by Susan Daitch
So if anyone asks, I’m not here.
Love,
Jack
P.S. Let’s get to the end of the film already.
It was as if a figure who had been chased for several blocks finally came to a stop and admitted that he did in fact answer to the name repeatedly called out. I read the letter twice. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. The excuse, that his desire was to travel with the films, was just as good a wedge in the door of return as any other. He might have picked a random moment to come back. Why did he trust me? Because I was preserving the films he identified so strongly with? In a way I was coating the underground man with Wet Gate, too.
After he wrote his j’accuse letter, Zola’s name, in some circles, became synonymous with le métèque, foreigner. His motives were seen as nothing more than the antics of a publicity seeker. Both he and Jack became les métèques. Clarice knew what was going on, why Jack had to give her the slip from time to time, but it no longer seemed to matter to her. She gave the impression that she looked upon Jack with repulsion, as if he was an illness she used to have. The antibodies to the disease were unknown, and after some searching through medical textbooks and experimenting with a haphazard assortment of pills and syringes, the malady just wore off on its own over time. Perhaps she tried running marathons or sat through hours of silent movies in order to be the sort of person he wanted, then she gave it all up. A woman who looked at her affairs as a series of columns: credits heading one and debits the other. Jack, in her opinion, was Mr. Debit.
So what am I left with? Unfocused pangs for a jackpot of a no-hope romance. Even the invisible Clarice dumped him. Even good-for-nothings are occasionally good for something. There are women who destroy themselves over idiots, dunderheads, liars, cheats, con artists, vacuous slobs, elderly or middle-aged babies who may or may not have the capacity to bankroll lives of leisure. Sometimes they tell their stories on America’s Most Wanted; they leave you staggering under the weight of the knowledge that desire can be oppressive if it doesn’t do you in altogether.
On a map of estrangement there must be a spot marked for the location where one spends the night with a stranger. You may not even know the meaning or exact nature of its geography while you inhabit it, but once that particular landscape recedes you realize exactly what you were about and what you couldn’t have known at the time. Once when I worked at the Library of Congress I spent the night with a man who claimed to have stolen manuscripts, rare unguarded manuscripts from libraries all over the world. Like Jack, he knew a lot about me, but when I wouldn’t help him, he vanished into thin air.
I didn’t really want to meet Jack Kews. I read in the paper of the trial of five men, citizens of a small town in upstate New York, who found a woman they knew passed out in a restaurant bathroom. She had had too many free drinks. The men laid her on a table and raped her. Although they had confessed to the rape they were only fined $750 each, since confession doesn’t count as proof a crime has been committed. One needs scars and sperm, the article said. Furthermore, according to the paper, the prosecutor often ate in the restaurant where the rape took place. The establishment’s owner was the father of one of her attackers, and the two men were friends. I could see the booths covered in red plastic, coffee slopped into their saucers, men leaning back in their places, not even hunched over on their elbows playing nervously with salt and pepper shakers, but sitting like viceroys with their legs spread apart, as if to say, “Hey, I got a dick, you know?” In the history of stalking, chase, and hunt, the quarry is often a stranger, unknown, the object of a voyeuristic speculation. I was less concerned with the idea of a stranger murdering a stranger. In the history of men and women there is plenty of that. Sartre, of whose moral support Jack felt justifiably proud, reduces rape to a case of the desirer and the desirable. The desirable in the case in upstate New York wrote that she wanted all five men lined up on a platform and hung for what they had done to her.
If I found Jack, he might turn out not to be the man I thought he was. He posed like Zola, ready to expose the false stories, invented conspiracies, and forgeries of aged Generals and Secretaries of Defense; hiding out in England under the name Pasquale, only to return to a Brooklyn apartment with no heat. I know one or two things about him, but just when I’m sure of a situation, something backfires, turns slippery, goes as haywire as a naked man in a wheelchair.
