Amnesiascope: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  Probably the only reason it didn’t escalate into an out-and-out marital crisis was that Lydia and Viv were currently preoccupied with a bigger problem. Catwoman hadn’t shown up. After several hours trying to track her down Viv finally placed a frantic phone call to the casting agent with the gangrenous hickey on his chest who, just before midnight, lined up another actress. Thirty minutes later Viv came over to say later the new actress had arrived and was looking over the script: “We have a new Jasper,” she announced, an odd look on her face.

  “You have an odd look on your face,” I said.

  “Well, it’s funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “She really is Jasper.”

  “What do you mean she really is Jasper?”

  “I mean, her name is Jasper.” And sure enough, sitting in a chair in the shadows as though she appeared out of nowhere, the way she appeared out of nowhere the night I met her, was Jasper. She wore a different dress, simpler and looser—an altogether less imposing incarnation, but as cool and slightly ethereal as she was at the Feverish, my script in her hand rather than a glass of wine. Viv introduced us, and Jasper just looked up from the script and said, I like the part about the labia ring.

  You don’t happen to have one, do you? Viv laughed.

  I’ll surprise you, Jasper laughed. Viv laughed some more. They both laughed together and then, looking at the expression on my face, laughed some more. In no time at all they seemed to be getting along famously, and then Viv returned to the set and I sat with Jasper trying to explain the script. I was explaining the character to her, which is to say the character I stole from her in the first place; I was explaining the things the character said—which is to say the things she originally said. She gave absolutely no indication of realizing any of this. She gave no indication of ever having met me at all. She read the lines like they were completely new to her, like she had never heard them before; she even analyzed and interpreted them as she went along, trying out different inflections. “I don’t like tits,” she said, “I’d rather say breasts.” Given the circumstances, I told her she could say just about whatever she wanted as long as it followed the general drift, and that we were going to have cue cards and someone to prompt her, so there was nothing to worry about. Oh no, she insisted, I’ll learn the lines, I’m a very quick study. Finally I left her alone to go over the script by herself. I was happy to leave her to it. There was something about her now that unnerved me, as though the night I met her she had stepped out of my id but tonight she stepped out of someone else’s. A few minutes later she was in makeup, still poring over her lines, and soon we were ready for her. The minutes passed as everyone waited; in the meantime we were shooting everything else that could be shot—scenes with the other actresses, close-ups of paint brushes, close-ups of canvases with Amy and canvases without Amy, close-ups of thighs that looked like lunar plains and breasts that looked like spheres over deserts. Viv kept going back to the makeup room to check in on Jasper and kept coming back without her. The crew grew mutinous.

  Jasper finally appeared. She glided onto the set like she did into the Feverish. She moved as though not walking through the real world but through the corridors of her imagination, where she might pick up one of its artifacts, casually admire it and then, bored, toss it over her shoulder. She didn’t so much drop her robe as let it slide off her, ascending naked to the model’s platform; she took off everything but the cat ring on her finger. The crew, men and women alike, were stunned by the sight of her. She was impossibly lush; you could practically hear last night’s semen still sloshing around in her. I had two reactions to her. The first was that I wanted to fuck her, because not to fuck her would be to insult God and slander the divine order of things, and the second was I wanted to get the fuck away from her, because it was about to become clear, as I suspected from the first, that she was absolutely crazy, the Abyss Walking like a Woman, madness so generic it practically had a bar code on it.

  We had written all of her lines on cue cards, and script assistants were at the ready to prompt her. We began filming. She got through the first line of her monologue—the one I had transcribed practically word for word from that night at the Feverish, about picking up the guy at the art gallery and tying him to his bed—and then forgot the second line. The script assistant prompted her but she refused to take the cue, asking instead that we begin again. Viv called cut, we took a break. After a couple of minutes Viv called action again and we started from the top; Jasper once again got through the first line and once again forgot the second, and once again refused to take the cue. Once again Viv called cut. When Viv again called action, Jasper now forgot her first line; the cue card was waving in front of her face but she refused to read it; Viv called cut, we took a break, Viv called action, Jasper began: “I was at a gallery the other night, thinking I might. …” She shook her head. Now Viv told Harris the camera man to just keep rolling. Jasper started again. “The other night, at this gallery, I was there and—” Over and over she started and stopped, the camera constantly rolling: “At this gallery the other … at this … I was at this gallery where I thought. … I—” Suddenly she dissolved into sobs. It’s all right, it’s all right, Viv assured her, and Jasper nodded Yes, yes, OK, and she took it from the top and actually got several lines into her speech before she lost the train of thought, at which point she collapsed naked on the platform like a woman having a fit, before suddenly leaping back to her feet: “OK, OK, OK! I’m all right, really, I can do it,” and beginning again at the top, camera still rolling, she once more got several lines in before everything fell apart.

