HEROICS OF THE FALSE: A NEW LOOK AT NOIR

JENNIFER S. BREUKELAAR

A Creative Work and Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales. July 2007. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to my supervisors Lisa Trahair and Anne Brewster. I would also like to thank Paul Dawson for overseeing the practical aspects of the thesis at the final stage. Thank-you also to Dan Edwards for discussions about film making software. I am grateful to Renu Rajpal for help with the Hindi. I would also like to thank Bob Stern for copy-editing the dissertation. Thanks to my agent Sandy Wagner for multiple readings of Viper, for her helpful comments and good faith. Among other things I am ever grateful to my parents, Margaret Reichenberger and Bob Stern for taking me to India. Thank-you to John Breukelaar for paving the way. Thank-you for reading and discussing this project ad nauseam, and most of all for your insights into how to complete it and why. For support that infinitely exceeded the call of duty, I would also like to thank my children, Isabella and Jack. CONTENTS

ABSTRACT 4

PART I: THE NOVEL

VIPER 5

PART II: THE DISSERTATION

I: INTRODUCTION 232

II: A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE 249

III: “IF THIS BE ART’S LIE” 296

IV: NOIR’S CHASMS 332

V: CONCLUSION 372

BIBLIOGRAPHY 377 4

THESIS ABSTRACT

In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola’s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir heroics. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir’s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts—the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead—which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie Hélène Huet’s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze’s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification. 5

PART I

THE NOVEL

VIPER 6

For practical purposes, however, Beavis and Butt-head are one personality, split into two so they will have someone to talk to. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, December 20, 1996 7

PART I

A sudden gust blows in from Old Town, stirring up a stale smell of bald tyres and worn asphalt underneath the freeway, deals made in windblown alleys glimpsed as you pass: clustered boys in tank tops, baggy pants and elaborate footwear. Wordless glitter. It makes little difference to you. The venue is a narrow warehouse between the tracks and the freeway. Ordinary men who know what they are wait in nondescript cars for stragglers from the club. You speed up, not to hurry past but to accentuate the clack of jaunty sling-backs against the pavement, shaved thighs pleasurably confined by the sheath's classic lines. The wig’s frosted tips burn like dry ice in the beam of the streetlights. There’s a South of the Border tang in the air tonight. You can feel it in your eyes. There is nothing on the outside of the building to tell you where you are. Images of heavily postered doors just like these proliferate like scar tissue on the late twentieth century face of Sydney, Toronto, Guangzhou. It's all the same to you. At the bottom of the stairs the doorman nods you into the pulsating darkness where movement, freeze- framed in strobe-time, surrounds thought and drowns time. A severed six-pack and sculptured shoulders surface and melt back into the gloom, flesh as smooth as fresh wax and swaying body-parts cut and pasted in a sonic montage by DJ Koma, looking ripped tonight in sleeveless leatherette. High Priestess of bounce, of lip-gloss and neon. Queen of knee-high boots. It will happen tonight as it always does: the nameless exchange. You are not the thing, nor the thing that made it, but something left behind… a miracle.

… 8

1 KILL NOIR

Dean’s mother would tell her group that San Corolla had never been her final destination. She’d leave in a flash and be back in Brizzie before you could say Harvey Wallbanger. Leave Chalmers, she would tell her group, with nothing but memories of his sun-kissed trophy-bride from Down Under that he could choke on or wank on — take your pick. “Not to mention the old folks. He screwed them over good and prop-pah,” Mackenzie would say sounding, or trying to, like a British wide boy. Mackenzie with her physiotherapy certifications and degree in English lit. It could be true that Chalmers, Dean’s father, did screw over his own folks, Grandma Lily and Pop. Well, to start with he got them to leave Jersey where all their friends were buried or at least the ones not in Florida. Then he buried them alive in some deceptively sprawling SoCal retirement home close enough to the ocean to see it but not close enough to actually get there. Dean remembers little about Pop except that he was a natty little dresser who came to America from some slum in Europe only to end up scuttling around that peach-toned twilight home at the ends of the earth. Lost to the silent winding hallways and views out faux-bevelled picture windows onto the wrong crashing blue, crows rising out of the aspidistra. Dean used to hitch a ride on Pop’s Little Rascal, loving the way it glided silently to the dining room where the Mexican valet would reach for the keys and soberly park it in the lobby. Dean loves that bit. While the residents softly shuffle to window tables on the downy arms of blow-up nurses. Ah, Southern California. Aaaahhh…blow-up nurses. In the bathroom Dean goes to work on three glow-in- the-dark pimples, a volley of blood-pus to hurl onto his canvas — the volcanic red and seeping yellow of cave art. He is the remote hunter of the Kimberly’s painting prayers on the walls of his mirror cave. He brushes his teeth. Practices his smile: basic variations on a soul-train theme. 9

Dean has Mackenzie’s green eyes but definitely a little too close-set. In the centre of a narrow forehead above a single eyebrow, a scar where there was once a large mole that looked a little like a mouldy-looking eye until Mackenzie had it removed. Kinky alien hair inherited from Pop, and a wide nose scheduled for surgery. Bad hair like the grocer's nephew at the market who went to Dean’s last school, packing up the grapefruit and string beans every Saturday afternoon. A raft sailing darkly off to one side of his head. But here's a thought: Dreads. Heavy hair that looks good in a hood with lips soft and moist like a baby animal. Hung. He practices his stance: eyes half-closed, now open wide and stricken and now downcast in terminal sorrow. Dean flails his arms against the speed of pain. He bowed his head against the onslaught. Prepare to dive or is it die? The bathroom sink starts to overflow. Dean has shaved but not well. He drifts into his mother's room. He softly closes the door on a cool white space dominated by a vast Chinese rug and wall-to-wall Sony and Pacific glimpses out a humongous window framed in creamy waves of drapery. He sinks his hands into her panty drawer which, withdrawing, he doesn’t quite shut. He elbows a pile of bedside paperbacks onto the floor and finds her pills, one/two of which he ritually pops while listening now to the front door softly close. She’d approached it silently, an art on high heels, as if she hadn’t wanted him to hear her leave and try and stop her, not that he does that any more. The pointed patent leather toes on the wet path and then the Acura backing up too fast down the driveway because after all it’s Saturday night. Saturday night. Last night there had been the usual fight, with his mother winding up, “You've got to be kidding, Dean, where does it all go?” and him with the futile trickle of living hells and dirty deals and then as usual for Mackenzie this was totally about her. “Where's Chalmers when you need him, eh, Deano? Hiding behind those slimy faxes that no one in their right mind would read? Not even you. Admit it, do you read them? Not in a month of effing Sundays, and why? Because they’re boring as batshit, that’s why and also because they orbit his own withered peenie-dreams, don’t they? Luckily there’s not much reading to do on a cheque, mate? Get it? I didn’t think so. But 10 you put up with the letters, which he can’t possibly imagine you read even though he’s paying you to make him think you’re reading them. How convenient for everybody. Take Lena. The step-sister. What does she get out of it? Buggered if I know. Maybe she reads the faxes, pretends they’re for her. Maybe they are. The point being that after Puerto Vallarta I’m broke, and even if I wasn’t you’re not getting any more money from me for, what is it this time: “snow boarding lessons? “ she’d twiddled ceramic finger-nails in the air. “How stupid do I look?” Not very, Dean had to admit with a defeated sigh. No more than your average hard- work blond. He’d turned away from his mother’s high breasts and elaborately layered hair, which is arresting enough to divert attention from a thickening waist for another decade or so. Dean now sees all Australian women in the same vein as his mother —gaudy yet resilient creatures that flourish on hostile terrain, and possibly eat their young. After two visits to the Gold Coast— except the last one when he ended up in a Brisbane detox—all he's left with is an impression of acidic pastels and dusty shrubbery and the naked eyes of replicating swimming pools. And Mackenzie’s right about Chalmers, husband to the power of n, away as usual in Tokyo or wherever, doing the nasty with some pleated office worker, or maybe just dreaming about it. And what with the influx of some low-grade Special K out of Bhaja turning everyone inside out … his regulars not returning his calls … the small-time drug-dealing business in a cyclical downturn … Dean badly needs cash right now. Dean goes back into his room where he runs a finger across a magazine picture stuck to his wall. He has his mother's hands. The clipping shows the new Onkyo home theatre system with Dolby and DTS that he’s going to definitely score if the new gig comes off. Although Dean has less invested in the actual gig, which is a joke, than a tangential arrangement made with one of the other disenchanted members. Tonight being Saturday, he could put in a couple of hours of study before going out—five-pages- calculus-two-chapters-Holden-Caulfield-three-chem-labs. Or just lie here, listening to Kill Noir, do a line or two, open a window then close it, take a break to eat, to comb his hair, to dance…replay the track…nevermind. Finally Dean swears unconvincingly and 11 throws The God of Small Things, or is it Vernon God Little, under his bed and spends an hour watching his caged rat eat bacon rind. Lacking assistance from Mackenzie, and until Dean’s share of the gig comes through, subsistence boils down to his allowance, sporadically and with strings attached, doled out by Chalmers in absentia via the step-sister in a complex arrangement of fax- wrapped cheques dropped off at a seaside café called Miracles. …

Don’t look down. The hiss and spit of distant hardware spins my words out into the world. Ivory plastic spewing pages onto a floor where she gathers them up and folds them into an envelope for you with my pre-prepared cheque. I think of you wherever I am. I am umbilically bound via pitch-black wires to the farthest reaches of satellite roaming Drag n Drop. Type message, select print, insert the familiar numbers. I am here; you are there; she is somewhere in-between. When you were little you wanted to be someone else. You gave yourself a new name. Claude. Mackenzie and I had to call you Claude. It was Claude adrift in the ornamental orange grove or playing with Action Man on the tasteful bedroom rug. It was Claude who was puzzled by the idea of adults interacting with painted bunnies and large bears who wore bespoke vests but no trousers and spoke English. And it was finally Claude who learnt to ignore adults completely. Mackenzie would walk past dressed for work and poke her head in: Be careful what you wish for, mate. She uses you like she uses her cunt.

—whatever that means. In the kitchen of Miracles, Dean brings the wad of fax paper up to his nose. It smells like ink and hot plastic with a cold undercurrent of feet. Dean crunches the paper into a ball and tosses it into the bin. He presses the pause switch on the washer, takes the dishes out and puts them away half-clean and still sticky. Flicks a phlegmy sprout from the rim of a fork, trying not to think about his mother’s cunt. The 12 kitchen is empty, with only one light still on above the expanse of metal counter and ancient tile. Roaches wait in the wings. Dean can hear them above the roar of tires on the highway, and beyond that the muffled surf. He can hear them above the cook’s radio left stutteringly on. Dean takes off his apron, balls it up with the wet towels and throws it in the hamper on the way out of the kitchen. He stops at the cashier's desk and checks his phone for incoming: XPELD! LOL. PARENTS CUT $$ :( SORRY CANDYMAN. WUV VIKKI. It is not yet midnight. Dean surveys the empty restaurant. Dirty dishes remain on a couple of tables but Darla the waitress is already relaxing in a booth with the manager and one of his pumped-up bum-buddies, as Mackenzie would say. Behind them, at a terrace table three silhouettes are stacked against the light flaring in from the highway. Strains of music float across from the other restaurants, washing across the gravel and weeds and over this row of weathered shacks that back onto a wasteland of laurel behind the parking area. Dean helps himself to a handful of change from Darla’s tip jar and heads through the kitchen to the screen door at the back, until a call from the manager stops him. Dean walks back in toward three pairs of red eyes floating in a cloud of smoke below a rice-paper lantern. “This just in,” Donnie the manager says, waving an envelope at him. “Say why don't you get that sister of yours to give me a ride in her car, man. Dodge Viper, dude, it's a beauty,” he says to the other guy, who's wearing a black and green tank top, and fluoro green bicycle shorts. “Blue paint.” “Stripes?” The guy's name is Lonnie. “No stripes, but I bet you it's got a blue interior.” Darla blinks at Dean through a tangled hedge of mascara. Behind the clotted lashes her blue eyes plead for something out of the ordinary, something beyond her face buried in his crotch behind the laurel bushes, summer stars popping in his eardrums. “Know how I know that, dude,” Donnie asks Lonnie.. “No Dude, I honestly don't.” “'Cause I bet blue's not its original colour. I bet it was white, with a blue interior. The 1996 model only came in red, black, green and white. Know how I know it's a '96?” Lonnie shakes his head. 13

“Cause after '96, the RT 10 went off the market for Super car refinement. Came back in 1998 with 450 hp and 490 pounds per feet of torque,” Donnie looks back at Dean. “I can tell by the demeanour of your sister's car that it's pre ‘98.” “She's not my sister,” says Dean, reaching for the envelope. “When did this get here? I already got one before.” Donnie sometimes forgets to give Dean his mail, which is why Dean is often short of cash and has to put up with Mackenzie’s diatribes. But Dean can’t say anything, because Donnie is doing him a favour just by letting him get mail delivered to the restaurant in the first place. Dean figures Donnie likes being involved in the circuitry of it all, especially if there is a chance of an introduction to Lena. Lena Grant, movie columnist with the Tribune: Twisted Sister. Child of a previous marriage. Drives the baddest car on the planet and Dean’s not jealous, no, so not pissed off that he can’t get his hands on his share of Grandma Lil’s legacy until college and buy himself some sick set of wheels instead. Not jealous at all. The manager pulls the envelope away and leans back in the chair. “She ever give you a ride in that car of hers?” he asks. “Yeah sure, every Sunday,” Dean says. “We go for a nice family drive.” Lonnie and Donnie look at each other and stagily shake their heads. Darla blinks painfully like two giant caterpillars are eating her eyes. Lonnie starts working his iPhone. Dean's cell is only an old RazR, but it still does the job, just not as well since Dean dropped it in the toilet at a Solana Beach club. The girl who was in the stall with him accepted his offer of half an eccie to fish it out. “Well maybe if you went over to visit her once in a while, your sister would give you a ride in her car, little buddy. She's your sister, right. Family's everything, tell me I’m wrong.” Donnie Boyle, bearded guy seven kilos over his ideal weight. Manager of this shithole café forever and ever amen. “Especially when they drive a fancy sports car,’ said Darla with her eyes completely closed. The sound of clapping from the Mexican restaurant next door. One of the silhouettes out on the terrace leans toward the sound. 14

“Open your eyes,” Donnie says, pointing a chewed-up finger at Darla. “This is not some fancy sportscar, this is not an RX7, your Miatta, what have you.” “Notta Miatta?” says Lonnie. “Not at all, my facetious friend,” says Donnie. “The Viper was designed by Carroll Shelby, father of the Cobra, fastest car on the planet. You tell them, kid,” he says sweetly. “And then I'll give you your mail.” “I've never even seen the car,” says Dean. “We lost touch after my grandmother's funeral.”

Dean remembers one side of Grandma Lil's face leaving the other the way a ghost leaves its body and the soul spilling out of her frozen mouth in a crystal stream of drool that pooled on the pastel table-cloth beside a pair of tens. Dean had been holding ten and queen. She sagged to the side and her head hit the table as her bunchy little body thudded off the chair. Dean stared at his grandmother playing dead and the ladies at the table stared into space until a nurse ran over yelling. Sturdy medics swanned over her body like angels. She was theirs and they knew it. Dean was hushed by the heavenly grace of their dance. At the funeral he fixated on the smooth globes of his stepsister Lena's breasts that curved out of the bodice of a quilted peasant dress. In different ways they were each largely oblivious to the rest of the entire disconnected brood that wobbled in black- strapped ankles on the sunny slope by the double plot under the flight path of the nearby airbase. Dean had walked up to his father, Chalmers who was staring after Lena as she got into her roadster. “The future belongs to the brave,” Chalmers had said but not particularly to Dean. Googling the phrase later that day, Dean had learnt that it was from a speech Ronald Reagan made after the space shuttle spilt its guts across what was left of the blue American century.

“Wake-up: you want your mail or what?” Donnie is saying. “Yes, please, “ says Dean, trying not to let his eyes fall on his watch. He has a buyer waiting for him down at Zillas at Mission Beach. 15

“Why doesn’t your dad give you your allowance himself, make your sister’s life easier?” Dean has a lot of experience answering this question, although he’s still not really sure of the answer. “My father tells himself that he is still head of a family that is basically me, her and him.” “Is it?” says Darla. “I mean he.” Dean thought she’d fallen asleep. “Why doesn’t he send them to your house?” Lonnie asks, but because it’s none of his business, Dean can ignore him. “Because, “says Darla slowly. “The deal is that he has to keep his job in order to get his allowance. No job, no cash from Daddy.” Lonnie giggles. Darla closes her eyes and take a deep drag of her cigarette. “Was that good for you?” says Dean. “You read em?” says Donnie. “Read what?” says Dean. “The faxes, shit-wipe.” “Definitely, every word,” says Dean. “Twice.” “Do people still do faxes?” says Darla. “Go back to sleep,” says Donnie. Lonnie hunches over his phone. Donnie says: “You can have your mail, but when am I getting the big intro? I’m trying to be patient. Get me behind the wheel of that monster? Show you who’s head of the frikken family.” “Twisted Sister,” says Darla, drowning her cigarette butt in ice. “She's the movie chick, right? That's what her column in the Tribune is called. She covers the Independents. I read her blog.” Darla lists in her chair, bumping Lonnie's texting elbow. “He told you, babe,” Donnie says. “She's not his sister.” He gives Dean a naughty wink as he passes him the envelope. Goddamn stoners. … 16

I like the way they smell. I like the way they sound. I am provisionally into the idea of words on the page. I pick them up, fold them, holding this representation of me in my hands. I consider these a material guarantee against my own disappearance, not to mention yours. From here to there, from me to you, this is a passage underwritten by small singing machines in muted ivory plastic and a dutiful stranger who says she is my daughter. The sun sets over the western wing; we know it as well any night-flying bird, predatorial bats hell-bent on downloading as much free food, booze and pre- menopausal minge as our long-distance life and accumulated Flybuys makes possible. Nothing to report from the Tokyo drone-fest. I did my Takarazuka: (En)gendering the False thing without notes. Scholars like myself bear witness to the possibility of a successful transition from obsolete English departments to the glamour of Textual Practices on the coattails of ethnographic excess. Untenurable academics as the new Diaspora. We adjust the angle of our laptops and jacked into vinyl-fried sockets, our attention nevertheless wandering toward the trolley’s ambient clang: the cocktail hour. I am on my way home, but not for long. …

