Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  “Why do they want to come here?” Fabien asked.

  “Drug trade. They make a fortune.”

  Fabien found it hard to believe these particular Algerians could assimilate with the seamlessness and speed needed to make large amounts of money in a land which the man himself found foreign and unpredictable.

  “They’re like an infection, gangrenous, that you fight in someone else, then it turns out you’ve caught it.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Throw them out.”

  “But you cut gangrene.”

  “Self-amputation if the infection has spread to oneself.”

  Fabien drank another absinthe trying, in a blurred way, to figure out who and what the man was talking about. Others listened to him with interest, writing down names and talking of traveling to Marseilles to loot or riot, but Fabien was utterly convinced they were as harmless as schoolboys plotting their turf wars. He wasn’t going to lose sleep over Kabyles. Wrapped in the sense of security that came from extricating himself from the café he returned home, only to fall asleep in a chair. He dreamed about Bluette as a succubus, cunning and sinuous, defying gravity like smoke. Consciousness and daylight didn’t seem to diminish the memory of the dream once he awoke, and throughout the next day he felt embarrassed whenever he saw her in the distance, sitting on the discarded hull of the Maine or sticking her hand into the volcano, now cold and pushed to the side.

  Star Film Studio was large; it filled an entire block, but Fabien’s office was small, cramped, his desk covered with papers and props: army uniforms, helmets, fake guns, and rubber chickens. False beards hung from pegs along one wall, a winking face had been daubed behind one, and he snapped the beard so that it boinged up and down. Large rubber shoes leaned against a windowsill; a filmy pair of gray wings, torn, wires sticking out, were propped in a corner; a cardboard sword had been placed across his cluttered desk like a threat or a kind of dare. It might have been left by an actor between rehearsals, or one of the set painters might have entered his work area in order to throw the gauntlet on his desk. Dares and the transgressions they hinged upon made Fabien nervous. Without glad-handing or behaving obsequiously, without compromising his reticence, he believed that maintaining cordiality in the studio was very important; it kept people at a safe distance.

  Letting himself be kicked around was part of his strategy of passive resistance, but sooner or later he would get Méliès. Georges might one day slip on the tail of a costume and land with such force he would crash through the set floor, and the cuts and bruises of battered or broken limbs would put him out of the way. The lesson: real injury can lie behind apparent puffballs. No one would suspect Fabien of loosening wheels, cutting wires, greasing the rails.

  As he drew models of scenes, as he discussed props and costumes or when he was tapped on the shoulder to perform, Fabien didn’t argue with the other assistants or actors. He appeared not to care about having his own way, and by seeming to be indifferent, he often got what he wanted in the end. If two painters couldn’t agree on who should drive death’s coach he would suggest a skeleton, as if he’d just that moment connected the idea and its symbol, death’s driver and bones, when he had in fact had the image in mind all along. They would agree with him and pour out white paint, as if the connection between the notion of death and the image of skeleton had only just occurred to them, too. Without thinking he ran his hand over a camel recently cut from a sheet of wood and several splinters became embedded in his palm. He opened and shut his fist, pushing out the yellow bits of wood. The cardboard sword didn’t carry any dare or threat. It was just part of the mess. He felt narrow rays of sunlight as he dropped the rubber shoes to the floor and opened shuttered windows. The others left him to himself in his cluttered end of the studio. He was careful not to offend anyone.

  “Move to the left, more slowly, look shocked. Try to express panic, see like this.” Eyes bulged, eyebrows shot up to widow’s peak, jaw dropped.

  Fabien could hear directions being given outside his door. He had a view of the stage, only half walls separated his quarters from the main part of the studio. He knocked over an empty flea circus that toppled down from a pile of crates, crashing to the floor. Fabien picked up the home of the fleas and put it on his desk. A beetle crawled out of one of the turrets. He squashed it with a giant rubber nose that lay on his ink blotter. He had bought the circus, a castle-shaped house, as a theoretical shortcut should a castle set need to be built, shaking out the bugs on the sidewalk and stamping them flat. If Méliès could enlarge figures, Fabien expected he would one day reverse the process and shrink them as well. The camera would be moved very close to the door, and optically reduced actors would lower the cardboard drawbridge, but by the time Gulliver’s Travels was shot the castle had fallen apart, its crenellations frayed and its turrets dented and miserable.