  By now Harris the Texan and the rest of the crew just wanted to rip the film out of the camera, tie a noose and toss it over the highest rafter. Every breakdown pushed them closer to vigilante justice. Viv was cool beyond belief. People were screaming at her and she was making fifty decisions a minute while always keeping her eye on the big task at hand, with the calm authority of someone so comfortably in charge she never had to raise her voice or make a demonstration of her power. Now I heard her voice in my ear. It was a soothing voice; she was smiling a little too broadly, beaming a little too brightly. In the monitor behind her I could see Jasper pulling on her robe and lighting a cigarette. “What?” I said uneasily.

  “Well. …” I didn’t know why but I already had this feeling Viv was about to say something very peculiar. “I think we’ve gotten as much out of Jasper as we’re going to get. We almost have enough to intercut with scenes of Amy. But we still don’t have Amy’s scenes with Jasper. …”

  “Shoot Amy’s scenes in close-up,” I suggested helpfully. “Someone else can read Jasper’s lines off camera.”

  “Exactly.” Her calm was as terrifying as it was awe-inspiring.

  Suddenly I saw the light. “Forget it.”

  “You haven’t even heard what I’m going to say.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You haven’t even—!” Furiously, she spun on her heels and began to stomp away.

  “All right,” I succumbed, “tell me. …”

  “Never mind.”

  “Tell me.” This was Viv’s genius; I was now begging her to tell me this idea I knew I wasn’t going to like.

  “All you need to do is read with her,” Viv said, fists on her hips.

  “Why can’t someone else?”

  “Fine. We’ll get someone else.”

  “You could do it.”

  “Fine. I’ll do it. I don’t have anything else to do right now, except direct a movie.”

  “Veroneek can do it.”

  “Fine, Veroneek can do it. I just thought maybe you would do it, that you would want to do it, because you wrote these lines and you understand them. I thought you would be able to see how much better it is for Amy to act with someone who knows how to read the lines and what they mean.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better for a woman to read the lines?”

  “Why would it better?” She threw up her h
ands. “No, fine. We’ll find a woman to read the lines.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll read it.”

  “I just thought it would be easier for Amy.”

  “I’ll read the lines.”

  “I think you should take your clothes off.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Amy is supposed to be a repressed painter, remember? You wrote it. Remember, she’s exploring her own psychological nakedness, through the physical nakedness of the model she paints? She’s affronted by that nakedness.”

  “It’s a naked woman she’s affronted by.”

  “I know it’s not ideal. …” Viv agreed.

  “It’s not ideal?” I said. “Personally, I think it’s distinctly less than ideal. That’s just my own personal opinion, you understand. No, I would say we’re in agreement on this, that a naked man playing the part of a naked woman is not ideal. And somehow—I’ll grant you I’m biased on this—somehow the fact that I’m the naked man makes it really not ideal.”

  “Yes, well,” Viv retorted, “I don’t have the luxury of ideal right now. You know, it’s not like you haven’t read with Amy before—you did at the casting session, if you’ll remember. She’ll be comfortable with you.”

  “See, at the casting session? I had my clothes on. That was the big difference there. I’ll bet Amy is a lot more comfortable with my clothes on than my clothes off. Ask her.”

  “Amy!” Seconds later Amy was at Viv’s side. “He’s going to read the lines with you so we can get your close-ups. Given that your character is supposed to be responding to a naked model when you hear these lines, doesn’t it make perfect sense that he should take all his clothes off?”

  “Absolutely,” said Amy.

  “I just thought,” Viv turned back to me, “you wanted this movie to be good. I thought you cared as much about it as I did. Don’t you think I’d be very happy right now to have an actress who could play Jasper without falling apart? Don’t you think, at this point, I’d even be happy with Catwoman, for God’s sake? But I don’t have a Jasper or a Catwoman, what I have is you. I don’t imagine Catwoman would hesitate two seconds to take her clothes off.”

  “I’m sure Catwoman wouldn’t,” I said bitterly. “If she had bothered to show up, I mean.”

  “I have no more time,” Viv calmly answered, as though explaining the sunshine to a three-year-old. She spun on her heels again. “Think about it a minute and let me know what you decide, so I can tell everyone whether they should just go home and I can figure out how I’m going to give Veroneek back her money.”

  That was her crowning blow, because she knew that in the end I was incapable of letting her down. Christ, if the Cabal ever hears about this I’m cooked, was all I could think thirty minutes later on the model’s platform. Around me was a great flurry of activity and preparation. The crew bustled with heavily suppressed hilarity; they couldn’t wait for me to finish so they could all explode with laughter. Only Amy, focused as ever, never cracked a smile. In my mind I kept going back to the beginning, to the night Viv first proposed this project. I don’t think it occurred to me then that I would wind up naked in this movie. In fact, I’m sure I had it in my head that it was other people who would wind up naked in this movie. Action! Viv barked behind the camera and, behind her canvas, Amy asked, “Where does he touch you?”

  “Under my breast,” I sighed, “below my nipple.”

  “Which one?” said Amy.

