by Gail Jones
‘Leo,’ Alice exclaimed, with a weak involuntary shout.
Everyone seemed to turn in her direction.
‘You know this boy?’ someone asked.
‘Yes. No.’ She corrected herself.
‘Leo who? What is his surname?’
Alice was obliged to reveal that she did not know the boy, that she had never met him, or talked to him, or even nodded as he passed by, that ‘Leo’ was a kind of fantasy connection. The policeman looked irritated. Alice added that he attended the school at the end of the street. The policeman wrote this down. He asked Alice if she had seen anyone suspicious in the street, anyone talking to ‘Leo’. Anyone harassing him. Any drugs. Any fights. Any prostitution. Alice knew nothing.
‘I know nothing,’ she heard herself blandly pronounce. ‘Je sais rien.’
Her throat was dry and her hands were trembling. Over the policeman’s shoulder she could see the still uncovered boy, his face battered and black-looking, the nose clearly broken. The hood of his parka was askew, exposing a gash along his cheek. One eye was half open. The lights of the investigation were startlingly bright. Alice saw her own street as she had never seen it before. Brutality accentuated it, made it sharp and irrefutable. There was a stain of piss on the wall, not far from the body. Crumpled paper in the gutter. A shredded and illegible poster, peeling like human skin. Alice heard a cough, an impatience; the policeman found this foreigner wearisome.
‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘Now.’
Alice fumbled for her keys and obediently entered her building. She felt herself stagger up the uneven stairs to her studio, full of a weight in her chest that was like a brick, like a sob, like a dead thing lodged inside. She sat in the dark, at the window, watching all that happened below. For a long time the men in the street just mingled and talked. Then Alice saw Leo’s body sealed in a black vinyl bag, lifted into a van and taken away. The reflecting tape was dismantled, wound on a spool like a film. The cars began to withdraw. She saw the last two policemen having a quiet cigarette. They joked about something: there was a moment of cruel laughter. When finally they departed, Alice ran downstairs, outside, and acting purely on instinct, skidded into the telephone booth on the corner and rang Mr Sakamoto at his hotel. He asked her to wait while he turned off the television in his room, and then he listened.
Alice spoke to Mr Sakamoto of the battered face. She spoke of the boy who was named and not named Leo, the boy she had known and not known, who was treated like garbage, left dumped in the street, destroyed, made ugly. She spoke of the sorrowfulness of the night and the sound that was never the river. She spoke of the way the policemen’s lights made everything inhuman, and the waste of it, and the pity, and the fierce anonymity. She told him of the joke she could not hear, and the implicit disrespect. The forms of negation that inhere in a single flicked butt, or a tone of voice, or a flung paper cup, consigned to litter.
Alice was aware of making awkward gestures in the glass box of the telephone booth. She was aware too that she talked quickly and probably made no sense at all. But still she spoke, and still she imparted to the ear of gentle Mr Sakamoto her vision of the thin boy’s face, robbed of life, and the central shadow in the street that was his fallen body, and the police with their stubborn persistence, simply hanging around. How undramatic they were. They had acted as if the world was orderly and sound. As if it were an everyday occurrence, this propped body, this offence.
At some point in her monologue, Alice became self-conscious.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Bothering you in the middle of the night.’
But Mr Sakamoto pacified and reassured her.
‘Do you want company?’ he asked. ‘Do you want me to come over? Or I could get you a room here. We could drink coffee together.’
But Alice said no. She was suddenly nervous of the intimacy of spoken words. The spilled emotion. Her unguarded display. They arranged to meet the next day at their usual bistro.
When she thought about it afterwards, she was surprised at her lack of restraint and uncharacteristic will to disclosure. It had been a summoning of despair into language, and its release through the telephone. All that black wind that had rushed to occupy her, all that night-time distortion and sense of despoliation, she had converted into words and sentences for Mr Sakamoto, just as he did, in another scale, in an entirely other scale, for his Uncle Tadeo. It was an experience of the strange tenderness of hyperbolic moments. The emptying joy.
