-draught from its blades whipping his tie across his eyes. Driven back, he traced his steps through the pines. For the next hour he waited by the lake shore.

Cinecity
. In the evening air Travers passed unnoticed through the crowd on the terrace. The helicopter rested on the lawn, its blades drooping over the damp grass. Through the glass doors Travers could see into the festival arena, where a circle of cine screens carried their films above the heads of the audience. Travers walked around the rear gangway, now and then joining in the applause, interested to watch these students and middle-aged cinephiles. Endlessly, the films unwound: images of neuro-surgery and organ transplants, autism and senile dementia, auto-disasters and plane crashes. Above all, the montage landscapes of war and death: newsreels from the Congo and Vietnam, execution squad instruction films, a documentary on the operation of a lethal chamber.
Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of a young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in a dark lace-work of blood. The quickening geometry of her body, its terraces of pain and sexuality, became a source of intense excitement. Watching from the embankment, Travers found himself thinking of the eager deaths of his childhood.

Too Bad
. Of this early period of his life, Travers wrote: ‘Two weeks after the end of World War II my parents and I left Lunghua internment camp and returned to our house in Shanghai, which had been occupied by the Japanese gendarmerie. The four servants and ourselves were still without any food. Soon after, the house opposite was taken over by two senior American officers, who gave us canned food and medicines. I struck up a friendship with their driver, Corporal Tulloch, who often took me around with him. In October the two colonels flew to Chungking. Tulloch asked me if I would like to go to Japan with him. He had been offered a round trip to Osaka by a quartermaster-sergeant at the Park Hotel occupation head-quarters. My father was away on business, my mother too ill to give any thought to the question. The skies were full of American aircraft flying to and from Japan. We left the next afternoon, but instead of going to the Nantao airfield we set off for Hongkew riverfront. Tulloch told me we would go by L. C. T. Japan was 500 miles away, the journey would take only a few days. The wharves were crammed with American landing craft and supply vessels as we drove through Hongkew. On the mudflats at Yangtzepoo were the huge stockades where the Americans held the last of the Japanese troops being repatriated. As we arrived four L. C. T.s were beached on the bank. A line of Japanese soldiers in ragged uniforms moved along a bamboo pier to the loading ramp. Our own L. C. T. was already loaded. With a group of American servicemen we climbed the stern gangway and went to the forward rail above the cargo well. Below, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, were some four hundred Japanese, squatting on the deck and looking up at us. The smell was intense. We went to the stern, where Tulloch and the others played cards and I read through old copies of
Life
magazine. After two hours, when the L. C. T.s next to us had set off down-river, an argument broke out between the officers in charge of our ship and the military personnel guarding the Japanese. For some reason we would have to leave the next morning. Packing up, we went by truck back to Shanghai. The next day I waited for Tulloch outside the Park Hotel. Finally he came out and told me that there had been a delay. He sent me off home and said he would collect me the following morning. We finally set off again in the early afternoon. To my relief, the L. C. T. was still berthed on the mudflat. The stockades were empty. Two navy tenders were tied up at the stern of the L. C. T. The deck was crowded with passengers already aboard, who shouted at us as we climbed the gangway. Finally Tulloch and I found a place below the bridge rail. The Japanese soldiers in the cargo well were in bad condition. Many were lying down, unable to move. An hour later a landing craft came alongside. Tulloch told me that we were all to transfer to a supply ship leaving on the next tide. As we climbed down into the landing craft two Eurasian women and myself were turned away. Tulloch shouted at me to go back to the Park Hotel. At this point one of the soldiers guarding the Japanese called me back on board. He told me that they would be leaving shortly and that I could go with them. I sat at the stern, watching the landing craft cross the river. The Eurasian women walked back to the shore across the mudflats. At eight o’clock that night a fight broke out among the Americans. A Japanese sergeant was standing on the bridge deck, his face and chest covered with blood, while the Americans shouted and pushed at each other. Shortly after, three trucks drove up and a party of armed American military police came on board. When they saw me they told me to leave. I left the ship and walked back through the darkness to the empty stockades. The trucks were loaded with gasoline drums. A week later my father returned. He took me on the Mollar line ferry to the cotton mill he owned on the Pootung shore, two miles down-river from the Bund. As we passed Yangtzepoo the L. C. T. was still on the mudflat. The forward section of the ship had been set on fire. The sides were black, and heavy smoke still rose from the cargo well. Armed military police were standing on the mudflat.’