Take, for example, the idea of dinosaur eggs manufactured from a strand of DNA piped out of a prehistoric mosquito caught in amber. The insect had sucked the blood of Tyrannosaurus Rex, but the gaps in the isolated strand that produce a T. Rex had to be filled in by whatever kind of DNA was close and available: a frog’s double helix was used for the patchwork. However, the resulting monster turned out to be capable of changing sex midstream. If you ask me every man is a potential Jurassic Park. You never know what you’re getting. There is no way of knowing what kind of violence is scheduled at the end.
“Adam Mercy.” He said his name as if it were one word. Adamercy. I pictured a man living in a basement, his gray hair tied into a ponytail by a rubber band. “Furtim Vigilans.”
“Furtim Vigilans,” I repeated, trying not to make my voice go up as if I were asking a question.
“Data-collection services. How may I be of assistance?”
After the usual preliminaries, I asked him if he knew a man named Jack Kews.
“Jack Kews. Jack Kews. Can’t say that I did.”
“Your name was on a list he kept.”
“Perhaps he intended to call me.”
“It was a list of men in a group called DLR.”
There was a pause, just as I knew there would be. The image of a skinny gray ponytail was replaced by a man in a silk tie swiveling in his chair to survey all the views from his corner office, or maybe his office was all corners, and he already saw everything.
“Yeah, I knew Jack.”
“Heard from him lately?”
“Not in years. I thought he was dead.”
“Can you tell me anything about him?” I was calling from Antonya’s desk because I was on my way out of the office. I almost wasn’t going to call Mercy, but on an impulse, decided okay, might as well give him a try. Antonya had gone to a martial arts class.
“Not much. He hid from people. Jack was the kind of person who didn’t laugh at jokes and who would make sure, in his silent way, that you felt like a fool for telling them. He ran from the camera, sliding down the flagpole as soon as he saw one.” Then he asked, “Who are you, Frances? Why do you need to know?”
“An old friend. He got in touch with me, then disappeared.”
“He has a tendency to do that. If you hear from him, please give him my number. I would love to see Jack again.”
“What kind of data do you collect?”
“All kinds, Frances. People lie. Evidence tells the truth.”
“Except when it doesn’t.” I felt as if I were an archaeologist brushing dirt away from an object I thought was a figure of an ancient totem or god, only to find when the dust was cleared an obscene plastic troll left by a looter.
“You could say that.”
I imagined Adam commanding a league of mercenaries who fanned out into the city wearing jackets with black patches embroided with skulls, claws, and the words Furtim Vigilans, Vigilance through Stealth, looking for Jack. Perhaps Jack imagined this, too, or maybe the data-collection mission wasn’t imaginary at all.
After I hung up I leaned over to throw out the scrap of paper on which I had scribbled his number. In the garbage I saw a flattened milk carton; a square piece had been cut out of one of its sides where a picture of a missing child had been.
Across the street from the Mayflower was a two-story building that housed William C. C. Chen’s Tai Chi Chuan Studio. At night when I looked down a few floors and across I could see the silhouettes of men distorted behind steamed windows moving slowly backward and forward. Red banners with gold writing covered the walls. On the ground floo
r below Chen’s was the Eye for an Eye Video Store on whose narrow glass panels were painted the signs:
ADULT PEEP
ADULT PEEP
and
NO
BODY
BEATS
OUR PRICES
The words body and beats took on new meaning in their isolation. I watched the men who went in and wondered if Jack Kews might be one of them, killing time before he slipped another note under my door, or did Julius, with the expression on his face of a man who loitered with anxiety, ever go into the Eye for an Eye looking for a film entitled Wet Gate, for example? I’d never imagined them unconsciously dogging one another’s footsteps, but suddenly the two were mixed up. After all, they both projected their personalities in my direction as if I were a blank screen. I added Jack’s most recent letter to the pile in my desk, locked the door behind me, and went home.
I stopped at an intersection. Antonya was playing with the radio. It was beginning to feel like the end of winter, deceptively and momentarily warm, and we’d decided to drive to Coney Island, a relic of its former self, but it was still a beach even if you had to watch out for used needles and broken glass buried just under the surface of the sand. We parked near the subway at Stillwell Avenue. It was a weekday and very quiet. Under the shadow of the blackened Thunderbolt, an abandoned roller coaster, I thought about what is preserved and what is lost. François Mauriac claimed that as a child he had been given a chamber pot with Zola’s name painted on it. Had it been manufactured, rather than made by hand, presumably there would be many others, and they are stored somewhere. Who keeps such things now in their attic or auctions them off on some unknown block, bidders collapsing into either knowing or ignorant hysterics? History with a small h, not panoramic history as in Dial 1-800.
