by Susan Daitch
“When is your flight?” I balanced the receiver on my shoulder, prepared to write.
“Next week.”
“Don’t you think Jack will want to see you before you leave?” I was prepared to meet him at the airport if I knew he would be there.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time he left me in the lurch. How did you get my number, anyway?”
Jack the two-timer, the good-for-nothing, Jack who’s always late, who owes money to everyone, Jack who loses his grip from time to time, anything. Jack, who tapped me on the shoulder then disappeared, only to repeat the performance again and again, always winking, always just out of reach. Jack, the man who falls asleep next to you on a plane then picks up your suitcase at baggage claim in order to see you again, but the exchange never actually takes place. Both the man and your stuff vanish into a foreign city.
“I don’t know why I’m talking to you,” Clarice said as if it had just dawned on her, and she hung up on me.
I was looking at the third-to-last scene of the Dreyfus film, the scene entitled “Battle of the Journalists.” In an ordinary-looking room men and women argue about the verdict, and within seconds a fight breaks out. Besides casting himself as Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer, Méliès has also cast himself as one of the journalists. He’s hopping all over the tiny screen. Perhaps he and Jack Kews are alike in that their good intentions are easily undercut. They look quizzically at those who flee from attention, who write anonymously or broadcast without call letters, those who think they have a message but poke the image of a messiah in the ribs. The fight among the journalists appears so realistic and violent that if I had just spooled to this scene at random without knowing what was on the film, I would have believed I was looking at a documentary, unstaged and shot completely as it happened.
“Enough people didn’t believe he could be found guilty a second time, as I told you, so you can cut the court martial scene.”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard him, but Julius had opened the door to my office without knocking. He glanced over my shoulder at the film.
“Let me see the courtroom scene.”
I ran the film forwards, a tiny square of light in a dark room.
“The image is fairly degraded. Dreyfus salutes the judges. Okay. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on here except when the verdict is read. If we could change the expression on Dreyfus’ face, if he looked happy or if the face were to be blurred by Wet Gate and you could do a little harmless airbrushing, then Dreyfus is a free man and less of the film faces the guillotine.”
“I can’t do it.”
“No one remembers this trial, Frances. I want to stay in business, to retire handsomely to an offshore destination. I don’t want to lose my shirt. Everything evaporates eventually. Dreyfus is innocent.”
In front of the troops in the yard of Les Invalides Dreyfus is stripped of his medals. This is the scene of his degradation. A man I assume to be a general breaks Dreyfus’s sword over his knee.
“Yes, but by changing the end of the film you’re giving the judges credit for something they didn’t do.”
“So you’ve said. Listen, Scholom Aleichem wrote a story, “Dreyfus in Krasilov,” in which the citizens of a remote Russian town read about the Dreyfus trial in installments that arrive in a newspaper mailed from France. They know all the evidence proves he’s innocent, that he was framed by corrupt generals and poorly executed forgeries. They don’t see how Dreyfus could be found guilty a second time. The guilty verdict isn’t possible, not in Paris, so they tear up the town’s only newspaper. It could only be a hoax. ”
“Méliès resisted the temptation to change the fantastic verdict into the correct verdict: innocent. He let the unbelievable conclusion stand. He shot the actuality, as improbable as it was. Who’s paying for this restoration?” This was a question I had never asked before.
“I can’t say.”
“You told the landlord it was someone in France.”
“The landlord needs whatever false assurances I can give him that the back rent here isn’t a lost cause.”
“Do we even have an air brush?”
Julius nodded.
“I’m just asking. I haven’t said I’ll use it.”
“A happy ending is money in the bank. Remember that.”
A line of frayed thread connected me to the Russian librarian, to someone who might long for an expensive coat when winter comes, especially if he now owns little more than a second- or third-hand gray suit. I no longer have any idea of the sort of image I presented. Was my shirt tucked in, hair flat, hands in pockets? Or were buttons askew, stains on blouse, dark circles under my eyes, did I have a manic twitch, were phrases tumbling from my mouth one after the next? In speech did I confuse characters from the Dreyfus trial (Picquart, Esterhazy, Zola, du Paty) with attempts to remember to buy soap, toothpaste, eye drops before the drugstore closed?
“The last scene is supposed to be one of terrible humiliation,” I said.
“Degradation can take many forms.” As he leaned closer I thought he might explain what he meant. How did this icon of degradation, the sword snapped over a knee, translate into the electronic present?
“The general’s face is barely visible. As the sword snaps, don’t you think some kind of expression would have registered?” Julius asked.
I carefully removed the Dreyfus film from the Steenbeck and showed him another one I had finished, The Man with the Rubber Head. Méliès’s head grew larger and larger, finally exploding, the force of the explosion blowing his assistant out of the frame.
“The man who mistook his head for a Coney Island whitefish,” Julius said.
He turned off the light table and we sat in the dark. He made me uncomfortable, and I moved my chair closer to the wall, hoping he wouldn’t notice I was, as usual, edging away from him.