  While rinsing the rubber nose under a faucet, he watched Méliès position a pair of actors dressed as soldiers. Fantasies, preconstructions had been suspended at Star Films, and Georges had decided to concentrate on a dose of reality, perhaps dangerously so. Méliès had experienced the abrupt slamming of body against stone floor.

  Years ago Star Films had produced several reconstructed newsreels. They were more like filmed documents; Georges called them actualities. When America intervened in Cuba and the Philipines, Méliès brought in headlines clipped from American papers, patriotic and sensationalistic, spreading them out on the studio floor. He knew about William Randolph Hearst, who had sent an artist, Remington, to Cuba to draw evidence of Spanish aggression toward American interests on the island. When Remington found none and wanted to return, Hearst wired back, You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war. Méliès liked the idea of hatching images and propaganda, but he would work against Hearst’s designs. He would furnish pictures of American trespasses, and so began work on an actualité, Divers at Work on the Wreck of the “Maine.” When Méliès spoke of the film, Fabien pictured American cowboys in Cuba killing campesinos, until he was cast as a diver and instructed to move in painful slow motion, as if he was plodding along under miles of ocean and had been doing so for years.

  The actualité now being arranged as Fabien washed his rubber nose required no optical illusions apart from trompe l’oeil backdrops. For this film, Georges would not use any trapdoors or fantastically painted flies. No creatures would bounce off springboards, glide through the air, or dance behind special effects. The stage set was ordinary, a prison cell.

  “Find an actor who looks like the accused.”

  “Don’t you think this one is a very good likeness? Tell the truth, in a uniform he’s not bad.” Fabien brushed off the man’s jacket.

  “No, he’s too tall.”

  Captain Dreyfus, played by an ironmonger, had overheard, and he crossed his arms over his chest. Fabien had looked for professional actors in Chatelet around the corner in Montreuil, but the resemblance of this ironmonger to Dreyfus, he believed, was remarkable.

  “Take him down any city street dressed this way, and you’ll risk a lynch mob.” Fabien strained his voice, as if he actually wasn’t sure and didn’t really want to get involved. The point of the film was to take on the mob. That was Méliès’s intention. Fabien bent down to tie his shoe, but in his affected nonchalance, he wondered if Méliès realized the depth of violence crowds were capable of when issue of the trial was raised. City streets, as he walked them, contained the potential to take on many possible characteristics, benign or animated. Paving stones uprooted and guns fired — these things didn’t reverse themselves — nor could the metamorphosis of an urban landscape be controlled just because the camera was dismantled.

  The ironmonger he had found down the street appeared, to Fabien, to be a perfect likeness, perhaps too perfect, but he pretended as if he didn’t care. When a set was complete Georges often found it wanting; when a set was in a fragmentary state, he was charmed, imagining what was not yet visible. He saw planets in a sky intended to be
empty. He saw crowns on launderers and those who worked in abbatoirs. If Fabien suggested that a particular prop or costume wasn’t very believable, or in some way not the best choice, he was reprimanded with the obvious: this, Méliès would point to the scaffolding behind the moon, was not meant to be authentic, we are no longer in the material world. In other words, Georges had license to imagine the dance of the skeletons, the grimace of a lunar crater, but not to tinker with Devil’s Island. Many pictures of the captain had been printed, more than of any other subject he could remember, and Fabien knew the ironmonger’s resemblance to Dreyfus was uncanny. Dreyfus c’est moi, Fabien imagined Georges saying, putting a fraternal but dismissive arm around the ironmonger, as he had around Barbenfoullis before he left for the moon, and Fabien would scream, You’re not Dreyfus, who do you think you are?

  “Do you have pictures?” Méliès asked.

  “Of course.”

  Newspaper photographs and postcards Fabien kept in a drawer in his office provided unquestionable proof that the actor and the accused spy were as good as twins. Georges relented, and Fabien was, in this case, made to feel he had not yet made his inevitable mistakes, so he went further. Something was wrong with the cell.

  “When the prisoner is in his cell he should have chipped cups and cracked plates. The cross should be removed from the wall.” He walked up to the stage and pried it off.