  “The left.” Out of the corner of my eye I was watching everyone around me. Everyone around me was looking not at me or Amy but the ground and their feet, trying to contain themselves; the only sound I heard was snickering, a solitary chortle from back in the shadows of the set. After a moment I realized it was Niles. It was Niles snickering and a certain peace came over me, because now I knew that in a few seconds I was going to kill him, just as I had been wanting to do, and it would make everything worth it. Thinking about it now I was glad I was naked, because it would just make Niles’ demise all that much more humiliating, to be throttled in front of all these people by a naked man. “When his hands are raised to my breast,” I went on, “you know … he’s exposed to me. He’s disarmed.”

  “Disarmed?”

  “Like in the gangster movies, when the bad guy puts his hands in the air.”

  “Or the good guy sometimes.”

  “Or the good guy.”

  “Is he the good guy or the bad guy?”

  “He’s the good guy when I’m the bad guy.” Later it would occur to me that this was one of those common primal dreams, to be die only one naked in a room full of people. I don’t remember what it’s supposed to mean, beyond the obvious sense of exposure and vulnerability; and I certainly don’t know what it meant that in this dream I was not only naked but in the role of a naked woman, talking to another woman about which breast I preferred having touched. Interestingly, as we did take after take, moving on from one section of dialogue to the next, everyone else on the set fell away from my consciousness and I became lost in what Amy was saying and what I was saying, until I had almost forgotten that my voice would not be on the film at all, that nothing of me would be on the film, that I would have been only the ghost who revealed himself, herself, whatever my self was at this moment, for the sake of the look on the face of that person who witnessed my revelation. At this moment, everything and everyone else was exposed to me. I was free of the threat or possibility of any further exposure, as naked on the outside as I was inside, and everyone cowered before me, prisoners of their pride and secrets.

  But later, going over the footage and looking at Jasper’s scenes on the monitor, Viv and I both noticed something right off. Mid-air, between her nervous breakdown on the set and the image caught by the camera lens, Jasper transformed into the woman I met at the Feverish—the spellbinding eyes, the vague German accent and strange stillborn smile. … The effect was electrifying. “Jeez,” Viv shook her head, unabashedly infatuated, “she makes the movie.” She called Jasper into the network a few days later to overdub some lines, and for the next week Jasper was all Viv could talk about.

  I think it was mostly Viv’s obsession with Jasper that gave us the idea for the party. In order to coax Jasper into her lair, Viv decided to have a Nude Artists Ball on Halloween at the Bunker. We would invite all of Viv’s friends, painters and sculptors and photographers and curators, plus some of my pals and their various women and wives, plus Veroneek and Joe and the crew who worked on White Whisper, and the other actresses and maybe even a select few of the auditioners, the Chinese lesbians perhaps, and perhaps Sahara and some of the girls from the Cathode Flower. Hell, we might even invite Catwoman and then tie her to the floor and stand around spilling wine and tequila on her and eating hors d’oeuvres off her body. Viv created invitations out of parchment and feathers and foil, drawing an elaborate image of a genie emerging from a pod with stupendous, dripping breasts like Jasper’s, and a penis I had the funny feeling I’d seen somewhere before, ejaculating a blue pool that bled around the card’s edges. It was left to me to write the announcement. But going over it in my mind it occurred to me I wasn’t sure how many of these particular people I really wanted to see nude, even at a Nude Artists Ball; the Cabal, for instance, I felt reasonably certain I didn’t want to see any of them nude, whereas I kind of liked the idea of Niles—invited in the first place only out of deference to Lydia, whose bottom was tattooed with his name after all—turning out to be the only person at the ball who was nude. So I made some adjustments in the invitations, customizing them, so to speak.

  The closer the party got, the more elaborate it became. Viv’s loft didn’t need a lot of extra ambiance, given the metal coffins and pyramids and mannequins and dead bugs on the walls, but she unpacked an exotic array of artifacts anyway from her various travels: masks and dolls and strange figurines from Africa and South America and the Middle East. Overcoming her dread of even imaginary spiders, she draped makeshift webs from one corner of the ceiling to th
e next. On the monitor intercut with Network Vs. broadcasts was an ongoing montage of Metropolis and Vampyr and Kiss Me Deadly, Louise Brooks and Val Lewton movies, outtakes from White Whisper and selected blasts from the Cinema of Hysteria; and in the center of the room, on a low glass table, burned a huge candle, which was actually the once-melted, twisted mutation of many candles. By Halloween night we had turned the whole Bunker into a maze, confiscating the bulbs from the light fixtures and throwing the corridors into blackness, extending the winding passages into the loft so that if people took one turn they wound up on the main level and if they took another they wound up on the upper platform looking down. Not intelligent enough to become truly confused, the first person actually to make it all the way through to the end of the maze was the dim little eighteen-year-old half of the Chinese lesbian couple. Three minutes of social intercourse confirmed she had the vocabulary of a parrot and enough brains to fill a shot glass. The other lesbian was lost somewhere on the Bunker’s second floor; all night we heard her distant screams. “You’re getting closer!” someone would shout into the passage every now and then, just for the sheer hell of it.