“Frances, we offer a service for which there is less and less need.”
I didn’t want to hear his confession, didn’t want to be responsible for its weight. I wanted to tell him about the librarian who had left everything he knew on the other side of the world, the hysteric in a wheelchair, the opening scene of The Man with the Rubber Head, where Méliès is chain smoking and smiling like the devil. Don’t make me responsible if the studio is about to fold, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Whatever deal Julius had made or with whom he’d made it, he kept to himself. I suppose all transactions can be read in terms of extortion, there are many who might sell their souls to avoid Devil’s Island. Some people, I think, carry their own Devil’s Island around like a box covering their heads with two holes punched out for eyes, and if that’s the case, the eyeholes are meaningless anyway. I tried to shrug Julius’s arm off my back. He kept it there.
Jack’s notes seemed to say, if you think there was only one deliberate framing, only one cover-up ever, only one case of forged government documents, only one miscarriage of justice, look how wrong you are, how naive. Julius, embarrassed and defensive, let go, saying his eyes were troubling him, and he left me alone with the silent films.
Listening to Julius’s footsteps recede, I rewound, put the Dreyfus film on a shelf with the other unfinished Méliès reels. A few hours later when I got up from my chair to stretch another envelope had been slipped under my door.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and I needed to look into the distance for a few minutes in order to compensate for hours spent with Dreyfus at close range. I went out, intending to at least walk past an address on the list of war resisters. The name was Adam Mercy.
I told Antonya I would be back in a half hour and left swinging doors in my wake, only to stand in the empty elevator feeling foolish; all my urgency was about chasing phantoms. Still, I didn’t go back, and instead walked out into the street with no hint I’d entertained second thoughts.
A few yards from the entrance to the Mayflower Building two boys played on overturned plastic buckets held between their knees. The buckets were white and looked new. A thir
d, smaller pail stood directly in front of them for people to drop money into while they drummed. Lately, they had been at their post every day. Inhaling smells of roasted peanuts and skewered meat sold from carts with portable grills I could only think about what I would say when face to face with one of the former war resisters. Hello, Mr. Mercy, we spoke earlier. I’m looking for a man you might remember. It will seem like an impertinent question coming from a stranger, but it would mean a lot to me if you could tell me if you’ve recently heard from a man I believe you first met many years ago? I’m no longer sure I know his real name.
I finally reached the address marked on Jack’s list, but the building had been demolished. The apartment complex next door was partly bricked up. Squatters occupied a few of the floors. Although it was long past Halloween a boy in a steak costume looked out of a second-story window. The steak was cut out of a box, painted red and white. He wore marbled red tights, a red cap, and waved a rubber fork before disappearing into the building. A Blockbuster Video, one story high, made of sand-colored cinder blocks had been erected where Mercy’s building must have been. I stood before the display window and watched Robert Redford wait in a parking garage of waffle-paneled concrete for his Deep Throat. Stacks of Dracula and Malcolm X framed the screen. Inside, two women appeared to be arguing, pointing to another screen that showed the same film. I watched in the cold for a few more minutes then went back to work.
Just as I had tried to imagine Jack Kews I also tried to form a picture of Adam Mercy. They were older than the boys I had known but Jack, his friends, and the ones whose names I’ve forgotten all looked into the same mirror. I was sure of it. They had long hair and rolled cigarettes whose contents came from wads of tinfoil or plastic bags. What they looked like, how they chose to look, mixed signs of masculinity and femininity in a combination that could be confusing. How you chose them or were chosen by them wasn’t thought about under the category of pressure, although the pressure to sleep with them came at every turn, and then I’m not sure. I never heard that word, probably never dreamed about it. It was just what you did. You just did it and then moved on to the next one with no attachments. Clear nights full of stars, warm enough to sleep outside if you wanted to, parents away, friends with cars. Tabs of acid might be brought out from back pockets as if the greatest thing in the world had just been discovered among the linty bits and pieces. Someone always had one of those small plastic bags.
“Jack? Jack? Is that you? I can’t believe it!”
I turned around quickly, but the man being embraced was little more than twenty years old and looked embarrassed to be recognized by a woman who pulled up beside the curb, got out of her car, and briefly smothered him with kisses. She was quite a bit older than he, and sensing his discomfort, she backed off, embarrassed, got back into her car, and drove away.
WARNING
“In the current rather emotional atmosphere the frequency of procedural errors on the part of the local draft boards has increased noticeably. In reading this Handbook please bear this in mind. If your local draft board does not respond as you think it should, contact your nearest draft counselor or Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors at once for advice on remedial action.
“In the best circumstances local boards act very differently — just as registrants do. You cannot prevent their mistakes, but only your own. Several men are in prison right now because of their own mistakes.”
This warning, which I took very seriously, is quoted from the Handbook for Conscientious Objectors edited by Arlo Tatum, tenth edition, December 1969.
When commenting on the Nuremberg trials Telford Taylor said, “Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” Knowing that, I left for Canada, but in order to survive underground I had to become someone else.