—some twisted sister, but what could be more screwed up than those faxes? Twisting out of some mean-machine under a west-facing attic window, and yes, possibly drowning them all in their mixed messages. Dean wonders if Darla is right: does the step- sister secretly read them before folding them around the dated checks and slipping them into the Miracles mailbox? Looks down at the crease, imagining the pages between her sensitive writers fingers. A quick glance at the word “(En)gendering” is enough to remind Dean of how much has been lost in translation as he pockets the envelope. Dean moves quickly through the front door past those shadowy remaining diners. He steps out into the damp night and breathes deeply. On the other side of the steep 17 streets behind him the roar of the freeway is muted but relentless. The traffic is light on the old road, the Pacific Coast Highway. A truck rumbles past weighed down by soggy tail lights in late summer darkness. Dean drags on his own joint and gazes out across the soupy Pacific toward a muted flickering from Swami’s in the north at Luminatas, and turns his head toward the queasy glow radiating out from the Acura Beach dives to the South. He stubs out the joint between spit-licked thumb and finger and then walks next door to Hungry Jacks. Four guys and a girl are hunched at an outside table strewn with Styrofoam cups and burger boxes. “Yes, but no. Best of the Best 2 is all about same-sex parenting,” Cliff is saying. “Phillip Rhee digs Eric Roberts who’s got a kid. That’s it, show’s over. The whole movie is a metaphor for a hegemonic end-game.” “Don’t make me laugh,” Damien says. He hair falls over his face as he melts little craters in the resin table with his cigarette. “It's about joining together to attain a single goal. They meet this guy who’s into oppressing the collective and gaining total power for himself so they have to kill him.” “No, but yes. They kill him because he and his fag partner, Wayne Newton, are giving fags a bad name with their counter-revolutionary sado-fag agenda. Argument and counterargument: othered against other. I’m talking about a difference in kind, forget degree.” “Bullshit, man, tell that other-shit to your mother.” “Bobby, who the hell is Bobby? Bobby Barnes, Cousin Bobby? Think, head,” Gemma is bent over her Handheld, matted ruby hair sticking up at the back. Behind her the interior of Hungry Jacks is lit up like an emergency room Cliff says, “It’s that old Davie and Goliath thing. You must take on the whole patriarchal culture or none of it. Either or. Now yes, maybe Runaway Train's about teamwork, but again, no. That is more like your straight-up buddy film.” This is all so clichéd, Dean could scream. Cliff and Damien are at it again like zombie robots from an International Convention of Hair Models. Damien’s red highlights burn in the glare from the Hungry Jack’s sign. Cliff’s Ruiz’s gelled curls march up the centre of his head in a gooey reminder of the giant fence keeping his compatriots out of 18 the country. Big Sweet Kev has got this home-grown grooming perfected and his cell- mate Russell’s lank mullet just about completes the picture. Dean stifles a yawn. “But even Runaway has a transcendental drifter, the alienated protagonist who carries his difference like a badge of honour,” says Damien. Damien has done less time than any of them except for Dean, and that’s only if you count Dean’s stint at Survival Camps. “Do you even know what you’re talking about?” says Russell in his rusty-chain voice. Russell’s expression never changes, and Dean hopes that when wrinkles eventually come to him they come in the form of those deep vertical ridges that line Russell’s face from the centre of his lower lashes to his jaw. Russell is Israel’s latest recruit—a shooter—and his rank aura makes no one comfortable. Israel is the boss and a relic like his platinum buzz cut. Israel isn’t here, but his girl Gemma is supposedly his stand-in. A shooter with no more conscience than the sawn-off he keeps down his baggy fatigues, maybe less. That’s why Israel took him on. “Like lots of other buddy films, think Midnight Cowboy to Forty-Eight Hours to whatever,” says Damien Hayashi, flicking flame-tipped black hair back from his eyes. “He’s the one who either has to find a woman or die to restore our faith in a straight world.” Russell says, “They teach that stuff in juvie these days?” Kevin says, “Which one is Runaway Train?” Russell came with Kevin, but Israel has known Kevin a while. He is older than them, maybe twenty-three or four, older even than Israel, but not as old as Russell. It is Kevin, not Russell, who unofficially keeps them all in line. Dean respects Kevin's grave farm-boy authority, but there is something about it that makes him uneasy. He finds it hard to meet Kevin's gaze, often trained on Dean when he least expects it. They have all worked with Kevin before. Then Kevin got busted on a possession charge and ended up in SQ where he connected with Russell, who’d about this Professor running art thefts for special collectors and how he was looking to put together some people for this latest job. But Cliff said, off the record, junkies have no honour, and with addicts like Russell, the score is never settled. He should know. His brother was loco tecato. 19

“You don't know Runaway Train?” Damien says, slurping his Pepsi. “Put Jon Voight on the comeback trail and got Eric Roberts nominated for an Oscar. That's the one where two convicts stow aboard an old work train up in Alaska and realise that no one's driving it, and they have to regain control of it before the bad-ass prison warden gets to them. Personally I prefer the apartment complex over the hurtling train as social microcosm—gives you more room to move. Think The Tenant, uh, The Million Dollar Hotel. It's more workable as a universal trope for impoverished communal values. I can't believe you didn't see it, man—” “The Oscar was named after Bette Davis’s ass, case anyone wants to know,” says Russell. “It wasn’t her ass, creep, it was her husband’s,” Gemma says, smoothly thumbing her handheld. “I hate last suppers.” Everyone looks at each other and then down at the greasy layers of paper on the table. They all know where Israel is, and who he’s with. Dean looks at Gemma. He both dreads and wishes for her to look up, to lock him into her jewel-blue gaze. He breathes deeply to get a possible whiff of the back of her neck, where her hair is most matted. Israel has assured them that this gig means no more grovelling through the broken glass for bling in a shuttered mall jangling with distant alarm bells; slithering across freshly mopped linoleum past gaping teenagers. Israel in the lucky red-white- and blue bandanna, Damien and the others wide-eyed in the terminal rush to the car where Gemma would be in neutral, possibly thinking: don’t look down. Cliff says, “Jesus, even I've seen Runaway Train, and I'm not as old as you, Kevin. Everyone knows that film, it's like Slow Burn and The Ambulance, you've seen them even if you don't know you've seen them.” “Look motherfucker, did I say I never seen it? I didn't say that. All I said was which one is it. Excuse me for not being able to tell one B-line piece of shit from another. Shit!” “I hate Eric Roberts,” says Russell, backing up his partner. Dean quickly looks away when Russell glances over at him. Russell saw in Dean something that made him pick Dean for the double-cross, a mirror of his own bad faith in Dean's slate eyes. For Dean, the gig holds little hope, mainly because Israel doesn’t know anything about boosting this sort of thing: a secret 20 tape featuring the late Princess Diana. So it was easy to make the leap from lack of faith to double-cross. Russell didn’t have to do much convincing. Dean says, “I like his name. Eric Roberts.” “It’s dope,” Cliff says. “Sick as shit.” Dean stretches his neck to one side and then the other and tries to relax. Vengeance? There was nothing banal about their life of petty crime. It had little to do with the fact that they did it because they could. It was simply what they were, or wanted to be: hunters against the hunted in a world otherwise stripped of polarity. If these old oppositions had disappeared, leaving nothing but the pulpy play of digital imagery then tell that to the piss-pants target in your firing line, slack-jawed cartoon characters frozen in deep focus. Cliff’s dark eyes gleaming from behind archetypal headgear—bringing your own boy-man into being—black knife sideburns accentuating a fragile bone structure. They were comic-book super-villains, splintered monsters in the making. Damien came in as the third man, Cliff said, because he gets it. “The psychic charge of comic-book art has more to do with a validation of adolescent yearnings than aesthetics, “Damien told them. He had been reading from the essay he downloaded for the community college course he dropped out. Comics describes as a dystopic totality in muscular chiaroscuro. The essay was called The Telltale Heart: Postmodern (Pulp)itations in The Phantom. Damien just changed the title to The Postmodern (Fan)tom and signed his name to it. He got a B-. Dean doesn't really get it. Cliff's mother said, what's the world coming to when comic books are taught in school? What happened to Shakespeare? And Damien said, we still do that, Mrs. Ruizman. “Last year we had to compare Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet with The Fast and the Furious.” They owed Mrs. Ruiz. They'd come to appreciate, between killing aliens on her living room floor, the pale curve of her purposeful calves picking her way over their 21 backpack and baggy jean debris. They hadn’t seen her since her older son's funeral, dark eyes wild through her veil, matching Cliff's under his hood. “Bobby Gold, Bob, Bobby, Robert, Roberto?” Gemma puts the leather-cased organiser on the table and looks out to sea. The Hungry Jack’s sign lights one half of her wide, pale face; the other is in shadow. “Did you talk to him, man,” Damien asks Dean. “Talk to who?” “ER, motherfucker, he's sitting right over there.” Damien jerks his head over to the three people still sitting on the terrace at Miracles. “You sure?” Damien reaches over the table and grabs Dean, spilling a Coke, and knocking paper and stuff off the table. It's nothing serious. Damien's not much older than Dean. Their horsing around is always kind of strained because Damien is a three Dan Aikido master and could kill Dean with his pinkie, sometimes looking at him as if the idea has merit. Chalmers’s letter drops out of Dean's jacket, and Cliff grabs it and waves it out of reach. “Give it back, Cliff.” Gemma doesn’t turn around, but she pushes some reddish hair behind her ear showing a gold hoop with a baby tooth dangling off it. Dean says, “I really don't think that's Eric Roberts, Damien.” “It's him man, I can't believe you didn't talk to him, ER man, King of the B-line.” “If I was sitting next to him right now, I'd kick his fag ass, and spit in his ugly face,” says Russ. “Look whose talking ugly, man,” said Damien. He stands up, pulling down his shirt. “I'm going to talk to him.” “Don't be an asshole, Damien. It's not him,” says Cliff. He grabs the envelope and starts to open it. “Hey, Cliff, don't do it. That's my mail, dude.” Cliff reaches into the envelope, and grabs the cheque, letting Chalmers’s fax pages drop on the table with the wrappings and burger crusts. “Hundred schmucks, “he says. “He always send you a hundred?” 22

“No, he fills out different amounts, I never know how much I'm going to get. Maybe fifty this time, next time, maybe fifty-thousand.” “Maybe nothing, you dumb schmuck.” Yeah, maybe nothing. Chalmers likes to keep Dean on the ball. “Give it back, Cliff, you're pissing me off.” “Doesn't your step-sister check them before she drops them off, dude? What kind of a big sister is that?' “No, man, she doesn't read them, doesn't care, she just delivers them.” “You read them?” “Yeah, twice,” “That's fucked up, junior, what kind of a family are you?” Eight-year old Dean walking in on Lena doing lines over the bidet, staring up at him with hate rolling darkly down her cheeks like stigmata. Another step-sibling hunched over her cell on the terra-cotta stoop registering Dean's sticky-fingered presence behind the potted Yucca with an unambiguous gesture. A boy he hardly knows spread-eagled on the Australian Squatters chair in front of the television with his hand down his pants, wordlessly thrusting his empty beer bottle at Dean. That would be his sixth birthday, the one with the trampoline, Chalmers and Mackenzie hissing at each other as usual in the kitchen. But Dean's super-hero x-ray vision could pierce the wall of their hate, deciphering the meta-code behind their moral posturing. He had access to the back end, and found it had nothing to do with him: Chalmers and Mackenzie (or whoever) weren’t fighting over any of them, merely recycling the slightly soggy leftovers of a bourgeois desperation that left Dean, at any rate, indifferent to whatever it was possible for him to think. “Bobby Torres!! Mr T! Israel's trainer!” Gemma turns back to the table, her face suddenly lit from the restaurant on one side, the ocean's inky phosphorescence on the other, the stars and moon from above, all proof, it seems to Dean, of a privileged sighting, one that gave him some kind of prior claim to its object. “Put that thing away,” Kevin takes the handheld and stashes it in her purse. “What the hell do you think you're doing, Kevin?” she asks him. 23

“I'm sick of hearing it, Gem, you can play with that piece of crap anytime, just not around me.” Kevin rubs his temples and shakes his head: hair the shade of fallen leaves. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Yeah, well I'm going crazy here, alright, Eric Roberts yanking my dick with one hand, and Mr T pulling on it with the other. For the last fifteen minutes, all I been hearing is names, Eric this and Bobby that.” “What do you care?” “I care a lot when I'm just trying to relax a little for once, have a bite to eat and all I'm getting is yammering.” “Kevin, next time you do that, I'm going to have to shoot you,” says Gemma. “You want me to shoot him for you, Gem,” says Cliff. “Make your move, punk,” says Kevin, and shoots Cliff with his finger. Cliff acts shot. Russ gets up and starts clearing the table with small tattooed hands, methodically scrunching Chalmers’s fax pages and all the wrappings and garbage into little balls and stuffing them into a big paper Hungry Jack's bag. Damien says, “I'm going over. I'll check you guys later.” He squares slim shoulders and starts walking though the chairs and tables, his long black hair incandescent in the beachside neon, blood-red tips brushing his shoulders. Gemma nods at Kevin, who is suddenly standing there in front of the boy, blocking his way. “I'm just gonna tell him about my screenplay, man, I wrote it just for him.” “Leave him alone, Damien,” Gemma says from behind a frosted blue plastic mirror. Dean watches her unscrew a little container and smear something messily on her lips with a ringed finger. “Everyone's entitled to a little privacy.” “Privacy isn’t even a word in this guy's vocabulary, dude. No one's got a gun to his head. He doesn't want to be a celebrity? Go and get a regular job like everybody else. Wash dishes like Dean.” “Dean when he's not robbing convenience stores or breaking into cars,” says Cliff. He grabs the waistband of Dean's jeans and stuffs the cheque into a pocket… 24

The first time … when was it? Mackenzie and Chalmers were already history. But when Mackenzie did catch him two-three years later on New Years Eve, Dean just knew she was going to kill him. He prepared for the final rush, the total adventure of the body, but it never came, just a cold stare before she turned her back on him to get dressed. Dean remembers. A couple of movie soundtrack CD's and some funky napkin rings and coasters that he pocketed while Ms. Drexler was chatting to him and this kid Vlad in the kitchen sipping instant coffee from a South Park mug. Vlad told his mom, who phoned Mackenzie. Chalmers had been away as usual pilfering some far-flung cultural oddity that he would bring back home like a relic to the Department of Textual Practices at UC San Corolla, faxes floating in at that time on Mackenzie's new ivory-white machine. Dean would see the ripped pages in the garbage can under her desk under an avalanche of cigarette butts and pencil shavings, a wad of Dentine stuck to “Love, Dad”. After she hung up on Ms. Drexler, Mackenzie pretty much went postal. She trashed his room and unearthed the layered stash—beer, fishing tackle, condoms, candy, magazines and the most shoplifted supermarket item in the world, razor blades—under his bed. Then she pushed him. She may as well have killed him—the humiliation of being pushed by your mother—two Vamp-nailed hands, a little red and swollen around the knuckles, maybe, but Chanel none-the-less, up against his chest, and boom—his ass is on the bed, flung there like laundry. Then she started crying and couldn't stop, even after Dean told her it's OK and made her some lemongrass tea. She sipped it while sobbing on the phone to her sister in Australia and then her shrink and then Dean’s who pitched a New Mexico personal growth ranch. That cheered her up. She glared at him and then went into her room and shut herself in, pill jars rattling and dope fumes snaking out from under the door. Teetering out some time later fragrant and black-sheathed, her blond hair tipped and bobbed back then in racy homage, as her stylist described it, to the sleaze starlets of the 1970's, like Susan George, abused by plot in ways that would be unthinkable in today's Hollywood. Imagine Ashley Judd or Jodie Foster as the raped wife in Straw Dogs. I don't think so. And Mandingo? Puhleeze. 25

New Years Eve. Mackenzie hits the world of parties while another world of glass balls and distant fireworks would come to Dean and his quietly keening Grandma on her 36” TV at Vista La Mer . But first, The Apology. Dean was a wiz at saying sorry. Mackenzie drove tight-lipped with nails the colour of dried blood curled around the wheel. She double-parked outside the Drexlers and marched him up the walk to the door of Vlad’s El Camino crap-shack. Ms. D. came to the door dwarfed in a man’s towelling bathrobe and let Dean do his spiel on New Years Eve in her small neat kitchen. Vlad’s leftovers warmed in the oven while global bon homie exploded from the joyless masses mugging at resentful reporters on assignment in Melbourne, London, Madrid. Mrs D heard him out, all the while cocking a knowing eyebrow stud at this snot pulling her son’s possessions out of brand-name pockets. But what Dean remembers most is his mother wobbling in black patent boots on the threshold with her bombshell hair aureoled sadly against the street light's chilling glow.