Over their lunch Alice resumed her clumsy apology.
‘I can’t believe how I went on and on last night. About the joke. About the river. I didn’t know what I was saying.’
‘It’s OK. Really. Everyone needs inside them an ocean or a river.’
Alice had heard him but wasn’t sure how to respond.
‘It was an overreaction,’ she continued. ‘I didn’t even know him.’
‘Not at all,’ responded Mr Sakamoto. ‘The death of the young is unacceptable. We should feel appalled and insulted. We should howl and complain. There is no overreaction to witnessed death.’
He looked out the window and seemed to have no appetite. He had a beautiful face, creased and burnished with sadness. His hair was silver, neat. He wore an impeccable dark grey suit and a red silk tie, patterned with chevrons. He might have been a Tokyo banker. Alice watched Mr Sakamoto push food around his plate. They left their meal half eaten, and walked by the Seine, in the wind-blown afternoon, companionable, now, in what was implicitly understood but could not be uttered, in what blew away, torn to shreds, in the wake of any calamity.
A woman inventor? Let me tell you about my favourite, Hedy Lamarr. Born Hedwig Eva Marie Kiesler, in Vienna, in 1913, she became a screen goddess of almost incomparable allure. In the silver economy, only Garbo rivalled her; in the field of enlarged pearly faces, fake eyelashes and suppliant poses, of swooning eroticism and deeply serious kisses, she was up there in the pantheon, genuinely adorable. Something in the filming of these women made them appear perpetually yielding. Their faces blurred with desire. They were languid, available. Lit from above, sumptuously, against a mound of silk pillows. When, as a young man, I saw her with Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah, I almost exploded with lust. Against Mature’s chunky body she flung her scarcely clad self; her hair was wild and astray, her intentions profane. I thought she was magnificent. In real life she married and divorced six times. She was a regular attractor.
Hedy Lamarr’s status as an inventor is less well known. Her first husband, Fritz Mandl, was a wealthy munitions dealer who sided with the Nazis, and Hedy left him and fled to London – but not before she had learned something of arms design and proposed the invention of a radio-controlled torpedo. When Hedy ended up in America, signed by Louis Mayer with MGM, she decided to aid the allied war effort by reviving her torpedo ideas. The problem, as she saw it, was their interception. With the help of a composer, George Antheil, who knew something of frequencies, she devised a plan to use frequency hopping to make it impossible to track and intercept torpedoes. Their joint patent application was hugely successful, and George duly gave credit to the actress who originated the idea.
It is the quality of anomaly that makes Hedy Lamarr’s case so important. No other screen goddess bothered herself with torpedoes, with the calculation of jamming radio signals and the logistics of random transmission. We must picture her on the set of Tortilla Flat, perhaps, or the dreadful Algiers, or the even worse White Cargo, gazing into the camera and imagining explosions. As she spoke her corny lines, or kissed her beefcake heroes, she thought – possibly with a kind of amoral abstraction – of sinking ships and sailors struggling to stay afloat in the ocean, of desperate men grasping at splintered wreckage, of men flailing and drowning, men with contorted faces, frantic with fear.
Alice was missing television. After long days of reading and writing, she wanted the uncomplicated comfort of serial images. She wanted a sofa on which to recline, an
d before it a moulded luminous box, solid and commanding as a shrine. Like plastic bags and mobile phones, television was both a facile utility and a tacky satisfaction. The news she read in newspapers seemed less real without its animating images; the weather report less credible without comic-book clouds and suns tacked onto colourful national maps; and her narrative hunger, which was massive, was unassuaged. She wondered if the story of Leo’s murder had been shown on television, if she would have been able to see his weeping mother, and his father, grim and brave and wearing a tilted shabby cap, just holding back the tears as he spoke of his loss. Perhaps there was a shot of his house, somewhere, and a younger brother or two, looking bewildered and estranged, peering with suspicion at the television crew, who nevertheless managed efficiently and brutally to intrude. Perhaps too, he had a pretty sister, almost his age and looking very like him, with the same thin pallid face and nervy manner, who announced to the camera that he was the best brother ever to have lived, and that he adored animals and video games and popular music.