  “But perhaps every cell has one, regardless of who is interned,” Méliès argued, then, after a moment of thought, gave in. “Take the cross down.”

  The Dreyfus look-alike lit a cigarette and slouched against a wall that was unstable and in danger of collapsing under his weight.

  On the train back to Paris he looked out the window. He’d neither heard nor read anything about a body discovered near the tracks, but he was sure the boys had been shouting at the train because of what they had discovered. The stream had prematurely aged into pools of algae and in spots was completely dry. The boys were nowhere in sight. Fabien added prison uniforms and cracked plates to his shopping list.

  He knew on which streets he would find secondhand clothes, prop furniture, facsimiles of medieval armor and plaster imitations of Renaissance Italian saints. He knew the shop in the Galerie de Valois where on the morning of July thirteenth Charlotte Corday bought the knife she used to murder Marat. It was a few, doors away from the former Café Mécanique where before the Revolution patrons were served by invisible hands from dumbwaiters that opened out into the middle of each table. Disembodied hands might have predicted the explosion of headless bodies soon to come. The Mécanique went out of business, outlived by Dr. Guillotine’s machine, which operated nearby. Directly next door was the Chinese Shadow Theater, once an entertainment for children and convent girls, then, by a transformation that would have puzzled even Méliès, it became a place where men could procure boys in crumbling rooms stripped of oriental decoration, all identities unknown. Now the building was empty, its windows boarded up, and a bitter breeze came from a smashed-in door that had once been painted red and gold. He watched a rat pull a long vegetable peel of some kind along the gutter. Then the rat turned on the peel so it cloaked its neck like a noose and ran on.

  Working for Méliès, he learned where to find everything in the city. For secondhand china he went to Bernard Lazare & Frères on rue des Rosiers. The window of Lazare’s contained stacks of plain white plates, irregularly shaped glasses, a polished but dented teakettle, otherwise it was bare of any display trimmings. A red-haired man in a black overcoat buttoned up to his neck who must have been Bernard’s brother stood behind the counter slowly moving cups and saucers to the shelves. Fabien leaned on the counter and picked, one up. It had red stripes running around the edge and leaves winding around the stripes as if trellised.

  “Thirty francs for the set. We have one left. Not a complete set.” He offered to throw in an ashtray from the Hôtel Coq d’Or.

  Fabien weighed one of the heavy cups in his hand. He explained that he needed something very plain.

  “Something one would be given in Cherche Midi or Santé.”

  “You’re not going to prison.”

  “Not me. An actor.”

  “Try someplace else, down the street you might find what you’re looking for. I’m closing up soon.”

  “It’s Friday.”

  “Yes, it’s Friday.”

  “Where’s Bernard?”

  The man continued to position plates as if they were valuable china without answering. He didn’t know what he had done to offend the shopkeeper. The cardboard sword seemed to hang over his head, its hilt of paste rubies glinting behind stacks of heavy-lipped bowls and rows of wine glasses with crooked stems.

  “I know Bernard. I do business with him all the time,” Fabien started to say. His voice sounded feeble, as if unconsciously acknowledging unknown and unknowable’s transgressions. He, Fabien, wasn’t one of them. If he had been a member of their own tribe things might have gone differently. It wasn’t always easy to identify them. One made embarrassing mistakes.

  “Are you certain Bernard’s not here?”

  “Yes, I ought to know, shouldn’t I? I’m always in the shop,” the man said, as if Fabien was an idiot if he’d never seen him. His tone discouraged Fabien from asking if something had happened to Bernard. Deciding to buy something, anything, for more than it was worth he pointed to a water pitcher on a shelf behind the counter. Greasy dust came off on Lazare’s fingers as he wrapped the object in newspaper; remaining expressionless, he wiped them off on the front of his coat. The bundle was tied with twine and handed to Fabien.

  “You should leave from the back door.” He looked over Fabien’s head as he spoke. The man’s accent blurred the conditional tense; words sounded almost guttural, as if he’d lived in Holland or Germany. Matching the man’s aggravated manner and not really understanding what had been said to him, Fabien took the awkward package in his arms and walked out the front door in a pique. Neither one of them said good-bye.