“Eric Roberts is like a … a human being,” Kevin is saying, strong square hand lightly on Damien’s narrow chest, the strange beauty of the tell-tale tattoo on his knuckle witness to irretrievable losses and hard won gains Dean cannot imagine. “He has the right to a quiet meal now and then, a night off? Like us you know … the calm before the storm. Anyone bothers us. You'd kill em right? Do unto others.” “Night off? I bet he's giving an interview over there. That’s how the street press do it. Meet some wannabe or has-been at any hole in the wall, hook them up to the espresso machine and let them talk about themselves for two hours. He’s been signing napkins all night, tell me I'm wrong.” “Two wrongs don't make a right, shithead,” says Russ. Damien has no reasonable comeback. “Don’t engage just before a job,” says Kevin. “With anyone. It’s the rule.” “He’s a celebrity,” says Damien. “They can’t engage. Different rules apply.” A gull lands on the table and starts picking at a fry. Dean thought they slept at night, but where? 26

“Celebrities are a human life-form,” says Gemma. “And equal rules apply. You think you’re a part of some kind of revolution here, but believe me, the more desperate the need to preserve something, which in your case, is the idea of a human subspecies, the more radical the rhetoric. That’s why I gave up college. Actually,” she said, fixing smiling blue eyes on Dean. “It’s more like going to church than going to school.” “But look at his life, dude, “says Damien politely. “It’s not life; it’s performance art. He is the artist, his life is his work, and the mystery lies in the struggle between them: the space between inspiration and failure—a miracle, fame—call it what you will.” “Call it survival,” Gemma says. “And I’m the boss’s girlfriend. I’m not your dude. Dude.” Damien looks up at Kevin then to Gemma smoothing down an eyebrow in her little mirror. Kevin runs a raw-knuckled hand through his hair and then takes Damien’s shoulders. “Otohto-chan, oyasuminasai. Big day tomorrow. And aren't you forgetting something?” Gemma snaps her mirror shut and drops it back in her purse. Her lips gleam like a wet puddle. Damien looks at Kevin’s hand on his shoulder, then across at Cliff. Cliff is checking out the ocean, silently mouthing the words to a tune, drumming the beat on the table with ringed fingers. He shrugs. Damien says, “Sure, Kev sure. Thanks for dinner, Gem. Israel too. Tell Israel I said thanks for dinner. ER can go fuck himself. Tell Israel I said that.” Kevin rolls his eyes. “Nevermind,” he says. Dean looks around for Russell, but he’s gone. Kevin steers Damien out into the night. “You sure you gave me back my handheld?” Gemma asks after him. She rummages around in a roomy black leather purse, allowing Dean, who hasn't been able to take his eyes off her all night, a split second glimpse of a gun barrel. He turns away and leaves with the others. 27

2 CORBAIN’S LAST HURL

“I had that dream again?” Mackenzie is on the phone to her sister in Australia, the land of making statements that sound like questions, a sure sign that the answer is beside the point. It's the regular Tuesday night call. “You know the one with the plates? Oh, I must have told Kez. Anyway, I’m on holiday with the kids,”—Dean sometimes forgets that Mackenzie has a daughter from a previous marriage living in Sydney—”yeah both of them, except they were still little? Yeah, gorgeous. And we were doing the Harbour Bridge Walk. Yeah. In Sydney. Not the big one, mate, no way, just the old one, along the footpath there beside the traffic? You’ve got six lanes of traffic and two train tracks on one side of that low barrier? But on the other side, the water side, there’s that steel fence? With barbed wire at the top and the danger signs? And you look through that across the harbour, Opera House and all that, and below you there’s nothing. Just blue-black water with white tips, like sharks teeth?” Easy to imagine spiky haired Gwenda curled up in a rotting director’s chair with a cup of green tea amid the Schnauzer turds and potted bamboo, red flip phone glued to her ear. “Anyway, we’re walking across, the kids and me, and right where the land disappears and it’s just you, the bridge and the water, guess what I do. Guess. You’ll die? I start dropping my Pillivuyt plates over the side, like magically through the barrier or something. What? I can’t remember, but anyway, you know the ones Mum gave me, the French ones? The big ones?” Mackenzie’s pride and joy, like heavy flat white moons. “Anyway, so I just start dropping them through the fencey thing, whatever, one at a time, I’ve got a whole armful of them, yeah, truly, no wait. Yeah, yeah, but each one floats, going down through the air, sort of like in slow motion. It catches a current of air, 28 slows down a minute, and then keeps falling down slowly with the black water waiting for it. My eyes follow it down, with the harbour not rushing exactly, but kind of flowing upward to meet us. And when it finally gets to the bottom, to the water, it slices into the surface on an angle, and I can see it right in front of me, like there’s something going on, something beneath the surface. Slicing into the water sideways, and it’s the oblique slicing I can feel in my dream, the dark sideways fall into the heavy water. I can see it under there, floating pale and wavering just under the surface like a fish or something. Then it sinks, just falls away into darkness. And I know what it is, but I don’t? Bit of a hoot, but anyway, how have you been Gwennie? In a nutshell.” She pokes her tongue out at Dean as he walks past, opens the front door, and leaves. Dean feels pretty good himself tonight. The new dreads settling in OK, his scar and late-adolescent blemishes a catalogue of inner states lost to words. Chemically induced self-awareness growing in proportion to his impressive shoe size, the way Mackenzie’s gaze is forced to meet his at eye level before it invariably looks away. There is solidity to his sense of what he is these days—a member, an entity—anticipation building tonight in the keen autumnal darkness. Enhanced, like Frodo after the fellowship was made official at Rivendell. From this high vantage point between the oceanic void and the hurtling rush of the freeway, Dean can clearly see where he is. Lights reflecting off a man-made lake in the middle of the track; the bottom end of the racing season. Beyond that is the glow of Del Carrera… fairy lights swinging in the slight breeze and muted clang of thin-lipped seniors sipping Pinot at Il Forniao. Dean’s eyes take in the Tudor-style shop-fronts, the slick condos, roof-top dinner parties in full swing. Then the stacked rocks and dunes where shadow-life begins, a lit-up cruise ship cleaving the vastness, seagulls asleep in the watery glow of deck lights. Chalmers says he always knew that Dean was different, but really he has no idea. He thinks he has the whole picture, knows where everything fits in—those useless foreign artefacts he fetishises over, himself, and even Dean. And he tells everybody all about it—that pivotal moment in the life of the inner parent, because as usual everything is always all about them. … 29

Unlike you, your sister Lena has a tendency to move with the wrong crowd. She has reconnected with this old Professor of hers whose reputation as a two- bit operator precedes him. He is a name that follows his bad rep around. He has asked her to ask me to courier some artefact to an old friend of his in India, an article he’d rather not trust to the regular channels. Standard stuff. She tells me the item is some footage of some secret science protocol. Why not believe her? She’s a journalist. The pay-off, at least for me, is a festival underway at the North Indian destination featuring regional theatre, the highlight of which is a production about Princess Diana. Dodgy? Possibly, but definitely the ethnographic opportunity of a lifetime, one that I can possibly retire on. All expenses paid naturally, including a satellite phone to hook up to the laptop. So, India here I come. Fear not dear boy: I’ll top up the coffers before I leave.

—k'ching! Dean kisses the cheque: $300. He plants barrel-chested strides through the marigold-scented darkness, down the steps and path to the highway, where Cliff’s black Dodge Ram’s been waiting for him since exactly eleven forty-five. Dean is running three minutes late as per his private arrangement with Russel. Damien gets out running polished nails through his hair. “You’re late, worm-dick.” “Sorry. My mom—” Dean whispers, sliding across to the middle seat. “Shut up,” says Damien, silently shutting the door, and sulking out the window as Cliff pulls out onto the freeway. “You know we had to be on time, “says Cliff. What are you doing? Israel is going to kill us.” “Not me,” says Damien. “I ain’t taking the blame for this mommy’s boy.” 30

This mommy’s boy, thinks Dean fishing for a seat belt, knows exactly what the time is. Russell’s time. Exactly three minutes behind Israel’s. Whatever Russell is up too, it translates into a pound bag of top-grade Singapore E, almost sold out already. So Damien can fume his Jap ass off. It makes no difference to Dean. Damien never sits in the middle, he has to be by the window with his nose in the breeze like the welp he is. The three of them are stacked up in the front seat and heading south past lonesome condo patches sprouting up like toxic fungus on the punished hillsides. Then they hit the more lugubrious sprawl of the Lumina la Vailles, Tacoma and Del Festiva—the Golden Triangle. A rash of slow moving lights prickling the vast darkness to the east tells them they’re passing the air force base. Like something out of Tolkien, but weird, Cliff had said one day on a dry run. The Biskit isn’t going to get past track 8 tonight, Rollin, because Cliff keeps playing it over and over. Dean wonders if they’re just going to keep listening to it until they get there. He doesn’t mind. “We could be sitting in that greenhouse right now, ladies,” says Damien. Dean has tried to block it out: jagged holes in the glass like devil’s eyes and a little office at the back with its yellowed map of California still tacked up to a bulletin board behind the foreman’s desk. A calendar hung by a nail from a window frame: Miss September 1994, the year Kurt Cobain died. Her aureoles were the size of Mackenzie’s dinner plates and she was fingering herself under lace panties. They all liked September: Cliff, Damien, Kevin and Russell slouching on rusted folding chairs around the desk waiting for Israel and Gemma to arrive on Israel’s big yellow Kawasaki. You could hear it coming a mile away. Everyone had their role. Russell was the driver and if necessary the cleaner, although that, Damien insisted, better not be necessary. The b&e was Cliff’s. The safe was Damien’s who was a specialist in the making. Big Kevin was the scout and general over seer. He had the biggest gun, a pretty serious sawn-off, with the others bringing up the rear in their .38s but covering for him all the same, after all the times Kevin had covered for them. “It’s footage, but it’s digital. So small you could miss it. He’s got it under the bed. Apparently.” 31

Gemma had found this out working undercover at Blue Moves, the club favoured by The Subject. “The Subject,” Israel had assured them. “Happens to be one of the top collectors on the West Coast. Keeps a low profile, but is a known force in the world of underground memorabilia.” “Can’t get more underground than Diana's Spencer's last home movie,” said Kevin. “Gonna change the world as we know it.” “Cheesecake, probably,” Cliff had said. “Like Marilyn’s last sitting. Or maybe the one before that.” “Is it encrypted?” said Damien. “If this Professor is worth his shit, he’ll encrypt it.” “Oh, he’ll encrypt it,” Israel had told them. “He’s got this hacker working for him. Best code-man on the planet. “ Israel had done work for the Professor before, in his college days, when the Professor had just one toe dipped in the murky world of underground collectors. “What kind of scientist has to become a criminal to fund his research?” Gemma had asked. “The kind that reckons he’s found a way to beat physics,” said Damien. Israel glared at him. He looked over at Kevin and Kevin just shrugged. Israel never could figure out how the help ended up knowing so much about his clients. Kevin kept telling Israel he had a big mouth, but Israel couldn’t help himself. “Shut up, Damien,” said Kevin, sharper than he should be. There was a picture in his wallet of a little girl who lived with her mother. Israel sniffed and pinched inflamed nostrils between soft fingers “I got my own princess right here. Right, Your Majesty?” and he’d reached over and pat Gemma on the thigh, low-fiving Russell with the other hand. Gemma just crossed her legs and more than once Dean saw Israel’s plucked eyebrows come together in simmering irritation. …

You were—ten? I sat there with one hand on the gearstick. I watched you 32 walking away from me. I was stuck in neutral. No words came to me. “Good-bye?” You could have waved. Not left me drowning. The green depths calling. The light-haired boy from the neighbourhood who came to take you fishing, already had a substance to him and I tried to tell you—toot, toot—but you didn’t turn back. I saw in him a realer-than-real too scary for words, but you were gripped in movement, every inch a-flutter. He held fishing tackle in one pale square hand, rods balanced on solid shoulders. A showy strut with you following as a mere sputtering afterglow. I was mesmerised by the street dappling through your insubstantial form. You floated beside and slightly behind him with arms and legs flapping in the breeze, trembling at a threshold of obliterating presence. He carried you along in the wake of his being … or more generally, by an undercurrent stronger than you would ever be. You were growing up. Gone boy.

Dean is deep in an anticipatory trance. Nothing insubstantial about his form tonight. It is all about to happen exactly as it should: the adventure of the body. Royal Box. Dean’s gun is a pre-loved .38 a snubby superior in every way to the embarrassing 22 he bought last year from Cliff’s connect. After Kevin goes in and gives them the all- clear, Dean will cover first for Cliff while he cuts open the steel door to the apartment and then for Damien when they get to the safe. He won't actually touch anything in the apartment himself. Kevin told Cliff to tell Dean. “Save the Fagin shtick for another day.” Fagin? Dean doesn’t take it personally. The unseemly footage is rumoured to be priceless. They turn off at Via del Normale and stop, waiting for the call. “They’re late,” says Cliff calmly. 33

“Who isn’t?” says Damien, obsidian eyes refusing to meet Dean’s, who registers a puffy purple bruise under the Japanese boy’s left eye. The call comes late because Israel couldn’t find the effen phone, he tells them in a harsh whisper. Turning Russell's trashcan car upside down, Kevin finally finds the phone under the seat, like a McDonalds toy, switched in error to vibrate. I’ve been calling like a hundred times, Is,” says Gemma. “I’m having a hard time keeping an eye on Kim—the Subject—tonight. He’s slippery.” “Don’t panic,” Russell had rasped at her. “Put me on to Israel, you junkie fuck,” Gemma says. Dean, Cliff and Damien have listened to Rollin’ maybe fifty times in a row, but they stop yelling out the chorus as soon as they get Israel's call. A soft woohoo from Damien and then they are quiet for the rest of the way. They head east, before going north on Potter and then left into Harry Street. They pull into a black square of chewed up asphalt on the west side of the complex as they had rehearsed and know rather than see Russell and Israel arrive in Russell’s old LeBaron, the disembodied red beads of their cigarettes swimming in the oily darkness. “How come such a bad ass criminal mastermind like Russ got to have such a funky ride,” says Damien. “He spends it all on junk,” says Cliff. “Heroin? Bullshit. I think he’s into some weird sex shit,” says Damien. “I hate working with junkie perverts.” “But you got to start somewhere,” says Cliff, patting Dean softly on the knee. He leans around into the back seat, and Dean gets a whiff of his cologne. He sees the tattoo on Cliff’s smooth chest in the gaping folds of a black shirt: the Mexican Eagle. Cliff passes them the flashlights and toolkits. He hands the larger one to Damien. “Let’s roll.” Cliff and Dean get out, followed by Damien. They move away from the truck in single file, silent except for the soft rustle of their label sweats. They are careful not to acknowledge Russell and Israel. They will meet Kevin for the all-clear and then head into the apartment to get the tape. The three boys stay close to the walls of the rank brown walk-up, barely visible in the muddy wash of a ghetto night. Dean touches the wall lightly. It’s real. He doesn’t touch it again, in case he’s mistaken and his hand goes right 34 through it, like a ghost-building. They circle the north side and come round to the front entrance—two down, two up—where Kevin is supposed to be waiting to oversee the job. But he’s not there. They wait for a minute, then two more. Cliff calls out his name softly. “Are we going up?” says Damien. “Or not? We were meant to be here, like five minutes ago. Late is bad news.” “Something is not right,” Cliff says. “Maybe he's gone back.” Dean smells something floating down the stairs besides their own echoing panic. “We would have passed him,” says Damien. “He’s still up there.” “Why? Why would he be up there? He's meant to be waiting here.” “Ask Russell,” Dean says. “Go ask him what we should do.” “That’s bullshit man, I consider myself a professional. I don’t need some junkie fiend tell me what to do—” Cliff says to Dean, “You go up first.” He and Damien exchange looks. Dean leads the way this time—if Chalmers could only see him now. Cliff and Damien are in formation behind him. Sour-smelling smoke wisps down from the apartment and they inch up the stairs, commando style like they practised a hundred times on the ranch. Reed's DIY steel door is lying flat on the floor of the apartment with Kevin beside it on his back, blood still coming out of the back of his home-grown haircut. They step over him in the dust-filled space, collars pulled up over mouths and noses, pressing themselves against the inside wall of the apartment, where Dean—weapon extended in both hands—makes out the reflective black maws of dead computer monitors. He stumbles over a tangle of keyboards and pizza-boxes. He pastes himself to the wall, adhering to a choreographed role he’d been born to play. They reach the bedroom door. Damien pushes himself to the front. Clothes tumble out of the closet. Shelves spill books and video tapes, one of which Dean, bringing up the rear, compulsively picks up and slips into his jacket. Kevin stares at him through the doorway from the floor. Blood pools in one of his eyes. That klepto better keep his hands to himself. 35

Damien’s heavy-soled, steel-tipped boot kicks at matt-black Pioneer components strewn across the floor. A toilet seat lies on the Indian print bedspread. The toilet seat is mounted on polished wood. Kurt Cobain supposedly had his last hurl into this toilet, before he broke out of the northern California rehab so that he could shoot himself. Pale chunks frozen in hardened mucous cling to the seat where they are sealed from free radicals in a special clear resin. “That’s the one Gemma told us about,” whispered Damien. The bed at an angle, revealing, in the split-second blink of Cliff’s flashlight, a gaping hole and a splintered safe, empty. “We’ve been sold,” says Cliff in a normal voice. “They killed Kevin.” Now Dean knows why Russell wanted to delay their entrance. Three minutes is enough time to put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger. Dean feels the need to be very far away. He turns toward the door but Damien puts twitching fingers, as insistent as steel, on his arm. “In a hurry, mommy’s boy?” Damien’s eyes are letterboxed against milky skin. “Get the bedspread.” Dean throws the quilt over his shoulders and takes it over to Kevin's body. They wrap the body in the quilt and Dean takes the feet—heavy harness boots—and Cliff takes the head and Damien leads the way down the stairs, gun arm extended. Russ is waiting for them white-lipped at the back of the building. The man smells like piss ad stale tobacco. They follow him to the car where Israel gets out and opens the trunk for them in silence, watching their faces. Damien and Cliff are about to heave Kevin’s body into the trunk, when they see he’s going to have company. There’s another body curled up there waiting for him, blonde wisps pressed damply across a smeared arch of eyebrow, tight skirt riding up on a recently shaved thigh. “The hell—” “Going to be crowded in there,” says Cliff softly, crossing himself.” Put it in,” says Russell. He refers to Kevin as an “it”. Cliff’s hissing a prayer while he and Damien place Kevin beside the other body in the trunk. 36

Israel takes off his bandanna and runs a hand through white hat-hair. “The Queen and Di.” He giggles. “Di another day,” says Russell. They guffaw in stifled grunts. “Live and Let Di…” “Di Hard…” The two of them, Russell and Israel are groping for air, bent double as they stagger around on the parched asphalt in tight, scuffling circles, gasping for breath. Cliff says, “ You two, hey Beavis and fuck-head, why’d you have to kill him? No wet ones, remember, that’s what we said.” “Is that Kim, dude? I thought Kim was a guy,” says Damien, his voice high and catching. “We always thought he was a guy, didn't we Cliff? I mean a regular guy.” The three of them casing the apartment through the summer watching The Subject come and go. He was a wiry man with long hair and winged cheekbones. Now he’s a dead ringer for Diana. Damien points a shaky gun into the filthy trunk between Kevin and some old plastic bags. Pointy sling-backs showing signs of a recent scuffle. “Girl's name though, ain't it. I mean Kim. I always thought that was a girl's name, Russ. Didn't you?” said Israel, making a show of wiping his eyes with the back of a sleeve. “Who knew?” “Tuesday night is fag's night,” says Russell to no one. He’s not laughing now. He lifts the wig with his gun barrel, short brown wisps poking out under a hair net, the deep groove around the neck gone a purplish red. “At the Old Town bars. A Tuesday night special.” “How did you know it was him?” says Damien. “Did Gemma say—did you know he was into this shit— “Di Another Frigging Day,” said Israel, the joke gone cold but Russell politely high-fives him. “It's the walk.” Russell says slowly, spelling it out. “Gives their game away when you can't see the hands—” a grotesque scarecrow mincing in the dark “—and this.” He holds out a small .22 that no one recognises. “See? The fag was strapped. So I followed him. He was heading straight up the stairs after Kevin, safety off: see? What’d you want me to do? Kiss him?” 37

“Why kill him? Shit Russell, you could have zapped him? What’s wrong with you? Now we’re all accessories to—” “Shut up,” says Israel. “You were meant to be there, remember, to watch his back—” “No, but yes. Dean was late—” “Forget it. Gemma called, warned us he’d flown the coop. Russell was on his way in to get you out of there, but the Hershey Princess here beat him to it. Next time I’ll tell him to let him kill you, better: I’ll kill you myself.” Damien glares at him. “Cross-dressers are not necessarily gay,” he says. “And there won’t be a next time. I don’t do wet ones. He was just the middle-man. It's bad like to kill the middle-man. They're a good-luck charm, like insurance—” Russell slowly lifts up his arm, pointing a dead man’s gun at Damien’s head. The white glare of a streetlight picks up the little black pinpricks in the junkie’s dirt-water eyes. “Shut up, Damien,” says Cliff. “Russell saved your life, right Russell? The guy or girl or whatever was strapped, get it? Thanks buddy. No but yeah, it's cool. No problem whatsoever.” Cliff pulls Damien to one side and stands in front of him. Russell lowers his arm. “Anyone else know about this?” says Israel. “Gemma ever tell any of you about Reed's, what, hormone problem?” “Maybe even she didn’t know,” says Dean, hearing his voice without being aware that he had spoken. “Maybe you’re fucking my bitch,” says Israel, a vein throbbing at his temple. He and Dean stare at each other across the corpses until Israel looks away. He checks his watch. “C’mon, kid, I’m just playing with you,” he says, still not looking at Dean. He shuts the trunk quietly and moves into the shadows behind the car, blowing them off absently with one hand while the other's already busy on the his phone, thumb working the buttons like some kind of sniffer-dog. “That's it people, show’s over. Zip up your fly. Russell's going to clean up. Go. Go.” Russell heads back toward the apartment, swinging a black vinyl bag. “What time is it?” says Cliff. 38