All that was left of the roller coaster was a kind of a skeleton of a skeleton. Sumac trees and weeds grew upwards through the missing rails, and people lived underneath it. Their houses were constructed from shopping carts, blankets, and fragments of broken beach chairs, webbing flapping in the breeze; bright pink or yellow deflated plastic animals replaced curtains. We continued past a bricked-over bathhouse, medallions of dolphins circling the top, just out of reach of the graffiti. Windows close to the top story were broken, gaping open. Those living under the Thunderbolt somehow managed to scale the walls and get into the vast derelict baths. Businesses, drug deals, and gang meetings were conducted inside its ruinous caverns behind Neptune’s head.
I bought a coke at Astroland, the painted tin Astroland boy and girl holding enormous hamburgers overhead.
The Cyclone, the white-heat version of the defunct Thunderbolt, was also inoperative but didn’t appear abandoned. It looked like a series of fake de Chirico mountains. “I would throw up on one of those,” Antonya said as pink and green cars slid from the outer edge of the wheel.
“The office can only last a week, maybe less.”
Despite the cold the boardwalk was full of people, Russians, mostly, in fur coats walking arm in arm, speaking slowly, sounds of observation and complaint, pockets full of cell phones and beepers. A group of beer bottles wrapped in paper bags had been left sticking up in the sand like a series of aggressive noses, bodies still buried underneath. Even in the chilly air the Wonder Wheel beckoned, lazy, inevitably returning riders to the point where they boarded. I watched a woman in a rumpled dress sit on the beach with two young children. They ran around her and dug in the cold sand, but she remained unresponsive, staring at the water. Two men passed her carrying fish they appeared to have just caught. She barely looked at them. Others walked by with radios blaring. Double trouble, one blasted, Antonya sang along with it, repeating the lyrics over and over. The children ran out of steam and sat a few feet away. Still, the woman stared at the ocean, gold sunglasses pushed back on her head occasionally turning to yell at the children in a south Russian Odessa accent. I threw my Coke can away and dumped sand from my shoes.
“Soon everyone will be either a spectator or an actor in theme parks where unattended children disappear,” I said, trying to be funny. “Without Alphabet hundreds of films will disintegrate.” In their place I imagined tableaus or rides based on the life of Charlie Chaplin or Dreyfus: digitalized funhouses attended only fitfully, and finally those would be shut down too.
The brief thaw ended, and it began to snow again, a last fist of winter, but a heavy one. The Mayflower security guard watched reports of hazardous roads on a tiny TV. Alphabet Conservation was dark when I unlocked the door, and thinking it would be deserted, I was prepared to disconnect the alarm system. The red light on the coffee machine burned in the shadows although there was nothing left in the pot but a ring of sludge. The alarm hadn’t been activated, all was quiet. Montgomery Clift had returned and glinted above a calendar. He had turned to face the camera, his arm around young Julius’s shoulder as if posing for a father and son shirt ad, except Clift, as Freud, wasn’t smiling. Julius had said he himself smiled because he felt he had to, that was what you did as a guest on the set for whom a favor was being done, he felt he had no choice but to smile. There was a light on in Julius’s office. I opened the door to find him slumped over his desk. I thought he had fallen asleep and had no impulse to wake him. I didn’t want to touch Julius, didn’t want to shake his arm or even be alone with him in Alphabet at night. The corridor was dark, light from the street came through two of the windows, and I made my way into my office, silently, without turning on any lights.