  The door hit him from behind as it closed, and a camera flashed; the sound of an explosion followed a sharp burst of light. He slapped one hand over his eyes and groped in front with the other, a cartoon blind man whose packages crashed to the pavement. Blinking and confused, he felt like Méliès’s moon who found a rocket stuck in its eye. In the moment he was disoriented, the photographer quickly folded up her tripod and began to run. When he took his hand from his face he could see her dimly, a spiked shadow, yards away, and he began to chase her, trying to keep her outline in sight, but each foot felt as if weighted by an enormous gummy rubber shoe. The woman was big and powerful, but she had so much to carry that before she reached the corner he was able to grab the legs of the tripod sticking out from under her arm. He yanked it and jerked her around. He faced a mask painted with long black lips and clumped, pointed eyelashes; it was starkly black and white the way masks were often painted at Star Films. As she shook free of him, they screamed at each other.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Scumbag!”

  “You’re out of your mind. Get lost!”

  Fabien tried to tear the mask from her face, but she managed to parry all attempts to get near her head.

  “Why did you take my picture?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “All I did was walk out of a shop!” he screamed at her.

  She mumbled something about foreigners or foreignness. Her voice was deep yet nervous.

  “Foreign to what?” he yelled, shaking her. He felt ridiculous yelling at a mask, especially a very plain manufactured one that was chosen not just to obfuscate, but to deliberately strip even the idea of a mask from having any sort of identity of its own. He was out of breath and humiliated. She dove for a cab which appeared out of nowhere, and was gone. He returned to the sidewalk before Lazare’s window where the pitcher lay in lumpy paper-wrapped fragments. Lazare’s door was locked, and no one responded to his knocking. He sat on the curb, unwrapped the
package, then balled up the broken shards in their paper and threw them away. The ashtray from the Hôtel Coq d’Or remained whole, and he stuffed it into his pocket. All the shops surrounding Lazare’s were closed as well, as if in the flash of his screaming, everyone had locked and shuttered their tiny, marginal businesses. He took cigarettes and the ashtray out of his pocket and smoked on the street in front of Lazare’s, holding the ashtray in his left hand. He couldn’t call the police. She hadn’t broken any laws. Anyone can take your picture. Rain began to fall, so he got up from the curb and stood under an awning for a few minutes. The street was deserted, and when he was sure no one was looking he dumped the ashes from the Coq d’Or bowl, let it fill with water and watched his reflection, swirled the water, then tossed it out.

  “You’re a lunatic.” A boy in a checkered vest whom he hadn’t seen huddling in a doorway yelled in his direction. Fabien looked at him while the ashtray filled with drops again. The boy wrapped his jacket around his narrow body, darted out into the rain, and vanished.

  Fabien stirred his coffee, making the spoon hit the sides of the cup with a repetitive sound. While he drank he drew pictures on scraps of paper littering the table: a prisoner looking at a calendar whose pages flew off into the distance, a train of camels, a disembodied hand drawing an S in the air,, an escaped boa constrictor, an empty checkered vest. He heard no one on the stairs outside his door, so at first he didn’t notice the delivery. As he stood to pour more coffee he looked down; the paper lay where a minute earlier there had been only bare floor. The gap between the bottom of his door and the floorboards was high enough to accomodate a large rat, so the folded journal had been easily slid into his rooms. It was a very slight paper, La Libre Parole, a paper he’d seen before but never read. Leaving his coffee half-finished, he picked it up and unfolded the damp pages. The first page carried his picture, blurred but recognizable, coming out of Lazare’s, carrying an awkwardly shaped package. The caption read that these businesses weren’t French, and the people caught coming out of these places therefore stood accused of partronizing businesses that weren’t French. The paper contained caricatures of beards who resembled Méliès a little, Méliès when he dressed as a devil, one of his favorite roles. By the time he emerged from his doorway thousands of people would be able to identify him. The power of the photograph was such that he felt accused and exposed, though all he’d done was buy some rubbish from a secondhand shop. The photograph would make him famous to a number of fanatics who felt he was part of a large piece of machinery engineered to ensure their betrayal. Putting dark glasses in his pocket before he walked into the street, he didn’t know if, when he traveled to Star Films, he was risking his life or not.