“Ten to one,” said Dean. His Nike watch, lifted from a drugstore in PB, glows in the dark. The videotape from Reed's apartment is digging into his ribs. “Why’d he have to kill him?” says Damien. “That queen was never going to do us damage: not with that popgun.” “Yes, but they were nice shoes,” says Cliff. “Gemma’s got a pair like that, no?” 39

3 PORNOGRAPHIC BRICK VENEREAL

Wilson Trulli had once told Lena that people go back to the past in order to create a new and different world for themselves. Basically this had all boiled down to the fact that, like everyone else on the planet, Trulli has made a movie, a little gem that he want Lena’s globe-trotting excuse for a father to drop off in India for him. Lena is surprised that people are still agreeing to do these things for Trulli. The old guy has obviously not lost his touch. Not with her anyway. Trulli who she’d adopted as father to fill in voids even she couldn’t fully understand. Trulli who wore his rumoured involvement with an anomalous criminal underground with the same panache he allowed other legends about him to grow and proliferate: he played in a band with Cormac McCarthy. He edited an interdisciplinary journal called Hole in the Round. He’d slept with Donna Harraway. He’d fathered at least three children in the faculty crèche. Possibly four. The last of the summer poppy straggled along the pitted highway. A mild breeze lifted her denim collar. Lena liked movies. She wondered if Trulli will let her see his before she gives it to her father. Even in her own mind she gets them mixed up—Trulli and Chalmers—the same basic personality split into two. Which is why it never occurred to her to question Trulli’s proposal to pay Chalmers to courier the tape to India. Nor imagine that the fact that Chalmers would take the money and run was anything but a foregone conclusion. Anti-gravity protocol. Chalmers would that: this is a man who claimed that he, for one, never looked down. Don’t look down, girl: Trulli standing seductively stooped at the edges of a self-conscious outer circle … splashing beer on his shoes and a little red sauce on his sweater, uproarious at the proffered bad-coffee stories and tabloid revelations all the while tossing gravel-voiced pearls to the circling swine. Homemade pizza because in California in those days a true 40 thin-crust was made, not bought. The uncomprehending disciples in ragged clumps around their diminutive mentor, a giggling cluster in ecstatic orbit around the still virile intellect because Trulli was still young enough then at the early fifties mark…Lena habitually dropped the envelope into the Miracles mailbox without thinking much about it. Less said the better. You played the cards you were dealt. She manoeuvred the roadster back onto the highway and headed north through understated commercial strips with signage like Cybertan, Roof Rack World, and ProKayak. She told herself not to panic…this was home. Lena liked keeping track of the new signs that took the place of the ones that eventually gave up after years of underexposure. The freeway fed commuters into Campus City, La Vailles, the Galleria east off I5. You only came this way to buy steroids or watch a community theatre production of The Rocky Horror Show or attend one of the back-door medical clinics if you were Mexican. Lena had her IUD put in by one of the doctors at the Santa Dominica Clinic, a soft-spoken woman with a good cleavage who blinked wearily into a dusty computer screen. So every few months a new sign came up—Riviera Pizza, nailheaven.com—that, over time, would attain the inexorable seaside patina of watery yellows, washed out blues and reds gone bloody. She crossed the tracks. On she curved through the old town centres with their late- eighties facades in varying shades of driftwood … and made it to the freeway. As she merged, Lena caught a glimpse of her eyes over her glasses in the rear view mirror: unmerry grey eyes like her mother’s. Off again at the El Camino exit and then it was back roads all the way home. Did she say “home”? The Viper: bought pre-loved six years ago from a guy in El Sonoma paying off his mortgage with six different credit cards, winding its way like a memory through the lion- hide hills. From the moment Lena laid eyes on its blunt curves, a ‘96 Viper RT 10, midnight blue with a cream interior, one of only a hundred and fifty made with a special blue leather steering wheel, including the soft top and factory hard top with all accessories and storage bags, Lena knew that it alone could take her past certain events in her life. She was going north today to find out why that hadn't happened yet. 41

Lena took a left into the canyon, right onto a narrow road lined by widely spaced cottonwoods and past an old house with curling shingles that listed behind a stunted pine. She could see the corner of a small studio in the back. In the front was a new garage, a pornographic brick venereal. She slowed past the house, playing back the graduate gatherings… Unlike Trulli, Chalmers had always seemed afraid of her … of what a girl would ask of her father. So she stopped asking and that was where Trulli came in, leaning curly- haired up there on the podium, cloaked in a lifetime of lofty conviction, his transgressively multi-disciplinary patter raining down on a thirsty brood … the theatrical flutter of telegenic hands waving away the daemons of objectivity—Space-Time Foam: Toward a new Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity—his heat-seeking gaze found its target and moved in on Lena Grant … she surrendered to his total presence. Lena passed the house and pulled into a long dusty drive. A perky black bird perched on the sign, where she slowed to a stop and checked out the Institute, her journalistically trained eye for detail flickering reluctantly to life. One story, concrete, modest landscaping: geraniums in bloom. It stood in a clearing, ringed by Eucalypts and scrubby outcrops. Wild flowers clung to the rocks. On the ridge behind was the road, and unseen from here, an arterial sidewalk sprawl through residential blocks … a bakery, pool-supply store, and a park lined with a jogging track. A white van slowed behind her as it approached the driveway. She moved into the parking area, but the van headed off again, gathering speed. Lena parked and switched off the car. Do your worst, Trulli. I’m still here. A tekkie came into view from around the corner of the building and lit up under the sign: Southland Institute of Materials Science. The bird flew away. Lena got out and started toward him, licking her lips. The man was pale with flecked hazel eyes and dark brown wispy hair that fell softly over his collar like a rock star’s. He was lean verging on sinewy, and his shoulders nobbled under the cheap white shirt. But there was something else—the way he seemed to need to be seen as one of the smokers here, the single- minded typage the figure conveyed. Pens in shirt pocket, one-two-three. He watched her 42 approach, and cupped the cigarette instinctively into his hand in a downward motion of his arm. Lena noticed his athletic hands and, behind the shades, her eyes flicked involuntarily to his crotch. He appeared self-conscious and oblivious at the same time. The rolling blue smoke behind him gave the whole scene a kind of glamrock effect. “Hey!” Lena said. “Hi.” Smiling pleasantly. A pleasant smile. Maybe it was because his swirling eyes had the tired blaze of a snake-wrangler, or maybe it was the way he started smoking again after checking her out, but Lena was still thinking about the bulge in his trousers when she said, “I'm basically here in a non-official capacity.” “Right,” still smiling: the man who fell to earth. “I have a friend here. You might know him.” “I doubt it.” Hunky Dory. She asked him if he knew Professor Wilson Trulli. He pushed himself off the wall, dropped his cigarette and said, still smiling, “I'm Jay Diaz, who the hell are you?” On their way into the building, she asked him why they hadn't published. He told her that they were under pressure from various funding agencies not to reveal more than they had to pending patent applications. Easy to imagine: the end of rocket propulsion. Just the slightest nudge needed for lift-off and once it's up there, the smallest nudge back into orbit, and hey presto, you've cornered a niche market. “For example, point-to-point government communication where total security is the only option, Diaz said. “The possibilities of the gravitometric imaging satellite for private use are limitless. You won’t miss a single movement of that final serve or the winning stroke. Freeze-frame the sweaty elation scrambling to the plate.” “That’s a pretty big fucking niche,” she said, compelled as always to swear like a navvy when in the presence of amazing fucking cock. “Imagine: taking a picture from hundreds of kilometres away and it’s like you’re in the same room.” “People will wonder how you got permission,” Lena said. She followed Diaz into restrained ‘90s décor: buttery walls, framed abstracts that spoke to the carpet’s vivid weave, a glass sculpture and a brass plaque acknowledging a 43 long list of patrons. Diaz got Lena a tag from a well-preserved administrator with tight skin and a gold tooth. He took Lena down a bright hallway, passing one closed door with a steel security panel and another that opened up into a large unoccupied office. They continued past windows that looked into a gleaming lab set up with equipment that she absolutely recognised: a new model vulcaniser, for example, not so different from the one back when at Trulli’s dingy lab on Level 6 at UCSC with it's security panel on the door and the password given out on a strictly need-to-know basis. Don’t look down. Was it still the same word? She’d let it slip once and once only, to her mother, Abby Weiss—Chalmer’s first wife—who was also on campus back then but in Anthropology. So Lena told her but did she know? This was an expression of Chalmers when anyone asked him about his trips: “If I told you, would you know… “ Was it still the same word? Abby had been the kind of determinedly absent minded parent that enabled her to walk right past little Lena and her half-soused pyjama-party friends and appear not to notice a thing, as if blind to everything that moved on the other side of a luminously layered inner topography. But when Lena next climbed up on the stool for some more sugary liqueur it had been moved. As far as Lena could see her mother would never change … she had been a wiry, scuttling loner ever since Lena could remember. For a while Wilson Trulli had once been among her few friends. They’d met when Abbey, a lonely post-doc bride with nothing to do on a Saturday night because Chalmers was at a conference, had strayed into one of Wilson’s standing room only seminars: “Fuelling the nuclear controversy: uranium dioxide and the new ceramics.” Abbey would stay married to Chalmers Grant until Lena was thirteen. That was the year of a disastrous sabbatical in Brisbane where Chalmers had been working on a book about Baked Bean wrestling in between having sex with a venomous physiotherapist called Mackenzie Roberts. Lena and Abbey and Wilson hung around a bit over the next few years but by the time Lena had grown up and was a student at UCSC herself, Abbey had taken to barely leaving the anthropology wing, known as The Crypt. She appeared camouflaged among the sepia photographs of Rajasthani weddings, the token knick-knacks in forbidden ivory, the layered kilums, idols 44 and lovingly mounted fragments. Once or twice they met at the staff club for lunch. Abbey pushed a plastic spoon around in her pottle of apricot and mango yoghurt. “That,” Lena had said. “Looks like pus.” Was it still the same word? Her mother had left the spoon standing in the yoghurt. She had looked away then from the angry eyes of the daughter who couldn’t see her for looking. Diaz led Lena through the main building and out a side door into the late morning sunshine. The mist had lifted and through the trees, ragged white tufts moved across the chalk-blue sky. Square cement paving stones made a path under the anomalous gum trees to a long low wooden building with a wide porch. There were two sets of railed wooden stairs accessing it, and behind, a small brick building with an oversized air conditioning unit hanging off a dirty window. “That's the office,” Diaz said, tilting his head toward the small building. “But he’ll be in the lab.” His eyes were on her face for the first time and Lena noticed that he wasn’t smiling any more. She caught in his flecked unwavering gaze a sudden recognition of what she’d been rushing toward. Trulli would see her but he wouldn't see her. “Maybe you should just let him know I'm here first. He asked me to come, but it's been a long time.” Lena hadn’t had a panic attack for years. “He’s got a recording or something for me to give to my father … to take to India … some gravity stuff … for a student. Just passing through. Really.” “Oooo-kay.” Diaz shrugged, unblinking. She checked that her sunglasses were still in place. He reached into his pocket and when his square dusky hand came out it held a small pill that he passed her and that unbelievably, she swallowed. Then he moved gracefully off up to the porch where he pressed a keypad beside the door and went in without her, coming out a moment later, touching his hair. He led her back into the lab where she registered the compressors and tanks of liquid nitrogen, stacked silicon moulds, corner-shelves crammed with jars of chemicals, broken ceramic disks in a stainless-steel sink. A faucet dripped onto a coffee cup … same old same old. Her one- time mentor and all-time traducer over in a corner with his back to them framed by a window facing onto a rocky bank heavy with morning glory. Talking to him was another 45 boy who, unlike Diaz, registered as a familiar composite: the Research Assistant—retro shock of frizzy brown hair, frayed lab-coat, rimless specs, pale face… and no pens. “When do we increase the spin speed?” the student was saying to Trulli, bottle-top eyes on Lena as she approached warily enough to pass as an extra wandering onto the wrong set. The Liberal Arts major in a Science lab—where's the elevator, people? Wilson Trulli turned around halfway through saying, “I think we need to take another look at the material specifications first. “ Then he said, “It’s you.” Cranking an imaginary camera with her hands, she said, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” And he cranked back. …

On the roof of Diaz’s sky-blue Toyota, there were, no kidding, large ski-racks. They all piled in. Lena ended up in back next to Wilson while Colin the grad student sat with Diaz in front, long legs bent up, light brown frizz touching the roof, making frantic eye contact with Lena in the side mirror. What was he trying to say? Diaz pushed in a CD and said to them in the rear-view mirror, “So where are we going?” “ Xeno's?” said Wilson. “The coffee's great.” “They wouldn't know a piroshki if it fell in their lap.” “What do you expect, Colin, they're Greek. Greeks know steak and fries.” “And coffee. Xeno's it is then.” Diaz started up the car. The CD was Australian. Early INXS. I remember your smile. Colin: “Let’s try that German place: Elsie’s. Elsie is a real person, not just a name. She cooks the schnitzel in person, wearing the same blue apron every night. You can watch her frying the potatoes through a square roundey-holey thing. It’s totally authentic with travel posters on the walls and whatnot. St. Anton in the spring.” “I think that’s called a serving nook,” Lena said, gigging. 46

“Jesus, we had one when I was a kid.” Wilson's one good eye flinched with the recall. “My God, I haven’t thought about it for years. My mother, moving back and forth behind the nook. The frame never changed. We sat at the table, our forks poised mid-air. We waited for her to come back into view before we could eat. We didn’t trust her to come back into the frame. Some characters don’t. “ “The suburban serving nook—a real-life precursor to reality TV,” Lena was, Yes, so totally jamming. Xanax will make her well every time. Not having had a panic attack for years, she’d forgotten. Trulli’s commanding timbre, a little shaky at the edges, retained its precarious potency. He didn't tell them the rest, about his mother’s fall down the stairs, and then the wheelchair. An Idaho childhood spent wheeling Mother to the store and back … his father waiting at the third story apartment to carry her up the stairs. A boyhood spent looking up stairwells, praying for his father to stumble so his mother would fall again and young Wilson could rescue her this time, swoop her up in his arms … like Superman, rising above the vertigo that would ground his alter ego for life. She took sidelong glances at his face as the freeway spun out behind them and the tawny ripples gave way to lurid signage and bristling Gas n Go’s. Once freckled and fine- boned it was now a puffy mask, framed by brittle bunches of faded hair. The stoop carefully choreographed from his wailing days was now wobbling somewhere between a lurch and total collapse. One green eye gazed out whole and clear, the other squinted out from the depths of inflamed ooze. Lena hoped she would find it easier to speak to him after a few glasses of wine. She wondered if she had any current prescriptions of Xanax at home. Diaz negotiated the off-ramp and swung his blue beast into glittering parking acreage. His eyes found her in the mirror. “Greek OK with you, Lena?” he said. “Greek, my arse.” said Colin.

Mid afternoon they were still there. A waitress arrived with another tray of drinks—Japanese beer for Colin, ouzo for Lena and Diaz. Wilson had slurped his way through most of a bottle of Chardonnay. The waitress topped him up. “Exotic forms of propulsion,” he was saying. “Nothing new in that.” 47

“OK, so give me,” said Lena. “Just in a general sense for now, some background information. Gravity is the big guy—the universal force, also the weakest in the universe, yet possibly not the cosmological wuss we thought it was. You claim to have discovered, what, a kind of artificial gravity? In what sense exactly?” “This is antigravity. It is potentially bigger than cold fusion. Ever tried propelling a satellite with rocket fuel. Lena? OK, this is flying saucers and time-machines, well a new kind of physics, at the very least. Have I mentioned Einstein's missing link, a last shot for our kind—” “Whose kind?” asked Lena. “Us, babe. You and me.” Science professor and Communications prodigy, a friendship that had floated on the sea of her insecurity only to founder on the jagged tip of deception. Yet hadn’t Chalmers’s dogged absences made the still waters of self-doubt been so fathomless, so treacherous, that she actually got off being the other woman to her own mother? The restaurant was on the outer perimeter of a Mega-shopping Multi-complex Super-Centre. From their table she could see a shimmering Toys R Us sign. Xeno's opened out onto ornamental trees in terracotta-coloured plastic pots that lined the walkway along the parking sprawl. They had a pavement table. Behind them was the store front … double glass doors etched with laurel-wreaths, and behind that the bar. Plates of honey-cakes on doilies revolved behind more glass. Lena got up and worked her way through to the restrooms. A chunky woman with frosted hair sat at one of the faux- travertine tables by the mirrored wall talking to herself. Her organiser was open next to a cappuccino. The woman spooned froth into her mouth while maintaining a bright patter with an imaginary companion. “I luv it!” A massive glass bas-relief of Dionysius, maybe eight or nine feet in diameter and resembling a huge translucent coin was suspended by fine steel cables horizontally over the lunchtime crowd. Apollo with his quiver, reflected in the mirrored walls, hung down from more steel wires over the other side of the room. The woman was still chatting and making notes in her organiser when Lena came back from the bathroom. This time Lena 48 registered the black wires flowing from the woman’s head into a minute cell phone resting on the table. “Yes, yes, yes—yeh, it's just—well, yes, yesyesyesyes!” Chunky drilled the table with a stubby burgundy nail. “I can't see a problem with that at all, assuming dates and times are—yes! Sounds like a plan!” Back at the table, cappuccinos for everyone except Colin. “I’m glad you came back,” Trulli said, looking almost tenderly at Lena. Almost. “From the ‘loo?” said Collin. “What’d you expect her to do. Flush herself down?” The sideways glance Trulli gave Diaz would have been imperceptible if both of his eyes had been working. The left iris slid seamlessly across the eyeball, the other followed sluggishly, requiring the old man to briefly jerk his head toward Diaz who, in any case, did not respond. Why did that irk her? “How many of you are there?” she said. “With or without the flakes?” Diaz in his Cuban jive, or whatever it was, waking up. Still looking into the distance, but not so far. From her research Lena already knew about the lifters, the Area 51ers, the jellied metal-men. “There are not too many of us left, as such, “ said Colin. “Mucken about in dark matter: who needs it?” Did he speak with an accent, too? Lena mentally thumbed through her image-bank of Thatcherite-era sitcoms and came up with a greasy-haired squatter in a phlegm-spattered undershirt shoving a pencil up his nose. “What we have attempted to capture on this film of ours. The one you’ve kindly agreed to take to your father—” “No such thing as a free lunch, Wilson. You should know that.” “Indeed. I don’t doubt that once Chalmers sees our very own Candle in the Wind reincarnated as the People’s Princess alive and well in the jungles of India, he will consider himself richly compensated.” “What if he gets busted, you know, ferrying this strange footage from continent to continent?” 49