Alice felt ashamed of herself for these prepackaged imaginings, and wondered if they were a consequence of her first impression that night, that she had stumbled upon a film set. The corruptibility of grief by routine image-making dismayed and upset her. Someone – perhaps friends from the school – had placed a posy in the doorway, where a telltale smear of blood was still apparent, but within hours the flowers had become ragged and a gust of wind sent white carnations rolling chaotically up the street. Alice thought at first that she might retrieve and replace them, but she did not. This event – the seeming authenticity of the laying of flowers by people who actually knew Leo, and their so-easy, so-quick ruination by wind – seemed to Alice symbolic of something irretrievably lost. She was unsure what to feel, or if feeling anything at all was not a kind of vague and luxurious self-indulgence to which, ultimately, she had no right. She didn’t know him, after all. For all her shy voyeurism, she had never even said hello.
Cities generated these disorders of response between people, these misalignments of personal and public meaning. In large populations, crammed together, there were inevitably forms of disturbance and assaults to consciousness. Discharges of violence. Lives in collapse, knocking others as they fell. In photographs taken from the sky, cities resembled circuit boards. It was no surprise, really, that there were sparky misfirings, dangerous connections. Even traffic, Alice concluded, set up a kind of static in the air, let loose vibrations and uncontainable agitation. Freighted with more than they could absorb, with city intentions, citizens moved in designs of inexplicable purpose.
Even as she entertained these metaphors, Alice rejected them. The circuit was too predictable, too completely determinative. Yet she was reminded of her father, and of faraway childhood things, invisibly charged. His workman’s hands clasping pliers, joining red and yellow wires with dextrous twisting and snapping and threading of copper. Objects flicked into being under electric lights. Simple incandescence. Simple shock. She had believed then in the fundamental electricity of things – of brains, of bodies, of whole communities.
By evening someone had replaced the flowers. Alice felt relieved. She gazed down upon them. More white carnations. Leo’s makeshift memorial was still as fragile as ever. Someone died here. There was a long handwritten note pinned beneath the flowers. Imagining its tribute, Alice began to weep.
Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.
Mr Sakamoto and Alice began talking more personally. They had enjoyed exchanging talks about inventions and modern objects, but now each ventured an occasional enquiry that signified the understanding between them, or was the token of a more relaxed and shared curiosity.
‘What’s the oddest thing you’ve seen on your travels,’ Alice asked ‘to do with misplaced technology? To do with things out of context.’
‘That’s easy,’ Mr Sakamoto said. ‘The Spanish astronaut.’ Here he paused to elicit Alice’s interest.
‘Well?’ she was forced to ask. She leaned forward and touched his hand.