During a dark night beside a bridge in Rennes an assassin hides under a bridge. He pulls a gun and Dreyfus’s lawyer, played by Méliès, falls to the street yelling for help. The assassin escapes. I was very tired and could no longer tell if it was snowing during this scene or if the film was only very scratched and grainy. I listened for sounds of the office being left for the night. Doors softly shutting in the distance might have been the sound of Julius departing. Ironically, as the story became more tragic, the image grew clearer. The end of the film was in better shape than the beginning. In the last scene Dreyfus leaves the court at Rennes for prison. Soldiers stand in lines with their backs to him as he descends the stone steps. There was no scene of riots or murder. I put the film in a can and went on to the next one. The preservation of The Affair was completed. The telephone rang.
“Jack, there’s no murder at the end of the film.”
“People were killed in the streets following the original showing of the film. People were literally stomped to death, ribs cracking, guts coming out of their mouths.”
“But it’s not on this film.”
“Look again. I’ll call you back. It’s freezing cold and there’s no heat in my building.”
“You could come up here to Alphabet. At least the heat’s still on.” But he had already hung up.
What he described sounded like the riot scene in Day of the Locust when Homer Simpson stomps the child actor, Adore, to death, but the murder had happened not in a novel about Hollywood, but in Paris in 1899.
Jack saw himself as an accuser, a finger pointer, but stopped short. Who was the murdered man at the end of the film and where was that ending? Small towers of film taunted me with the possibility of the wrong splice. The answer could have been in any one or none of them.
I read a story once about a woman, Ethel K., who was in love with Harry Houdini. Even aside from the fact that he was already married to Bess Rahner, few personal obsessions could have been more hopeless. She followed him from outdoor exhibitions to staged arenas all over the world. As many times as she watched Houdini escape from any number of contrivances, whether he dangled chained, cuffed, and straitjacketed from a Wall Street ledge, or similarly manacled, plunged off a Berlin bridge, she always held her breath as she watched; his performances left her both aroused and terrified. It would have torn her apart to see someone torture the showman, but she confessed she was mesmerized by his penchant for torturing himself. She waited at stage doors, a round, lovelorn face lost in the crowd, sent lett
ers that were never answered, ran out of money, did odd jobs, even engaged in prostitution when she became really desperate. Once, as he descended from the stage door, she called his name, and she believed he turned and gave her a smile before entering his car. Often she was convinced he looked her in the eye during his escape struggles, making eye contact despite the mob, the sea of other choices, and doing so in the last minute before he finally broke free. It was mostly men, fedoras or homburgs perched on their heads, that made up the crowds, so she wasn’t that hard to spot. Hey, sweetheart, it’s me! Your good-luck charm! The hats ignored her, and the great man never so much as sent her an autographed picture. Houdini was always one step ahead of her, as if it were she herself he was escaping from.
One night, alone in Montreal, Ethel K. considered giving up the chase and going home, though home, at this point, could be wherever she decided to hang her hat. The object of her desire kept running away, disappearing around the corner, just out of reach. If she turned the tables with a Harrumph to you, Harry, disappearing herself, would his next show end in disaster? Or, noticing her absence, even if he wasn’t exactly clear as to her identity, would he find his way to her door? Ethel, my darling, please come back! What she was driving at was a means to shift the story, so escape was no longer the main subject of a given page, but would become a footnote to their romance. Ethel K. was ready for a straitjacket herself.
In one of Houdini’s original tricks, he and Bess changed places. He was chained, locked in a box, the box itself wrapped in chains, then she pulled a curtain, obscuring the whole shooting match, and clapped her hands, the magic sound necessary to instigate the mechanics of the switcheroo about to take place. In an instant, he stood before the audience, and she was found in the box. So in the story of Ethel K. and Harry, she hoped he could be persuaded to change places, to make her someone to be desired, and he someone she needed to escape from. In fact, she did need to escape from him, as the seducer she imagined him to be, a role he actually didn’t have much of a conscious hand in. Was this story some kind of vaudeville reflection of the hide-and-seek game I was playing with Jack? Yikes. I hope not. To be seduced by a disembodied voice isn’t much more substantial than eroticizing that last flick of a wrist in an escape artist’s repertoire. If so, I’m not sure who plays which part. Given Jack’s affinity for escapeology, I don’t know if the thing that he’s afraid of, the thing that chases him, even if it’s me, is more real or less real than life in rooms above the man in a wheelchair.