“I don’t know whether to be cheered at this display of daughterly concern or concerned at your lack of faith in an old friend. I’m a scientist, Lena. Pure and simple. Play the tape when you get home. Set your mind at rest.” He passed over a large brown envelope containing a small rectangular object. It was addressed to Avinash Ashtekar, c/o Theatre on the Move, Zaribagh, Rangeela Pradesh, India.A large motorcycle rumbled into earshot. Diaz sat up a little higher in his chair, looking out across the parking lot. Lena pushed her sunglasses off her face, beginning to feel that any opportunity previously offered by those flecked grey eyes and wary smile had been somehow lost along the way, his frayed routine pushed now to its limits. “The pulse generated by our equipment has the same properties as a gravitational field, but pushing away from the earth. Like gravity, it is completely unaffected by matter placed in its beam path such as a thick steel plate and the force it exerts differs only with mass, not the material or chemical properties of the object. Of course you need the right ceramics. That was the most difficult part. Not to mention cooling the disc down to temps below—what was it, Col—40K’s?” “Never mind initial conditions, there are just so many other unknowns,” Colin's legs were wound around each other under the table, exposing bruised pink shins. Diaz smoked, gazing across the parking lot. Lena was growing aware of a frayed edge to his measured insipidity; his unbuttoned sleeves and twisted collar suggesting emergent limits built into the extravagant routine. “Easy to imagine, though,” Trulli rubbed his liver-spots. “The world freed from the limits of projection. Like a movie.” “Like a movie?” she said. “But remote imaging is the opposite of a movie. A movie is simulation… it creates a false world that bears just a surface resemblance to this one… and in fact turns against it in order to open up a new space for alternative proliferations, the two worlds are tethered together by our imagination.” Trulli waved for more coffee. His one good eye was coming back to life, an inbuilt menace returning to his hunch. Lena looked up from the table as Chunky blew a kiss at someone behind her as she pushed open the glass door. The wires still in her ear. Lena watched Chunky rummage in her purse for a bleating cell phone, and heard its cry 50 drowned out by a feathered throttle and the bike suddenly in full view before coming to a stop in front of the restaurant: buttery duco and diamond-hard chrome idling in the booze-sodden afternoon like a cave-painting come to life. Its rider, a conjured leviathan from the prayers of future rock-dwellers, wore primitive Stars and Stripes drag beneath a compact helmet that he pulled off before reaching into a sports bag. “Lena,” Trulli said, leaning forward. His spotted hands began to creep back toward hers. “This technology will answer their prayers.” “Whose prayers?” she said. “And for what?” His fingers were dry and papery like brushwood against hers. She pulled her hand away. “To look down and not to fall, “he said. Still studying her closely, Trulli said something that she couldn’t hear under a burst of loud laughter from a nearby table undercut by the bike's idling murmur. He across to Diaz, clasping his spotted hands together on the table. She remembered these hands as bold and capable, and supposed that he did too. Chunky went down with the first three-round burst. She was talking into her headset on her way out: state of the art mobile communications technology in pieces on the ground. A waiter hit the pavement, and Lena found herself pressed up against Diaz under the table, glass raining down. The gunman in dusty leather stood astride the bulky yellow machine, his helmet dangling from one handlebar and a surprisingly small weapon gripped shakily in both hands. Another round: the giant glass Dionysus inside exploded. Half the restaurant vanished into air when a mirrored wall behind the bar disintegrated, is seemed to Lena, in slo-mo. Xeno's Café was getting smaller with every muffled shot. In her cramped position Lena felt Diaz’s physical presence as a real and fragrant entity as he pulled out a weapon. A flash registered, and also a dark liquid-flow from under the cellphone woman. She made herself small, and scanned for Wilson. There was another burst, answered by Diaz. Plates crashed. The wall to wall yelling in Xeno’s Greek Café was answered by a wail from approaching sirens. The gunman and his bag were gone, and Lena suspected that Diaz might have actually hit him. From under the table she heard the bellow of the bike’s wounded departure. 51

Diaz got up and looked around for Trulli, who appeared from behind the counter, brushing glass from his sweater. Diaz holstered his gun and turned to Colin, curled up against the door frame. His eyelashes were white against his face. He touched a wound above his left eye form which blood trickled in a thin, unsteady stream to a dark pool at his throat. Lena noticed a shiny ooze on her own jacket; as the blond woman with torn pantyhose crawled toward the door over broken plates and piles of food. “What happened?” Lena asked Diaz. One ear was blocked. Diaz raised an eyebrow sadly at her. “Is this a dream?” she said. Her sunglasses that she'd pushed up on her head during lunch, were gone. Lena turned to Wilson, and Diaz said to no one in particular, “A strange piece, considering, not what you’d expect.” “What did you expect?” Wilson said. “Paintball?” “What’s going on?” said Lena. “That model was banned in ‘94, after a massacre in a San Francisco legal firm. It’s got some faulty mechanism that switches to full auto without warning. You notice the laser sight, unusual on a semi, neither one thing nor another.” “It didn’t help him much. He was all over the place with that thing,” said Trulli. “I want to say I told you so,” said Diaz. “’94 was a big year.” “People are in need of medical attention here, Wilson, what's the story?” Lena said. The two men looked at each other. “I'd say just a disgruntled employee, wouldn’t you—”. If they told her would she know? Diaz running a hand through his hair. Faint crashes from inside and the splash of liquid spilling… staff attending to the fallen… uniformed men lumbering out of squad cars. “Let’s go,” said Diaz. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over Colin's shoulders, taking Wilson by the arm. They turned away from Lena and began to head toward a white unmarked van idling beside the walkway. Sun pounding down on the dead and wounded, the machine-etched shopfront in shreds across the pavement. Smells of late afternoon beer and burnt coffee. A silver- 52 haired Xeno fretting as he straightened a chair. Xeno pulled up an overturned table. A lock of silver hair fell over his eyes. “Where’s the shooter? Did anyone see the shooter? Where were the cops, those shits? I’ve lost the whole place, my whole place—they don’t know what it’s like,” tears glistening on Xeno’s year-round tan. “You don’t know what it’s like!” he called after Diaz. Diaz didn’t turn back. He pulled shades down over his eyes. A light breeze came up and lifted the back of his hair as he led Trulli away. 53

PART II

4 SEXUAL PRACTICES

Shadowy wooden Beefeaters recycled out of old Air India Maharajas guard a bamboo and plywood Buckingham Palace behind bamboo gates. The stage itself is a vast structure knocked up out of local materials. A track runs across the front along which the paparazzi on their plywood Kawasakis (pulled by ropes off- stage) will hound the Princess to her death. A guide told me that the bikes, like the wooden black Mercedes, are locked away in a truck in the theatre's compound. Sandi Roi plays the Princess. She is in the compound somewhere. Imagine her beneath mosquito netting feverishly dreaming of a brother away at school at Ann Arbor and a bi-focalled mother at work on the evening meal in Calcutta while her father in short-sleeved polyblend changes to yet another crowded bus that will take a further hour to get to their suburb. But here while she sleeps, buffalo graze behind the theatre, which is a gigantic tent set up in a field just outside the village. Behind it a bamboo grove falls away to a sea of grey- brown, the plantation.

… 54

Dean has sand in the crack of his ass from sleeping on the beach. He hunches into his sleeping bag and watches the leaden tide rolling in. He scrunches up the faxes and watches them blow across the black sand—grey blobs held aloft in the sea breeze until they merge into the ambient blur. He looks at his father’s cheque like he could eat it. Onkyo dreams exit stage left. Israel would kill him if he knew, but Dean has to keep turning up for work like normal, or he won’t get his allowance. Like Darla says, no job no help from Daddy. Israel doesn’t have to worry about things like allowance. His allowance is a caper away. When Chalmers comes back, he’ll no doubt buy Dean ramen at some overpriced joint down at Del Carrera in return for bragging rights about his trip (“two of them, wearing nothing but baked beans, Deano, from asshole to breakfast”) in some sort of forced and deranged attempt at intimacy which comes down, as always, to Chalmers having the last word. Mackenzie is worried. Dean hasn’t been home for three days. He doesn’t dare in case Israel sends Russell around to check. Dean tells his mother that he’s house-minding at Chalmers’s place and they speak on his cell. Mackenzie is currently focused on an online creative writing course. She wouldn't know even if he told her. And Israel? Running around town with thirty rounds jungle-clipped to an assault pistol taking pot shots at clients doesn’t give a man much time to check up on his staff. His ex-staff. Israel loved to clean his gun, some wacko piece he ordered on the internet. He bragged about having the pre-ban model, with its specially threaded barrel shroud and 32 round magazine. But even Kevin used to say Israel couldn’t shoot to save himself. Cut to Kevin lying on the layered dust with his eye filling up with blood. Watching Dean help himself to a souvenir. Cut to Damien surfacing in some film department in Canada. Cut to Cliff's Ram peeling up the onramp, tail-lights trembling before disappearing into the night, heading back to his mother's house one last time. To tiptoe past the room that he shares with his dead brother’s bed. Past parents' room, the bed softly breathing in the dead of life. To look for the last time upon his mother habitually sleeping on the side nearest the door for easy access to her boys’ muffled dream-yelps and Freudian thirsts, to linger a moment on her small tense shape, coiled for purpose even in sleep. To leave the turquoise ring he stole for her on the dining room table with no note. 55

Think: Russell could be hiding out at the ranch with the coyotes and his old German Shepherd but Dean doubts it. After dumping the dead at the border, he'll be heading off to putrefy fresh fields, right after he's taken care of Gemma. Dean figures Gemma was either in the double-cross with Russell and, like Dean, knows way too much. Or, more likely she’d already gone solo, partnering up with the Subject, who she sent to kill them all. Dean gets hard at the thought of it. Dean shivers into his sleeping bag. The nights are getting cooler. All he ate last night was a piece of cornbread from one of the plates piled up beside the sink at the restaurant. Clouds bank to the north. Two hours until any possibility of breakfast leftovers. Several hundred yards down the beach some kids are goofing off around a dying bonfire. Their silhouettes shift like filaments around the smouldering pile. A feathery blob moves in and out of Dean’s field of vision. It is possibly a dog and probably a big one. Dean watches the shape following it with his eyes to try and keep it in the frame but it just hovers elusively around the edges, as if some director can’t decide whether or not to keep it in or cut it out of the picture entirely. It keeps disappearing only to pop up somewhere else until Dean wonders if there are two dogs or if it is a dog at all. Maybe just something in his eye. He finds himself mesmerised by the moving, replicating shape playing at the edge of the frame.

…

How is the snowboarding or is it sandboarding? Don’t look down. I’m hooked up to you via a complex system of floating bodies in space, keyboards, cables, ones and zeros. Binary parenting can be a blast. You just have to go with the dataflow. I come bearing a package for a certain Avinash Ashtekar., C/- the Mobile Theatre Company, etcetera, etcetera. In case you’re wondering I am in Northern India: Rangeela Pradesh. United fly daily to Calcutta. A connecting flight to Lalganj airport. A taxi or a bus to the village. I’m staying at a hotel here at Lalganj, but am apparently going to be the guest of someone involved in the 56 production. They’re picking me up tomorrow. I’m going to spin this into a kind of independence theory in reverse: Go Global to stay Local. I might be able to work it into my chapter on Univers(al) Specifi/Cities. Can’t you see it… Tiwi Cross Dressers from Darwin and Misha Betov's productions for the Theatre of Moscow, and this: The minoritised subject and the power of the false: Diana in the Jungle. Kind of leaps off the page, doesn’t it? On a more grounded note, black-bereted paramilitary clash with AK- wielding separatists in back streets and mountain passes. Tribals move through the dense twilight forests, as invisible as the grenades they stuff into towering bamboo stands, the muffled report of WW1 carbines vying with the nocturnal call of protected wildlife, the distant crash of an illegally felled Teak. The insurgent groups who base themselves in the surrounding hills and across the border descend periodically to stage a kidnapping, ambush or ceremonious surrender of arms. I think of you wherever I am—

—Chalmers forgot to put a cheque in this one, so it's time to see Mackenzie. Dean can’t afford to keep buying new T-shirts and underwear at Walmart everyday, anyway—

—meanwhile there’s always a meanwhile. Plug in the Iridium for global access courtesy of Wilson Trulli and dial me up. Mr. Arun Krishnan is my guide. He is a brooding cutie with pale eyes and a hair lip who apparently works for a left-leaning newspaper. Who doesn’t? Years ago, before it all went ass-up, Lena and Trulli went to Palm Springs, and got someone to snap a Polaroid of the two of them next to a lifesize, cardboard Mayor Bono. In the picture you notice two things: 1)how much they are beginning to look like each other and 2), how Sonny, unchanging in the enigmatic stance of the image of an image, looks more real than either of them. I don't know which strikes me as the greater abomination. The Princess convalesces beneath her net. The heat knocks you sideways. 57

I wait for the science student Avi to arrive, and he will relieve me of Trulli’s anti- gravity hocus pocus. The scream of jungle wildlife, the dusky silence of the children; temples rocked in prayer. Movie music follows me wherever I go as the mothers wail for their dead soldiers. Can I make something of this or would my take just drown between hoot and holler? After the cancelled dress rehearsal last night, the West Coast media writers and performance-art theorists from Perth and British reviewers got rides back into town or found somewhere to stay here in village Zaribagh. Some attached themselves to the troupe and they are the ones drinking whisky and playing cards in Prince Charles’s trailer. As for the diva, they all say Sandi Roi is the real thing. I interviewed the impresario, Bibbu Ashtekar, who also happens to be the boy, Avi’s uncle. He told me that they used to call her Diana in high school because of an amazing resemblance to the Princess. “Actually,” he said. “You know she was born to play this part.” Villagers drift into town for the show, setting up camp on its outskirts. Some stay with second cousins and in-laws. The wealthy have reservations at the plantation guest house. But most come from up and down the green river on bejewelled foot or by boat. They balance meals and blankets on their heads. They travel stacked on bullock cart, sidewinding bicycles or scooters. They float across the swirling river and trickle down from dawn-blue thatched communities high up in the hills. They wear thin shirts and bulky dhotis or gauzy saris, jangling silver bracelets, flashing gold teeth, spectacles bulky and blurred. They come from the cities and industrial towns in gravity-defying compacts and pick-ups. Buses swerve past lumbering buffalo and sacred scavengers. Mynah birds burst out of a towering fir tree. Lurid posters in anomalous pastel tones—not just of Diana but audacious stage versions of Titanic and Anaconda, complete with special effects—peel off doorways and hang by nails from mango trees. The airport at Lalganj is busier than ever. Because even or especially here with the heat shimmering off the paddies and local history flowing in the veins of the villagers like the purple river that 58 feeds their green land, global myth looms large. For centuries drama has relied on the written form—the play of course, the novel, even verse. Now, and here in this place, it turns to the movies, and especially Hollywood blockbusters, which it adapts to its own unfathomable sensibility By this I mean, pre-production is under way for next year's main attraction: And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story: the play of the telemovie. Was it Lena who was nuts about it? I'm picturing Abbey working her way through a box of midyears, Lena cross-legged on the rug, decoding the bewildering sketches and celebrity walk-ons rerun on TVLand. Whether it was The Jackson Five, Ronald Reagan, or Dolly Parton, they all dropped into and out of the frame like pieces in a puzzle, clues to a greater mystery involving a fleshy and powerful banality. Perhaps in terms of reruns, an here I speak of the Diana play, it is this false memory of an elusive original that gives one access to the secret life like a prayer to who or whatever lies buried beneath the elegiac montage. And so, like the Indian Sonny and Cher whenever it is produces, Diana will answer the prayers for planetary empowerment. To look down and not to fall. I got you, babe.

…

Thursday night. Dean finally lets himself in to the shell-blue Del Carrera condo with its aspidistra and hibiscus hedge and views over the race track at around eleven o’clock. Inside he breathes in a competing toxicity to Mackenzie’s perfume: something uncharacteristically floral. A light goes on somewhere upstairs. Dean hears a door open and heavy footsteps, and he freezes as a strange woman in hippo-print pyjamas appears at the top of the split level landing. She holds a cricket bat. “Hi?” Waves the bat at him. “I’m Louise? Lou?” Why is she asking him who she is? She looks like she should know—every big twenty-something blond pound of her. Her hair is cut in a perky bob, and her healthy skin actually seems to glow in the dark. 59

“From Australia?” she says. “We children from previous marriages have to stick together?” Finally a question Dean knows how to answer. He turns around and puts his hand on the doorknob to his room but catches a sight of Louise’s big ass wobbling beneath her PJs as she stomps off. She leaves the cricket bat on the landing. Same mother? She definitely didn’t get those twins from Mackenzie. As Dean goes into his room he hears his shower running and then stop. He locks the door silently and pushes new blond dreads bought with Chalmers's last cheque out of his eyes as he turns around to see Gemma stepping into the wedge of light from the bathroom wearing his midnight blue waffle-weave robe. Her hair is combed off a high pale forehead and falls down the collar in dripping tendrils. She looks at Dean and then between them, where Dean’s masked rat is sitting on the desk eating an Oreo.” What’s its name?” Gemma says. In the angled light of the bathroom, Dean notices a little blue vein running across her left temple. “Dashiell,” Dean says.. She looks at him blankly. “He was a writer for a magazine in the thirties call Black Mask. Dashiell Hammett.” “Cool.” “It’s a masked rat. My mother named him.” She makes him shower first. She is in between Dean’s black Egyptian cotton sheets when he gets out. He gets in and her nakedness makes him tremble uncontrollably and she has to slide herself on to him, and he is gritting his teeth and grabbing at the sheets as the spasms build and she has to cover his mouth but a door slams upstairs, so someone must have heard his sobs. They smoke a joint and eat Oreos and talk about the shooting at Xeno’s and how it only rated a page two play in the Tribune. Disgruntled Employee Targets Scientist: Two dead. It was on the local news for a few minutes and Dean caught it on the kitchen radio at Miracles. “Where’d he ever get that gun anyway?” asks Dean. 60

“Who? Israel?” “No the other bandanna-wearing guy with a grudge against mad scientists,” he says. “He got it out of a firm in Miami, I think. They cater almost exclusively to the criminal market. They claim their weapons have an unrivalled resistance to fingerprints.” She is talking absently to Dashiell, who is eating Oreo crumbs out of her hand. “Israel needs a gun with an unrivalled ability to aim itself at the target,” says Dean. “He thought the laser sight would help.” Dean looks at her. She is turned slightly away from him watching Dashiell. Her hair has dried. He wonders where her gun is. He big black bag is on the floor beside the bed. On the bed table beside Dean is the tape he took from the dead Subject’s apartment. A computer-printed label says Two-Lane Black-Top, 1971. “Did you send the Subject to kill us?” Dean asks. She looks at him and smiles pityingly. “Why would I do that? Doesn’t change the fact you were in cahoots with Russell to waste Kevin.” “That was his plan?” “Gee, I don’t know… maybe he just needed some time to change a flat.” Dean shakes his head. “Did you see his heap outside when you got here? Maybe coming here wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do.” “Are you trying to tell me something?” She’s looking at him, smiling. Her nipple is holding the sheet up. Dean watches as the black folds slowly slide off the fleshy knob. Her breast is fully exposed, white and full and round. She touches her nipple with a red fingernail, watching him watch.