Even in Canada I was always looking over my shoulder, down the block, across the street. I sought out crowds because if anything happened there would be witnesses to the confrontation. You heard stories of deserters and draft exiles being kidnapped in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, only to be spirited over the border. A chloroformed handkerchief was put over your nose and mouth, then you were driven straight through customs with no questions asked. I wasn’t interested in becoming an experiment in transnational anesthesia, so I went on to England, believing it less likely that the long arm of the FBI would stretch across the Atlantic and back just for one draft resister. I don’t like the term draft dodger; it implies something cagey and sly, and doesn’t reflect the decision to leave as a moral one. We were against the war.
At first in Canada and later in England I felt like a kid trying on Halloween costumes, making the sounds of a gorilla, then speaking like Frankenstein or Dracula in turn, but my false identity soon turned from a kind of curiosity or novelty into a very different condition. It became a vacuum that sucked everything out: memory, history, geography. The identities that were meant to cloak erased the person who lay beneath. Now you see him, now you don’t. I won’t even tell you the names I traveled under. I became unmoored. My motto was: today is the first day of the end of your life. I was from Chicago, from Los Angeles, from Seattle, from small towns whose names were entirely made up: Red Plains, Whitman Park, Sandy Hook, Los Carneros. I had a lost twin sister or Clarice was my sister. I wrote under a variety of names. My address was a shifting post-office box.
I forgot a great deal and filled the space with whatever came to mind first. I couldn’t confide in Clarice because I didn’t really trust anyone. Fascinated by skinheads she worked with victims of their attacks, administering counseling, visiting housing estates and caravans. As if answers and then solutions could be found in half-hour interviews. Ask the right, informed questions. Get useful answers. Find a solution. Living with a man who had to keep changing his story might start to feel old. What if, I kept thinking, what if she decides she’s had it and goes back to the States with no warning? She insisted she didn’t want to go back either, but then I began to worry that distracted, she might slip up under pressure. Clarice often stared out the window when I or anyone was on about something. She wasn’t aware of it, and insisted she was listening, and somehow the syntax of other people made it through her daydreams to her spindle neurons, but I could never be sure. That dreamy look, like Wendy waiting for a shadowless boy while Rome burned, was kind of seductive, because there was always the possibility that she really was listening. But it was a risk. I was afraid we’d be at an airport and Customs and Immigration would ask, “You’re traveling with your brother?”
“My brother? I don’t have a brother. Wait a minute, yes I do,” she might say.
So we behaved as if we were strangers who didn’t know each other. I tried to lose her on crowded streets, on trains, in large shops. It pissed her off. Living with me, she said, required a lot of guesswork. In the morning I’m at my worst, and she would do anything to try to crack the moodiness that left her out. She would wear my clothes, which looked ridiculous on her, cuffs and legs dragging behind, or describe the pratfalls of her dreams, leaving out the nightmarish parts. She would talk in funny accents, imitating people who had been in line ahead of her at a store or a post office, snippets that sounded like futuristic creatures in their combination of mismatched syllables and abbreviation. Her life was sometimes one continuous narration, I wasn’t sure if I was doing more than listening or less. Still, I stayed around while I knew she found herself getting louder, shriller, more ridiculous in the face of my increasing need for invisibility, to lose my shadow.
I learned to be as neutral as possible so people might see in me the reflection of their own attitudes; I provided an arena for narcissism. I had to become an actor. I’m not an actor. The process of slipping into and out of other identities took a great deal of self-control and driving under the speed limit. I didn’t, under any circumstances, want to attract attention. A speeding violation could be a one-way ticket to deportation.
For a few months, nearly a year, I worked in London at an old movie hou
se, more of a storefront than a real theater, that showed Méliès’s old films. I was drawn to them. He had ended his life in obscurity, and his films had been revived only recently. Like Méliès I tried out a few different heads, then exploded them when they were no longer of any use, and also like Méliès, I found it tempting to write of myself in the third person. (He drove to Canada picking a rarely traveled road where he had to wake up the customs official who just waved him through. He had cut his hair quickly and unevenly. The man didn’t notice.)
When the manager and other staff seemed to be getting to know me too well I had to quit the job, but before I left, I learned something about the Méliès films that were about to be sent to you for preservation. I decided to slip back in.
In 1973 when President Ford offered “conditional clemency” or “earned reentry” to the forty thousand American exiles, only thirty-four gave it a try. There were five categories under which you could apply for this reentry business, but none of the categories allowed for the position of being against the war. We’d committed no felony, unlike Nixon, who was granted a presidential pardon. Why accept a pardon if you haven’t committed a crime? A question that was asked of Dreyfus as well. What we had done was refuse to participate in an “adventure” that we considered criminal. We weren’t the ones who needed amnesty. That same year I went to the International Conference of Exiles held in Paris in early spring. Sartre, in a letter written to a magazine for American exiles, supported us. His letter has antecedents in Zola. The idea of writers, philosophers sticking an oar into the political sea began, I think, with him. Anyway, Ford’s clemency program was a crock.