Mr Sakamoto grinned. ‘Only a year ago,’ he began, ‘I was visiting the city of Salamanca, in Spain. The cathedral, what they call the New Cathedral, which actually dates from the Renaissance, had been recently restored. The stonemasons added the carved image of an astronaut to the figures in a frieze around the door. There he was, suspended among ivy leaves and griffins and dogs and sheep, with his helmet and suit and gigantic boots. The oxygen line that attached him to his ship – not pictured, of course – lay across his belly like an umbilicus. His nose had already been knocked off, giving him a kinship with many of the ancient bishops and biblical figures elsewhere on the cathedral, earlier effaced …’
‘At first,’ Mr Sakamoto went on, ‘I thought it a sacrilege, a kind of puerile mischief. But after a while it began to look more and more acceptable, and I thought it a comic touch – almost a theological point – about the inclusiveness of creation, about the sacredness of the joke, about the incorporation of every thing into the scheme of the cathedral … I’m not sure, really …
‘There is also another dimension to this story. I had been to that very spot, to that very cathedral, years ago, when I was first married. I took my wife, Mie, on a European honeymoon. She had never been outside Japan, and I suppose I thought, rather proudly, that I would show her the world, I thought I would demonstrate my knowledge and be the one to offer new pleasures. I was anxious to make a positive impression, to make her love me. But Mie hated travelling. The trip was a disaster. She was disorientated and unhappy, and talked longingly of our home. Often she stayed in our hotel rooms, and left me to sightsee alone. She found the trains slow and inefficient, she hated the food. I wanted so much to bind us together and create a foundation of special memories to begin our marriage, but in the end had to concede I had misunderstood her. I felt ashamed. I had not even known her well enough to realise she would rather stay at home. In Salamanca I coaxed her to the cathedral: we stood before it – then unrestored – we were in a sunny plaza, it was a glorious spring day – and she burst into tears. Mie clutched at my arm and begged to be taken home. Spain was only the second country on our itinerary, but we returned to Japan within a few days. Last year, I revisited the towns and cities I had been to with Mie. I wanted to see them again, and also retrack those places we had stood together, if only in that tense and misguided way. I realise now how pompous I must have seemed, lecturing her on European culture, expecting her to like what I liked, to be deferential. I realised too how very mismatched we were, although we did come to love each other, after the girls arrived. Ours was a marriage, like many, which required each partner to suppress their truest identity, to become joint, to become a kind of functional unit.’
Mr Sakamoto fell silent. Perhaps he feared he had said too much. Then he smiled and asked: ‘And you? What odd misplacement can you describe?’
‘Nothing quite so interesting. About two years ago I went backpacking with my boyfriend, Stephen, in Indonesia. We were living fairly rough, trying to avoid the big centres, trying to set ourselves a challenge. On one of the islands there was an active volcano and you could hire a guide to take you walking to the summit and then down again. The walk took about ten hours and was almost impossibly strenuous. We left well before dawn, at about three in the morning, and the way was steep and treacherous, with loose stones and hazardous cliff-face manoeuvres, and towards the top there were sulphurous emissions that made us choke for air. We thought we were suffocating. Our eyes were streaming, our throats were sore, the earth beneath us was so hot that we could feel heat through our boots. Stephen told me afterwards that he was convinced that we would die there together, on that stinking slope, our faces burned to nothing by the ground where we fell. The Indonesian guide seemed unperturbed and hurried on, practically leaping up the volcano, while behind Stephen and I s
truggled to keep up, feeling foolish and exhausted. Our legs ached terribly and we were sunburned and frazzled. When at last we finally reached the summit, there before us was our nimble and nonchalant guide, smoking a clove cigarette, relaxing, looking pleased with himself, and a young German couple, who must have found their own way up the mountain. They were both resplendent – dressed in lime-coloured Lycra and reflective sunglasses. The man was speaking into a mobile phone. He spoke at the very top of his voice, and was presumably shouting to Germany of his latest excursion. Stephen and I looked at each other and laughed. We felt shabby and pathetic; we were so tired we weren’t sure we could make the return journey, and there was a man, looking monumental, looking like an advertisement, with a mobile phone. The German couple were in fact polite and welcoming, and we all descended together, and shared a meal late in the evening …
‘I know that the ubiquity of mobile phones is not a particularly arresting story, but the trek had been such a trial, we had felt we were at a point of extremity, that its appearance on the scene seemed more than usually absurd. In the village, below, there was not even electricity. And something about the way the man spoke – so loud and commanding, like a stockbroker, settling a deal – was truly shattering in the context of reaching the summit, finding oneself in the sky, standing over gas and molten earth at the point of physical collapse … We looked out at the landscape, barely able to stand – it was a vista of paddy fields and rolling hills and in the far distance, the ocean – and what we heard was shouted speech, sent up to a satellite.’