…

The incongruity of baking waves of heat under layers of night: I am trying to 61 acclimatise. Under a withered moon, the jungle spread out behind the scattered shacks and dirt lanes. Arun Krishnan and I sat for a long time in the yard behind the house where I am staying, by a low concrete platform used for washing dishes. The house belongs to his grandfather, as does the mahua brew that we were drinking. The back yard slopes down to a shallow pond with floating lotus plants, behind which is the stage and the theatre compound. As I sat and drank my beer, I looked toward the pond into a darkness layered with a shifting, unidentifiable mass: a small herd? Another drinking party? The darkness simmered and refused to give up its secrets. “Why are you really here, Dr Grant?” asked Krishnan, beginning unbelievably to roll a joint. “I mean the troubles lately. People will wonder how you got your pass.” “Identity politics, the fatal attraction of opposites,” I said. “What’s your game? His sexiness is staggering, with his swept-back hair and luminous eyes—not blue and not green. Johnny Cash meets Charles Sobhraj. “Actually I happen to know that you have a parcel here addressed to a young fellow by the name of Avinash Ashtekar:. Avi as you may know is the ward of the Bibbu Ashtekar, the legendary Impresario. Ordinarily this would be none of my concern. However your man Trulli’s aerialist stunts are infamous especially in these parts where the debate over India’s need for a long-range ready-to-fire capabilities without the launch and transportation nightmares of the Agnis I, II, and III is almost too hot to handle, sir. And yet here you are.” “Here I am,” said. “Waiting for the show to begin.” “And here I am an old-fashioned activist running interference between unfortunately routine regional violence and its wider global significance,” Krishnan rubbed a mosquito bite on his stylishly chappalled toe. “Are you aware that GPS is now in the basic tool-kit of your motley fundamentalist? Imagine what an established Chieftain could do with Trulli’s anti-gravity technology.” Krishnan’s hair is styled like a rock-star: soft and gleaming and darkly brushed back off well-tended skin. He is based in Tushwar, where he lives with 62 his architect wife and two children. “GPS?” I was thinking about my own hair. How I’d kept it long over the decades—a kind of modish salt-n-pepper pageboy. “Global Positioning Systems—Satellites and what have you, without which you could not communicate with your son via the laptop you are using now. How much would you say that phone—an Iridium, is it—set him back—and that’s just the frosting, beneath which is some pretty rotten banana cake, sir. Why get involved?” I was wondering if he simply used coconut oil on his hair when in the village, or if he brought his products along—the holding gels and anti-frizz serum, the heat treatments and ultra-balms for maximum shine. “You’re the one who’s bananas, buddy-boy. Trulli can’t even get funding in his own country without fudging results. And the satellite phone is just for insurance, by the way. Ordinarily I just plug the laptop into ports provided by the hotels I stay in, but here—well, we thought conditions could get a little rugged.” “So why did you agree to do it?” “What?” “Take the role of courier. Delivery boy. You look like someone typically attracted to a bigger part. Your hair, for instance. Boyishly long atop that lumbering physique. I bet you do push-ups every morning. How many : fifty? A hundred?” I drew on the joint. It was the smoothest weed I’d had in a decade, sweet and leafy on the palate with syrupy undertones, and no rough edges to get caught on the way back up. “Do you know why most people do anything?” I said. His eyes upon me were as red as a weasel’s by now. “Why don’t you tell me.” “Sex or money or both.” A distant howl from the jungle. Was it a primate or a jackal? I am learning how to tell the difference. I shivered in the cooling darkness and passed him the joint. I watched him blow the smoke out in a fine stream toward the pond 63

“So, in the end, your claim for our Diana is—?” A yellow light from the neighbour’s house came on. The grandfather’s tethered goat stirred in her sleep. “Well, sight unseen of course, but humble productions like these are generally a nostalgia for social change writ large: a kind of homesickness for the future.” “Really?” he said. “Really,” I said. “They work on so many different levels.” 64

5 DROP-DEAD HORNDOG

Dashiell is grooming himself on Dean's desk. Dean finishes the joint in the semi- darkness, listening to Gemma fall away from him into sleep. He reaches for the remote and plays Reed’s tape, Two Lane Black-Top. Two brooding long-hairs in a stripped-down hot-rod. They challenge a middle-aged loser in a shiny Pontiac to a cross-country race. They pick up this underage hitchhiker who ends up sleeping with everyone while tossing out lines like, “What is this, some kind of masculine power trip?” One of the lead actors is actually James Taylor. He and his co- driver are on some kind of existential track through the bleached vista of their own minds that in the end excludes the sex and the money. All they care about is getting to the end of the world. Just to prove it’s there. They blow off their nemesis who says, “Colour me gone, baby.” A still camera shoots their random exhausted trips in and out of diners, motel rooms, gas stations and behind the wheel of the Chevy itself, a stripped-down souped-up relic eating endless blacktop the way one of those old projectors used to eat film. The way a runaway train eats up the track.

…

A torn red curtain hangs limply across the empty stage. The Village temples are called Houses of the Name. I take my trusty Handycam with me wherever I go. Children mob us in the streets and flies clump around their genitals and buzz lazily at the corners of their mouths. I point and shoot. They hold out their hands for cash. The players rehearse without the Princess. Sandi’s stand-in is a make- up girl with a limp. The make-up girl tells me Sandi used to be or is still engaged 65 to Avi., the boy whose name is on the package. This boy Avi: where is he? We all want him to come home so that his Princess can wake up. “He is nuts about the theatre,” Krishnan tells me. “The whole Ashtekar family have been in the business for generations. It is this fellow, who in spite of being a physics student in Calcutta, finds the time to dig up most of the background information about Princess Diana.” He follows me around the Village. We take a boat trip up the river. I try and explain what I do. “Textual practices, “ I say. “Theories that liberate the text slash subject from ideology.” “Sexual Practices?” he gestures toward a group of raggedy insurgents-in- waiting gathered at the sweet store. “And how exactly does that alleviate world hunger?”

…

Dean is saying: “Russell needed someone to delay the gig to give Kevin time to get killed. Why kill Kevin? Can you tell me? I thought they were friends. You sent The Subject back to the house to save the tape, to kill someone or get killed. The Client has his tape, and for his sins against Israel, the Client is now dead or hiding. And I’m still broke.” But Gemma is asleep. And Dean is lying here next to his potential new girlfriend in his mother's house while someone else who hates him is bumping around upstairs. But he finds himself distracted by periodic blips and flashes on the screen. The blips in the footage of Two Lane Black-top might not be noticeable under normal circumstances. But circumstances are not normal, and Dean only needs his current state of turgid self- awareness to confirm this. The anomalies in the footage have all but disappeared by the climactic scene, which occurs on a race track, the last leg of the challenge. It's night and there's a shot of lights 66 on the roadside (blip) and James Taylor at the wheel (blip) and he speeds up (blip) and there's a shot of the road ahead and then (blip)—

…

“Demythologising,” I told Krishnan. “If it moves, kill it,” Avi is due in tomorrow. He has his last exam in Calcutta today. “We find badness, where we thought there was goodness. Debunking: break apart the object and unzip your desire. The textual self unleashes powers of the false. Enslavement of the text: heckle and Jekyl. Sever oneself from the word-slash-image: I am not an animal. Guilty by implication, and accessory to the meme of the sign. Otherness: sever, repudiate, and renounce the love object. The sign has by its own actions renounced innocence. But love can be restored. Textual practices map out a future in which the bad things it demystifies can be made good.”…

Dean lies in bed and listens to his mother and stepsister Louise talking in the front yard beside the garage. Mackenzie’s accent is in full Down Under flight. “Shut up, Lou.” “Seriously. He’s got to go, Mum.” “Where to? Chalmers won’t have him.” “That’s because he’s a bloody juvenile delinquent. Not to mention a little shit.” “He’s sixteen.” “He should be at school.” “He’s just having a year off. Special dispensation from his therapist. The paper- work is in order. He’s got special home-work designed to restimulate his emotional intelligence.” “He’s bent. He should be kept away from society. His conformity—the Rasta styling, the budding stubble—is a mask. He’s a freak of the ages.” “I’m too old for this.” 67

Dean hears the Acura door open. “Drug addicts. Ravers. The panting and moaning, the heady decadent fumes at all hours. The rest of us need sleep, exhausted as we are by the sheer effort of living. We get off our derrieres: action, reaction. He doesn’t leave that room. He and that little moll.” “He goes to work.” Dean hears the car door shut. “Work, I hear you say? Dirtying dishes while dealing drugs to losers and carving his pound of flesh off his wastrel of a father?” “He is the dishwasher,” Mackenzie says, her voice muffled at first behind the descending window. “It’s a real job.” “He’s a poster boy for the void.” Another car door opens. Dean hears keys jangling. A finch singing. “You’ve been hostile ever since you got here Lou, it’s pissing me off. Really. Get a life. Get laid.” Louise’s voice laboured as she loads various gym bags and accessories into the rental. “Know this: it’s me or him. He’s behind that locked door and every night the groans and moans. What is that about? What kinds of connection are possible in a vacuum? The mind boggles. I’m repelled—yet fascinated,” the brash laughter splintering the late afternoon. “Not much.” “You’re wearing me down, Lou. Look, my hair’s gone spastic. It’s book club night; we meet at Spanky’s to discuss weighty literature. Why don’t you come? We’re reading Don DeLillo’s Running Dog. Seventies hokum—paranoia, bugging devices—The Age of Conspiracy. It’s a bit of fun, really.”

Gemma’s breasts are like soft blind rats. She asks him how long they are going to have to put up with his sister. “Lou’s not my sister.” “She’s full trouble,” Gemma says. “Matey.” 68

…

Krishnan interrupted my writing: “Unlike myself, you and your colleagues still entertain the dream of reanimating the Left through its obscure cultural practices—the resistive nuances dormant in Yabbie Racing, the cultural politics of Cowpat Lotto and what have you. You are admirably engaged in a ceaseless rereading of a text that never stops rewriting itself, as the saucy French would say.” He presses his stub into the concrete. It was getting late and we were meant to be going across the river tomorrow for a wedding. The boy’s arrival is delayed by another day. In a family picture published in yesterday’s Lalganj Courier he is second from the left in the front row, a toothy blur with deep-set eyes. “There is no Left, left,” I said. “As such. What we have now is an adversarial matrix. The Queer theorists, and feminists, and people of colour are the base quotient for an exponential series of queers of colour and women of colour to the factor of all the other others. Careers depend on being able to identify an oppositional dynamic running through a given text and lay claim to it.” When I was a boy, we lived in a small frame house in an outlying area of Jersey: Rookwood. We were one of a long row backing onto the tracks. Your grandmother Lily taught English to foreigners in a community college across town, but it was solidarity of a greater power that she craved—the smoky union meetings, moonlit exchanges on street corners, mixed crowds at Negro bars. She let herself go in a physical sense. She could get away with this longer than she deserved. We ate at the kitchen table, yellow Formica looking out onto the railroad. I liked to have dinner waiting for her when she got home: something simple—a bowl of soup or an egg. She was often too tired to eat. I’d cover the bowl with a pot lid to keep it warm while she lay down. I’d check on her resting in her stocking feet on the twin bed. She'd be out cold and as night fell I put myself to bed. She would get up later and reheat the soup in an aluminium pot kept 69 under the sink in paper bags. The kitchen was linoleum and Formica hell: a table, a stove, a sink and a small countertop. She kept the pots and pans in clean paper bags under the sink. I thought of getting up and sitting with her. I wanted to watch her eat. I liked the way she tucked soft brown hair carelessly behind delicate ears that possibly hadn't been washed in recent memory. She wore pearl earrings (Lena has these now). Instead I lay quietly under the army-issue blanket. It was as if I couldn’t move. I pictured her at the stove with her bathrobe hanging open over a soiled nylon nightgown as she stirred. Although I was aware at only the deepest level of distant sirens on the prowl it is this sound that comes back to me even now in dreams. This heat-seeking sound in search of another. I learnt what it was to be ghost in the transformative realm of a vanishing schematic. I watched old oppositions melt away, leaving nothing in their place. There no Left, left. “At that time,” I said to Krishnan. “Reformers came in two varieties–robust obsessives and nervy theorists and I would be neither. Lily was the first kind. She went like a bat out of hell. Work hard, play hard. Teaching made her tired only because it was neither one thing or another, neither work or play, but something in-between that seemed to serve a secondary purpose in her model world.” “For mothers of a certain era,” said Krishnan, who looks too young to know. “Their entire repertoire of moral machinations consists of a high-wire act between labour and love “Don’t look down,” I said. “And your father,” said Krishnan. This time, we were sitting in a small café sweating over saucers of sugary tea. A television hung from a corner playing Die Hard dubbed in Hindi. “Pop was the other kind,” I said. “He hurt inside and out. He used to hold his aching head, but it was his mind that throbbed. Bruised eye-bags on a thin face. He dressed well. He kept a small camp bed in a workshop behind the garage.” “Where he listened to the radio and smoked,” said Krishnan. “I imagine.” “The folded leaflets piled up on the Formica table; she organised the picket- lines and got petitions signed. She collecting food packs for dependents of 70 incarcerated fellow travellers. Then there were the parties, impromptu get togethers over J &B whisky and their legendary meatballs. The jazz spinning out of Pop’s old Vitriola. I was growing up into a very good-looking boy. Pretty hair. A curly grin.” “I can see you now,” said Krishnan. “A drop-dead horn dog.” “I came home one night in the rain and found a curly-haired man in my room. He had been a contender for Mr Universe once. Now he taught with Lily at the community college. He lay passed out with one burly arm thrown across those adipose wagon-trails. He’d spent the year in Paris where he'd taken a whole paper on Freedom at the Institute of Political Science. Like Lily, he was card carrying AFT—American Federation of Teachers.” “Where did you go?” Krishnan said. I had almost forgotten he was there. This was another day. We had been across the river, to a meeting of three villages to discuss the latest spate of missing teens. The missing are young boys “recruited” by rebels who are in turn backed by shady business interests. Guerrillas take the boys at gunpoint while their families sleep. They force them to dig up the family’s savings stashed at the bottom of rice-sacks or stitched into bedding. Sometimes the boy would come back with a bullet lodged in his neck, with or without hands and feet. “Where did you go,” said Krishnan again. “With the muscle man in your bed, where did you sleep?” Oh that,” I said. “I crawled in with her.”

…

Dean became a thief when he saw his becoming in the eyes of Hate Boy. Hate Boy was a neighbourhood kid although Dean had never seen him before. He came out of nowhere to knock on Dean’s door and take Dean fishing. But he saw something else in Dean. Something that made him leave Dean by himself beside the cold river. Leave Dean barefoot in the mud. To eat a solitary snack of candy and soda stolen from the local market. Dean wasn’t surprised. He’d seen himself in Hate-boy’s blue eyes: becoming. 71

He’d heard it in his father’s last word. Chalmers always had to have the last word. Toot fucking toot.

Toot-toot. I beeped but you didn’t look back . You were involved in something else entirely: the blue-eyed boy who fished. You were on your way, floating in hate’s slipstream. Why did hate pick you? Why you— “He didn’t mind?” said Krishnan. ‘ We were on a path that skirted the river. We walked down a scrubby mound and stepped onto a large rock platform jutting out into the green water. An old woman supervised two dark-eyed girls draping damp petticoats across the rocks. “Who?” “Your father. You sleeping with your mother, while he was in the shed?” The shed held a sophisticated ham radio. But best of all was the Captain’s Chair built of soft American Oak contoured to the body and worn to a patina webbed out of the muted sunbeams and years of contact with unwashed flannel. I would sit in that chair after a day of fishing and swivel first one way and then the next and the airwaves would bring the world to us in a stream of staticky fizz. “Mind? Pop was asleep in the shed. The Jazz records were all his—Muddy and Sonny and Fats—but he couldn’t party for long. Mother was out cold. I had to open the window to let out the dank fumes. Then I took off her shoes—” “Look,” Krishnan cut in, pointing to a long boat floating down the river. An emaciated fisherman rowed with khakied jawans at either end. Between them a brace of tribals with their hands tied behind their back. “Logging. A single Teak tree fetches US$950 on the black market.” I tried to look impressed. “The Villagers are going underground to get their boys back,” he said. The sons and brothers who have been kidnapped by rebels as unwilling recruits. There is an illusive but legendary mercenary whose name is Nirmal Prasad,” Krishnan looked closely at me with his parti-coloured eyes. “The rarely-seen Prasad is a jungle warrior whose m.o consists of kidnapping the boys back again 72 and returning them to their families for a price. The cash goes back into The Cause, of course.” “The Cause?” “Prasad is a Separatist. That is the only Cause around here. The so-called insurgents are mere counter-revolutionaries. Police flunkies punishing innocent villagers for supposed transgressions.” A breeze gusted up from the river, lifting the dead and dying leaves on the banks. They swirled around us whispering the secrets of this land. The language goes flap, flap, whirling around me. I hear, but I don’t understand.

…

Gemma sits on the end of the bed in Dean’s midnight blue waffle-weave bathrobe and sips from a can of diet Sprite, leaving a greasy imprint on the tab hole. She offers it to Dean. He’s lying on the bed, naked with hands folded behind his head. She looks around the bedroom. “When did you get the Fender?” “For my eleventh birthday from my father.” “Are you any good?” “I’ve never played it.” Dean's Queen-size bed has a sage green jacquard bedspread that Mackenzie bought in London. The walls are a matching tone of woody green which makes the room look smaller than it is. An unused punching bag swings in a corner. Above the desk is a large framed poster from a movie he never saw: Reservoir Dogs, and another one of Kirsten Dunst in her underwear. On the wall hanging over the bed that they rarely leave are a couple of Australian prints of Amazonian women with banana breasts and giant nipples. “Who did those?” Gemma asks. An Australian artist, Reg Mombassa. He had a band in the 70s called Mental as Anything. “What did they sing?” 73

Dean knows only the chorus of one of their songs because his mother used to play the CD. If you leave me, can I come too. A new silver iMac looms on the oversized oak-look desk with rotating Vampirillas floating on its screen, a different one for every month. The silver micro-blinds are slightly open and the white glare from outside slices across Gemma’s torso in horizontal stripes. Her face above her body is shaded in silvery gloom but outside, the birds are silent so it must be daytime. “He began to shut me out,” Gemma said, picking at the bed spread. “The Subject. He worked on the footage day and night, I don't know what doing. He made calls. Went on errands. I'd go over and he was busy on his computer and I had to go away. They always send me away.” “Have you seen my iPod?” Dean says, without getting up. “I had it yesterday, or was it today? What day does the maid come?” “I wonder what she was telling us about herself … or about us?” “Who?” Dean says. His dick moves. Toward the sun striped across her slim body. “Princess Diana. Do you remember her hair? I mean from the pictures. Her hair made her look like Simon Le Bon, or was it vice versa? Remember them? Duran Duran. Images remember. They exist only to remember. Look at an image of Diana and it looks back. Its secrets proliferate in the collective memory. He sits up on the bed and runs a hand across her soft belly under the robe and up to her breasts. She loosens the robe and lies back on the bed. She balances the can of Sprite on rampant pubic hair. Dean takes it off, and gets on top of her, chugging on it as he starts grinding, softly, into white flesh stark against the dark robe. Still chugging. “Diana,” she says. “Killed The Subject. Not me.” He says, “I’ve got some money coming from Chalmers. You take it and go up to your step-mother’s in Santa Barbara. Get a job until I get there. “ “I want. The tape.” “The professor’s got it.” “You’d make a copy. Wouldn’t you? If you were him.” “Who?” 74

“The Subject.” “Sure. I’ll find it. Then we’ll go away.” “To Australia. Yes yes.” Dean pushes into her again and watches her pale blind breasts jiggle as she closes her eyes.

… 75

6 A HUNTER AGAIN

Time passes. Dean can feel something building in him, a sense of purpose left behind in that downtown squalor where two men were killed. At Miracles, he squats down to stack the stockpot and the big sauté pan underneath the stainless steal countertop. He gets up and looks into the sink but decides not to wipe it. He takes off his apron and throws it into the hamper with the dishrags. He reaches for his father’s letter off the shelf and opens it, absently scrunching up the faxed pages and dropping them one by one in the trash. The cheque—$100. He puts it into the pocket of his backpack. He goes into the cool-room and nabs two-three vegeburger patties, a couple of steaks, a hunk of cheese and three cranberry muffins. He puts them in his backpack and leaves quietly out the back door.

…

“You don’t want to get involved with this,” Krishnan said. He stretched his frame, catlike, across the circular cement platform that swelled against the starless belly of night like a giant navel, a flattened yoni. “Your daughter is already in danger. Trulli isn’t finished with her. He will use her up. But surely you don’t want to also imperil the boy—” “Which one?” “Which what?” “Which boy?” “Avi Ashtekar . Don’t give him the tape. It’s double-trouble.” “Double-what?” “He’s a good boy. Achchha beta.” “English only, please.” “The boy knows too much already, and yet not nearly enough, believe me. 76

He thinks he can save her—” “Save who?” I rubbed my eyes. I downed the rest of my beer, thirsty after the evening’s salty meal, beyond anything I could imagine. Sweat plastered my hair against the back of my neck: not a good climate for a retro-chic pageboy hairstyle. But I’ll be damned before I trim it: that windswept ‘do has been gracing my dust jackets for two and a half decades. Maybe a ponytail? “The Princess who cannot save herself. And there are those who are simply waiting for him to take possession of the tape which is really two: I warn you, Dr. Grant, they are waiting to pounce on Avi, but if you don’t give it to him, you will unleash a special brand of hell—Trulli’s godless web linking higher to highest man in a vertical reach beyond—” , “Calm down, pally, I’m not here to steal the soul of your culture with my—” “Sexual practices, isn’t it?” “Textual, actually, textual practices. Where the hell is that boy?” ““The best-kept secrets flourish unmolested on the surface of things,” Krishnan said, with a savage smile. “The secret is woven into the image itself. It was always this way, even before digital. Ever looked at the back of a Flemish tapestry? The back tells a different story, it weaves a contradictory message: coded and eternal. Tell me about your first wife.” I was losing weight. I had felt on arrival like a big lumbering American. I basked in the stares. I tried to buy a new pair of jeans and could fine none with legs long enough. My long hair drew giggles from the women. But now no one seems to notice me. My hair is falling out. I wrap it in tissue and burn it beside my cot every morning. “I met Abbey Weiss in 1968 in the bar at Heathrow airport. We spent two days together in an airport hotel while the century effectively came to an end. Between you and me, I had the buckish good looks of a liberal film director, the mind of an mathematician, the hollow leg of a British motor journalist.” “And the rutlust of an old dog?” Blokey banter building up in the elaborate routine. “A heart of stone, “ I said. “Is what I wished for.” 77

“A relic of the sexual revolution—” he said, with a stagey wink. “Yeah, well, but sadly by the ‘80s it was all over…’84 in fact. Lena was twelve. By then the long-distance life in deconstructed English departments requiring frequent travel to conferences, remote festivals and chilly European archives seemed more a part of me than she was. What’s that noise?” “Deer,” he said, pressing a button on his watch. “They must have got a whiff of us. I should be inside working … Lena, Lena, the one with the art?” The beeping had stopped. “I never mentioned art.” “You spoke of canvases leaning against sunlit walls. Fruit, actually. Peaches vertically stacked against fluorescent backgrounds, lime green and such. Orange and pink pears all in a row.” “Don’t recall that conversation, pal.” I would have given him the tape there and then but I couldn’t help but see him as some kind of low level threat, like Trulli long ago, but with a stronger chin. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Actually so your daughter takes care of things while you are gone—looks after her baby step-brother, gets your money to him and keeps it out of the hands of what, wife number two or is it three—” “Trish is half my age! Lena’s what, in her thirties now, let’s see 1971. Trish is just twenty-nine or so she says. She’s got the kid, the classes.” “Yes yes, the swimming,” he said. “But to music. I should be inside working on tomorrow’s editorial.” “Actually, it’s more like running” I said. “But in a dream” Our weedy chuckles woke the goat. She struggled to her feet and pulled frantically at the tether once or twice before finding something to chew on in the cooling dust. “Members line up for her classes, sipping gaudy fluids and adjusting waterproof heart-rate monitors. Stay strong till the end, she tells them. That’s the challenge.” “The pregnant and infirm—waving Styrofoam dumb bells above their heads. Does she wave back?” an incongruous giggle escaped as he coughed and 78 passed the joint to me. “Not waving, drowning—” I drew on it like the burn-out I am and passed it back. He didn’t smoke it right away, just held it aloft in nervous fingers. His bloodshot eyes like old wounds fixed on me, the smile frozen on his exhausted face. “The boy will come,” he said. “It won’t be long. He’ll take you to the heart of the matter but at what price?” I'm sitting in bed now with the last of the joint. Easy to imagine: Krishnan cross-legged on the worn mat beside his sleeping grandfather. The Dell’s galactic glow enveloping the younger man in its planetary embrace. I sit here on this cot in a small North Indian town. Threads of smoke hover in the mosquito net before drifting out on the prevailing breeze to the pond, across the cultivated acres and out toward the jungle. Double trouble? …

—cooler now at night. Clouds blow across the stars, and the simmering ocean is sludgy like the chocolate pudding in the bottom of the pot he just scrubbed. Dean hitches a ride downtown and then gets on a bus lit up like an ambulance. The driver is an Albino ape with a wispy colourless moustache over a little pink mouth. A group of Mexican cleaners in blue jeans and tiny sneakers sits in front. Dean gets off on Potter and starts down Harry to the apartment building of The Subject. …

And … Action! A ten metre high Styrofoam iceberg rips a hole in a plywood ship floating in a sea of blue nylon. The audience goes wild. Bangles tinkle. Bosomy aunts and their fetching nieces smile at me. We are watching Titanic: the Play of the Movie. Earlier I saw a giant wooden aircraft, manned no less, take off in Hijack. In yesterday’s Anaconda The kajalled hero struggles with a giant 79 cloth snake while his double romances a betrothed village girl in the background and guerrilla soldiers patrol the theatre compound. Fusion theatre in full swing. High concept gestures immersed in regional song and dance, hammy pantomime, double entendre, Western dress. They don’t let me video more than five minutes of each performance, so I take frantic notes… but I really don’t know how I’m going to get this stuff out of here. I know from procuring planetary oddities to shore up the ruins of liberal theory and this doesn’t really fit in—

—Dean sometimes thinks about how he’d tell it … to Gemma, say, if she asked, but she won’t now. She’s in Santa Barbara, or headed that way. Chewing her fingernails down to the quick on the train and wondering where The Subject kept the copy. Or if he even made one. “I know he was trying to,” Gemma had said before she left. “He didn’t tell me, but I think that’s what he was doing all that time. Without me. That blond bitch took him away from me. Princess Diana. With her hair.” Saturday night. And there are a lot of things that Chalmers either knows or he doesn’t. On his way back from Gymbaroo that time Chalmers saw Dean walking away from him, and it turned him into some kind of visionary, Zen and the Art of Long-Distance Parenting: if you leave me, can I come too. But for Dean it just came down to another sad Saturday in an empty house. Orange trees reflected dully in the unused swimming pool, and eleven year old Dean slouched on the Spanish leather sofa in front of the giant TV. A knock on the door barely audible, Dean willing it away as the siren call not of a life outside the chill room but of certain death. The knock is followed by a soft scuffle and a familiar metallic sigh: fishing rods. Death would look like that, wouldn’t it. Come fishing with me, Death says. It’ll be fun. The trout hover over their shadows waiting just for you Deano. Yes, Dean fishes but no, not since Pop died. When he was really little, Dean would squat beside Pop in those cool waters back east in a special pair of fishing pants Pop sewed up specially for him on Grandma’s old Singer and talk the fish into dying. He’d talk them into his two-handed tickle, Pop standing there in amazement—the ancient Mariner in rubber pants—while the 80 kid picks up one slippery trout after another in his bare hands. It was then and there that Dean formed an unshakable belief in the power of choice. Everyone chooses their own form of death: him, the fish, Pop in the shed, everyone, even Chalmers. Don’t look down. Toot toot. Anyway, there was Death juggling two rods, one of which—a bright purple thing with silver lettering—he holds out, clearly deciding not to say a word to Dean ever. They walk down the street, Dean struggling to keep up with the kid’s pistol-packing stride. And there’s Chalmers and Trish passing them on their way home and waving but Dean couldn’t see past the cold blue eyes of Hate-boy, his father’s silver van slicing the blue irises like a manta ray. On their way to the river, Dean and the boy stop at the market to buy some Cokes. They walk through the candy aisle, pre-Dean still floating beside Hate Boy. But Dean's time is nearly there: history called. The boy stuffs a candy-bar and a bag of liquorice into the big front pouch of his Ecko sweatshirt and then he nods to Dean: time to go. But not in those words. These weren't his last words … …

Diana may be Princess of Buckingham Palace, says the Prince to Camilla under a giant disco ball, but you are Queen of my Heart.

I have a new distraction. Her name is Laxmi and she’s a heck of set designer (the giant cloth snake in Anaconda is all her own work). So we missed most of the first act including the Royal Wedding … all the frou-fra-ha between the lowborn village girl and her bitch mother-in-law.

I am a poor girl from a humble family.

With the rumoured return of her fiancé, Sandi Roi, the actress who plays the Princess, is fully recovered. She is also a student from Calcutta, with black hair cut in a Sloanish bob and an ample bosom. Her skin is topaz and she wears blue contact lenses. 81

Security for the theatre is courtesy of Chanda, the guerrilla group run by an illusive local kingpin, BS Chilling, who fronts the Hula Hut juice franchise. Shunya took over from Suraj, a left wing group protesting the Western content in the productions, until the Feds, assisted by the paramilitary and loyalist groups came to town. There was bloodshed—that's how Krishnan lost his mother, by the way— and now the ultra-nationalist Chanda keep the peace. Back to allegories. Read the palace guards as the Indian paramilitary; throw in a brace of “you bitches” in Hinglish, some dizzying production numbers, and bawdy allusions to what goes on beneath a burkha. With enough cash, you can sex up any tired old tale, and vice versa. End of story. Can I go now? The short-sleeved and sandalled Fourth Estate fidgets in two or three rows of the vast and stifling tent for the full dress rehearsal. The international press comprise a long-haired critic from The Observer with a tea-spattered lapel, and a rubbish features writer from Australia whose breasts look like her own. And the rest, academics mainly… a smattering of disorientated cultural studies, theatre and performance scholars on grateful leave from rationalised university departments around the world. Fill the coffee-pot and watch your back. Diana emerges Venus-like from the depths of her role, transforming proscenium into provisional space and it is the miracle we have come to see. What distant memories will she bring with her? The act, like the image, remembers eternally until the end of memory unleashes something else entirely: the imagination. That’s the allure. Tomorrow night the tent will pack in a couple thousand paying locals, in slacks and vibrant saris held in thrall to their dusky Diana and her partial metamorphosis into a timeless martyr from the classic texts, strong and tragic, Western glamour turned on its head: that’s what this means. She wears white make-up, a purple dress and speaks in musical Hinglish.

I am Diana, Queen of Hearts.

The villainous Paparazzi loom as large as the scale model of the Palace. 82

Hisss, we say. Boo. A large wooden helicopter suspended on wires overhead makes a choppy landing on the painted Palace lawns, spilling out a team of crouching reporters: lock and load. Aboard a scale model of the Royal Yacht Britannia, the geographically-challenged Princess laments her lack of privacy.

We have passed Gibraltar, Sicily, the Suez Canal and Algeria,” says Diana. “And still they follow.

Pushing fan-blown hair out of her eyes, the Princess turns and points accusingly at us… you… while a bobbing rowboat filled with brown-armed photographers closes in. A satin sea undulates menacingly. Chandas take their positions in the village and at flash points around the peninsula. Imagine: shy boys in khaki hefting AK's. At intermission I ducked out under cover of a standing ovation to try and find Avi. I had the tape with me. I am never without it, partly because I don’t trust Krishnan, who I see less of these days. The Impresario, Bibbu Ashtekar thundered toward the stage waving brown arms. I thought I had seen a young man sitting with him earlier, maybe not. Technicians scrambled around equipment and the lighting people called across the scaffolding at a perspiring stagehand called Shiv in a Chez Guavara T-shirt. Outside, in the starry dark of the sleepless village, some village toughs lounged by the tent. As I approached, their reddened eyes narrowed darkly behind the smoke of their cigarettes: Guerrillas in the midst. One of them goaded me in English, “Look for his woman, OK.” They joined each other in mannered, mirthless laughter: “Saaley Amreekan.” “Which woman?” I said. “Whose? Avi’s?” Chatter tinkled from the refreshment marquee. The slim silhouette of the Australian journalist swayed in the buttery flare of the bamboo torches while the jungle night closed in around us. “The Princess of Di, OK? She really really has love always to the people. 83

Look for the Princess.” They pointed to their puny chests, red eyes and me and laughed. I was always a sucker for Australian panty line. I left, and before you could say Tiki torch, Sheleah the features writer and I were nibbling barfi and discussing Bakhtin in the VIP tent.

They belong to me, always, to my name and to history. I am Diana, the People’s Princess.

Act II: Lady Diana Spencer the overcooked saint. Alone in the world now, she explains to an aid that she has a duty to the people, who, like her, are victims of a vicious political machine, and to whom power can be returned only in death. Then — we’re in Paris, — dance-hall music wheedling up from the pit. Paparazzi on cardboard motorbikes pursue the Princess and Dodi in the plywood Mercedes into the tunnel to a cacophony of strobe lights and electronic Indian movie music. Curtain, cut to the tunnel. The car rears up at a wild angle to a loud screech of tires, before hitting the fatal yellow pillar and rolling. A woman in the audience screams before a final lurch and the car is still, plywood wheels spinning crazily in the silence. Diana dies as she lived: in perpetual motion. …

Dean gets off the bus, and walks across Harry Street into Potter. He’s driven past the apartment complex many times with Damien and Cliff, but only now realises how vast it really is. It takes up almost the whole block—eight clusters of buildings in units of four to eight apartments, each with an anchor-unit of maybe twenty or thirty apartments five six stories high. Near the corner, what’s left of the street is taken up with a laundromat, a Mailboxes, Etc. and a small dark market behind steel shutters. It is a windy night. Dean shivers in his nylon sports jacket. He looks up at the one tree on the street—he doesn’t know what it is—flapping at a chipped and sorry moon. On 84 the other side of the street from the apartments are some sagging one-story frame houses and on the corner an old yellow walk-up. A dog barks and someone yells and a chain jangles and the dog yelps and then the street is silent again. A throbbing carload of black males cruises past and Dean pushes himself into the wall by the closed market. He skirts a sodden mattress leaning against a pile of bricks. He heads for the back of the complex, cutting into the large parking lot on its west side. A plastic whisky-bottle floats in an oily puddle. Two post-apocalyptic Caddies slump at one end. The other cars are a Chevrolet Suburban and an old Ford pickup. There’s a vacant lot behind the cars and Dean walks through that behind another building of four apartments—two up, two down—that is almost directly opposite Reed’s, but on the other side of the complex. There’s a light coming from the downstairs windows and TV noise. Another building diagonal to it, lights on in the left top story windows and pounding music. Dean breathes in the timeless smell of stale ganga and testosterone. He stays in the shadows, skirting the sides of the complex. He pulls his Dreads into a pony tail using an elastic band on his wrist and prepares to jog the rest of the way to Reed’s apartment. But instead he remains rooted to the spot when he catches sight of pulsing hole in the darkness, a redolent void behind the main building. Like the Bermuda triangle, it is an anomaly of dead calm in the living chaos of an alien habitat. You try and avoid it. You go the long way, boots and all—pretend it isn't there, like the strange room off the basement of Auntie Gwen's house in Sydney that she calls the wine cellar, but is really just a door into the earth's hellish core, home to zombie rats and the tunnelling arthropods that populate Dean’s night terrors. No sudden moves. There it sits like a portal in the dull moonlight, a whole hole of untold horrors: crop circles and toothless fairies at the bottom of the garden. Dean approaches warily with pounding heart and coldly beaded forehead. He reaches the edge and nudges the smooth perimeter blindly with the toe of his Nike and prepares himself for its jellied give. But unexpectedly it is hard and cold. He kneels down and touches the inner disc with his hand —cement. It’s a large circular cement patch about fifty feet in diameter ringed by pale chipped swimming pool tiles, once a pale California blue … nice for a weekend dip. The ho’s and bitches cooling off in the summer. Weeds and crabgrass trace its outline. Cement it in, cover it up. Pool-busters from hell, contractors for another 85 litigation-wary financial institution: fill in the hole, another gunked-in urban scream no one can hear. Dean veers away and heads over to The Subject’s apartment, stumbling over a torn plastic bag weighed down by an unidentifiable bulk. He hesitates at the bottom of the cement stairs leading to the upper apartment and goes around the building instead to the back where Russell must have killed the Subject nearly two weeks ago. There is a car there. It is Reed's cramped white Ford Focus. Dean goes over and opens it with one of the keys he keeps on a large ring for this purpose. Part of the package, along with the fake ID’s and juvie street cred. Anyway its batteries are flat as a tack, as Mackenzie would say having left the Acura lights on all night after one too many Harvey Wallbangers at Spanky’s. Dean gets out and locks up. He goes back to the steps and this time—no hesitation— he marches up the stairs with his .22 extended and his arms swivelling just like they learnt at Russell's training camp at Riverside. Wasn’t Israel totally sold on that ranch and the idea that Russell could turn this band of small-timers into a troupe of professional. Didn’t that double-dealing old junkie put them through their paces among the flyblown corpses of coyotes come in too close to Russell's menagerie—chickens, a couple of cats, a tame racoon, and a small but vicious Shepherd cross called Eoin. Rhymes with moan, said Russell who took pride in his Irish heritage. Sometimes Eoin got the coyotes and sometimes Russell got them with his mother's old Winchester. Either way, he’d sling the soft bodies over the barbed wire fence or just leave them in the dirt where they fell. That all seems like another lifetime. Dean has become. He feels ready, standing in rank darkness on the landing where he counts to one hundred exactly. He turns on the flashlight. Russell sure did a job on the door which is boarded up like a crypt. Dean gets his step-sister’s cricket bat out of his bag and smacks the bottom edge into the boarding. Just once. The wood cracks and he uses the bat handle and a small jemmy to widen the gash around the latch area. He fires up a cheap acetylene torch he stole from Target ages ago on the latch, attacking the welded patches left by Russell. A push with his elbow gets him back in. He closes the door softly and bolts it. Then he counts out another hundred, and then another listening for footsteps or distant doors opening. He flashes his light onto the walls, finds a window and goes over to it. He looks out and the dark mountains of apartment. No lights have gone on that weren’t on already. 86

Then he turns around and sweeps his light across every square foot of the room—sweat- stained walls, worn rug and a busted armchair pushed over on its side. Smashed equipment everywhere and an overpowering smell of garbage and old pizza and coffee grounds with strong faecal undertones. He checks out both the bathroom and the bedroom, making sure that all the torn shades are still drawn. Then he comes back to the front door and takes a deep breath before pulling the switch. It doesn’t make a lot of difference. Dean sees The Subject as a man who shunned the bright lights. This was a man whose passions had been forged in the flickering universe of cinema before his total retreat into the labyrinthine cave of Internet self- employment. His name had been Kim Reed. Dean looks up. Dead flies float in a pee-coloured shade. Another switch turns on a sixty-watt bulb swinging from a sticky cord in the kitchen. Software manuals with titles in code lie scattered on the carpet, stomped on by heavy shit-caked boots and tangled up in cables and adaptors. A set of headphones dangles off the desk, one earpiece smashed. A huge monitor yanked from the wall and thrown on its side, brains crushed to silicon powder. Smashed CD’s and old floppies spill out of boxes—more cords, a projector, and an antique analogue dubbing system that someone has taken a hammer to. Dean wonders when they got here. Whoever they were: Russell’s gang on the side. His real gang. Cliff and Damien and Dean and Israel were just decoys. Russell’s allegiances had been somewhere else entirely. Crumpled remains of equipment that once edited or copied or digitised, but to Dean is now just unidentifiably twisted wires and smashed circuits. He falters for a moment. This may be too much. He wishes that he'd been more like Damien and urgently attentive to the technological minutiae of the new millennium. For Dean technology had come to randomly pushing buttons. Eventually you pushed the right one. Kim’s kitchen is bare except for a massive turd on the linoleum, courtesy of Taco Bells and one of the sophisticated professionals assembled by Russell to undercut Israel. Was it the tape they were really after, or just Kevin. Dean cleans it up with cardboard and paper towels and flushes it down the toilet in the bathroom, a long tiled tunnel like a solitary bowling lane—sink at one end, toilet squatting at the other, a shower and filthy 87 bath behind the door. Dean washes his hands checking out the rusted mirror and tucking a linty Dred behind his ear. Then he heads into the bedroom. He turns on the light, gun drawn. A young man in boudoir make-up, a short kimono and knee-high boots sits on the bed smoking, elaborate blond layers brushing his narrow shoulders. Dean blinks and the boy fades away, leaving only a guilty after burn. Dean shifts in his Diesel jeans. Instinctively he reaches for his phone. But who to call? Who to tell. Dean knows that at the minute he stepped through that door, Kim’s door, he ceases to exist. Step out again, and he can be Dean again. But not in here. In here, he’s dead. He opens the closet first, expecting to find it full of freaky feather boas, silver wedgies and velvet frocks, but there are only the usual shirts and jackets, t-shirts, jeans, socks and underwear thrown on the floor. There is another smashed CD player and CD’s everywhere on the musty rug. A towering rack on its side. A silver VCR and a black TV. Reed’s bed, pulled to one side to expose the safe—emptied now of royal box—is neatly made, except for the bedspread that they’d wrapped Kevin in. Kurt Corbain’s petrified chunks are still on the bed. Dean bends down and picks up a videotape from a pile on the floor. A home-computer label says Groundstar Conspiracy. He picks up one labelled Dog Day Afternoon, another that says Klute—that one he’s heard of—and Hustle and The Gun, The Conversation, All the President's Men, Parallax View. There are a dozen or so of these funky old movies scattered on the floor, all VHS’s and no DVD’s, although he did notice a DVD player in the living room. Dean sits down on the bed and he feels more alive than he has felt in sixteen years. He shakes out his snaky mop, and runs his hand across the fuzz blooming on his chin. He is alive and alone. He is free. No one can get you when you’re dead. Heart-beat slowing, he sits here on another man’s bed building the lie and test- driving it for plausibility before he comes up with a version that'll hold together for the long haul. He goes into the kitchen and turns on the cold water and lets it run clear while he goes into the bathroom and pees. He finds a coffee jar in a sticky cupboard. He washes it and fills it with clean water. Then he takes it into the bedroom and rolls a joint. He smokes the joint on the Dead Subject’s bed after hanging Kurt’s hurl carefully back on a nail above the bed. Dean falls asleep with all of the lights on. … 88

The village fires burned low as I made my way across the village to the Princess’s trailer. Tomorrow’s rice soaked in clay bowls. Eyeless courtyard idols kept watch over the animals. I look a left past the Krishnan house toward the theatre compound. Opening night is tomorrow, so sleep was not on anyone’s program tonight. The theatre brings work to the Village, so I saw local girls running errands between make-up and wardrobe. Their brothers balancing on ladders. Mothers painting scenery. A generator throbbed in the background firing up bulbs attached to looping wires and the kerosene lanterns sputtered in the warm breeze that rattled the palms and brought the smell of the river up from the jungle valley. At the make-up tent I watched the actors shrugging off their characters before a row of greasy mirrors tied to bamboo poles. Prince Philip’s stoop straightened; Hewitt’s jaw unsquared and the Queen’s frown turned upside down in the melodic linguistic curtain that shuts me out, always. I watched pretty lips part in banter as jewellery, make-up and costumes were shed into the waiting brown arms of smiling urchins from Wardrobe. Beyond the theatre were the breathless fields and beyond these, the humped forest keeping watch. I stopped before a brown tarpaulin under which shirtless men fixed props by lamplight. A hasty screen-printing of a Bollywood Di with blond hair bathed in lotus-light. Above her looms a grim, Mongol-style monarch of all she surveys. I stumbled over a plastic jar of murky paint-water. I tried to wipe my Fry’s on the legs of my jeans. The seedy, peppery smell of the troupe’s evening meal drifted across the compound and mingled in the air with frangipani, dung and red dust. I followed sounds foreign but not alien: trailer doors slamming, the rustle of a sari, bell- metal clangs and softly unintelligible chat. Someone from orchestra was softly practicing the tabla. I arrived, finally, at the compound’s edge: around me the breathless clacking of bamboo and banana. From the trailer came the unmistakable voice of the Princess. Shadowy forms appeared at the small square window of her trailer. She was jerking toward him and puling away, her form bending and pointing as she appeared to be fixing her hair: braiding and 89 berating. And isn’t choice just another word for descent? Then the trailer door pushed open and she left, sobbing. We watched her leave, this shadowy boy and I, until a footstep in the dark made me swing around. I caught a familiar whiff of foreign tobacco, not Indian. The jungle snickered and in my lunge for the trailer there was something else registered and instantly forgotten. And then I was inside, staring at his reflection in a mirror atop a littered dressing table. I know what you are thinking. I realised then what I couldn’t earlier admit: I’d come for him. I couldn’t give the tape to Krishnan, because it was Avi was who I had come to see, sitting in a director’s chair with his face, my face, reflected in the mirror. All the way from America. Avinash Ashtekar is seventeen or eighteen. Reflected in his eyes I saw it —not the whole thing, not the end and not a mirror, but a small fragment of time swirling up to claim me. I saw myself of course as I’d seen it in his image in the paper—everything from the wide mouth and big teeth to the slightly puffy eyes. The longish hair and curling fringe. Like me, he was big, but big as I was once: more rangy than hulking. I saw myself but from an impossible angle and if you only knew what I have seen through those eyes. I saw you, Dean, and Lena and all the losses and gains—indistinct and canted—in his eyes now looking at my own reflection, and it was time to dive. And I saw something else, rushing up to meet me with red-rimmed eyes like river-stones. I saw something I thought I’d lost. So I could not give the tape to this boy, in whom I found what I’d been looking for. But neither could I give it to anyone else. It was mine alone to bear. The god of times past smiled at me from the mirror in the dressing room of his false princess. But he was a real prince, too real for me to deal with. A Hindu David. Curved lips in a tear-streaked face, eyes clear and long and pale lifting to look past themselves. His dark hair stuck out under the soft white hood of an oversized sweatshirt. He gave me what I wanted in those eyes and it began but wouldn’t end with 90

Trulli’s umbilically unwinding tape. Trulli had taken Lena from me once, the last time, but forgiveness is just another word for time, rising to mesh with the wordless descent of itself from the edge of itself. Could I be a decoy and lead Trulli away from you all this time, all the way down? “I grew up with the theatre, Dr. Grant,” he began, a reflection talking to a ghost in time’s crystal. With the diabolical composure of youth, he pushed aside the dressing table rubble and began to boot up a laptop moored to a small silver camera. “My father was at the forefront of the New Wave of the sixties. We had one too, you know. He did Crime and Punishment with Raskolnikov transformed into a local separatist. Waiting for Godot. Another on that I can’t remember. It didn’t matter to us as long as the transformation remained true to the breakaway model of the mobile theatre—cautionary tales to ward against a nameless dread—faceless deeds in the name of God and other totalities.” His hands flew over the keyboard and he smiled as he spoke these words that were full of the dazzling land and the weeping Pyari, beloved river. I asked him how long he and Sandi had been dating and he shyly said, “A few weeks only.” I thought I heard his voice catch. “How did you and Trulli meet?” He said that he had never seen him in the flesh. “Has he seen you?” I asked. “We met on the Net,” still smiling, his mouth like a sculptor’s wet dream. “Through your work on alternative forms of propulsion?” He soft brows drew together in momentary confusion, slim brown hands poised above “Enter.” ““Oh that,” he said, glancing quickly into my reflected eyes and then back at the board. “Actually my field is gravitomagnetics. You see? Basically, gravitomagnetics is an aberrant gravity effect built into Einstein’s theory of relativity by which a rapidly spinning object, say a superconductor—” one long finger twirling in space— “can generate a new force of nature. Einstein died 91 unable or unwilling to unify gravitation and electromagnetics into one force, as you may know. But actually, this is not what Trulli is about. He says his problem is the ceramics, but between you and me,” smiling at me in the mirror with my own irreverent smirk. “I think his problem is bad physics. Our group down in Calcutta has OK ceramics, nothing special, and we’ve already observed a weight reduction that exceeds his. But he knows I know that. Can I have your daughter Lena’s email address? I have her to thank for getting me the tape, yes?” I would have burnt down the house to save her, truly, but he got there first. Where was I? “I was there for her birth, well almost,” I told the mirror. “There had been some turbulence on the way over from Amsterdam I think. I bought teardrop shades in Copenhagen. I thought I had only two choices, the life of the mind or the life of the body. Then the department changed its name to Textual Practices and I found a way to indiscernibly incorporate the two.” But he wasn’t listening. “Can I have the tape?” “So what’s really on it?” I said. Time to hunt, to dive into this consciousness of real and present danger, to be hounded and haunted, time to be a hunter again. “Come I’ll show you. “ He held out one hand, not looking at me, the other still working the keys, code rolling down the screen. “But we haven’t much time. Do we?” A God’s eyes looking past themselves, beyond the river sanctified by the falling yoni of the slain princess Sarti carried away by stricken Siva. In him I saw what I could have been? What would it be like to become him? “Yes and no,” I said, its corners digging into me mid-body. I had waited for nearly two weeks for this moment. I had kept the tape safe from Krishnan. Or was it the other way around? I had woken often to find him staring at me from his cot in his grandfather’s backyard. Its corners dug into my while I slept. 92

But now that I found Avi, especially now, I couldn’t let it go. Time to die, I mean lie. “I can’t give it to you,” I said. “Because… because, I don’t have it. I’m so sorry. That’s what I came to tell you. I left it in Calcutta at the hotel. This happens at my age, don’t laugh. Yes it’s no laughing matter, I know. But it’s safe. They are sending it up special delivery of course and when … I’ll get it to you, promise, should be any day now.” In profile he looked like Lena when she was his age, I think. I don’t think we were seeing much of each other then. “What’s on the tape, Avi ? It may be dangerous. I understand the science experiment is some form of sophisticated encryption?” He shrugged and began to shut down the computer. A dialogue box came up that said, “what do you want your computer to do?” Avi sighed. “Everyone knows the story: the personality disorders, the paranoia: Diana used to fire servants in code. Terrified the world would find out about her and the bodyguard, she sent cryptic messages to the tabloids composed of letters cut out of magazines chronicling Charles’s affairs. The way was paved for the flowering of a truly global mythology. It is actually not the truth, because it produces its own lie, another truth, and the two bear only a false resemblance to each other. You chip away at the story but you also have to add a bit here, move a bit there, and you have to be careful not to damage anything. Like a sculptor chipping away at a piece of stone to get at the form inescapable from his or her own destiny. I'm sorry,” he said with a sad smile. “I’m struggling with this metaphor.” So Trulli’s tape had something to do with Princess Diana? But what? If Trulli had buried something stolen beneath science data no one would credit, what could I do about it, and why would I do anything. His eyes told me why. I’d let my other children get away, but this was a bird in the hand. Achchha beta. I thought of you flying away from me toward some final destination and how I could have stopped you if I’d known where the father fits into the life of the dying child. I had no faith. I couldn’t move. I left the country so I wouldn’t have to watch Lena take her first steps. 93

“Where do you fit in?” I asked. “I have an interest in these things. Even here in the jungles of India, global dread looms large.” “Why you?” I said. “You are too young to be running interference in some underground tussle for the lucrative treachery of the cosmos. You should be back at school. At a bar somewhere. Visiting relatives in London.” Avi stifled a yawn and sunk down in his chair, half blocked by the reflection of the laptop and the dressing-table clutter in the mirror. “I was to be a kind of unwitting fence,” he said. “A go-between. Like I said, form is in the end inseparable from destiny. They don’t know I know this. Look at this bracelet. Do you know what these initials stand for?” I stared down at the silver bangle he’d pulled out from under a white sleeve: WIIFM. “What’s in it for me?” he said. Distant music trickled in from the compound, the muted strains of alien woodwinds, a stuttering tabla. “The tape is dangerous. You should have nothing to do with it,” I said. “I can’t allow it.” This was the first time in my life, in over three decades of parenting that I have uttered these words. Avi pulled his arm away and slouched down in his chair. Suddenly he was gone from the mirror. In it was reflected nothing but Sandi’s trashed trailer, postcards, flowers, strewn clothes, a smashed bottle of perfume. I counted to ten, listening to an ethical time-bomb ticking down. Its airy buzz filled the room. I leaned forward and looked into the soft hood. His eyes were closed over the pillowed flesh. The soft snores emitted through parted lips. I think I actually tried to touch the beloved cloth and to breath in the faintly streaked flesh. In my peripheral vision I saw my own reflection looking down into nothingness. I stood up and folded fifty thousand rupees under the keyboard. I left with Avi still snoring and the tape still in my pocket. 94

7

HATE-BOY

Dean wakes up to the smell of shit. Weak morning light permeates the room through the grimy shade, and falls on a stricken statue of an angel or a Madonna lying on a shelf. On the table beside the bed is a lamp like in a motel room and Dean leans over to look in the drawer which is empty except for a bottle of sleeping pills prescribed to Gemma Mayhauk. Gemma: instructed to become the subject’s lover and now wanted as a spy. Was that her name? There is a large pale rectangle on one wall where a poster or picture used to be. Dean looks down at his watch. 8:30. At that moment his phone rings. He reaches for it. “A note. You leave me a note, very thoughtful Dean, I’m impressed.” Mackenzie never announces herself on the phone. No hello it’s me, Mackenzie, your mother: mamalicious. Not her personal style. You pick up the phone midway it seems, through the monologue of a madwoman. Dean is surprised to hear her voice. He thought he was dead. “Where are you?” The story tells itself while you light the first cigarette of the a.m. “I’m staying at Chalmers’s.” “How nice for you all, happy stepfamilies.” “No one’s here, remember. Chalmers is away and—” “And the exotic dancer? Flipping waffles in feathered mules?” “The wife is not here either, actually.” “Ah, the sister in LA how convenient—she’s a stripper too, isn’t she?” “I don’t think you call them strippers. Dad said she was a fitness model.” A low chuckle passes from mother to son. 95

“Well you’re there anyway, my darling and that's the main thing. I was worried, to put it mildly. So—” her voice changes as she cradles the phone in her neck while reaching for her cigarettes. “—how did you sleep, mate?” Cue the hush-now part of their repertoire. “Fine, I'm Ok, “ says Dean. “It’s because of Lou isn’t it?” Why can Dean still smell shit? He swings his legs off the bed and nearly falls in the chunked human turd on the carpet by the side of the bed. One edge already looks slightly stepped in. Dean knew he was wading through shit-stink. The smell had become part of his dreams. He looks at the bottom of his shoes, takes them off and into the bathroom, while Mackenzie attempts to justify the existence of yet another maladjusted offspring. “She brought you a present you know. She’s trying, my sweet. We all are.” He walks back into Kim’s room with a plastic bag and the only paper he could lay his hands on: three or four faxed pages from his father. “What’s the present?” Dean bends down and starts pushing the turd into the plastic bag using a wad of Chalmers’s faxes: wasted words. He ties up the bag and takes it into the bathroom, flushes it down the toilet. “A cricket bat autographed with the names of the Australian side. It’s a collector’s item and a piece of your heritage. She bought it at a charity auction at her tennis club. A very thoughtful gift I must say. Musta costa motszah..” Her mother trying on, her Jewish mother act. The Jewish mother she never was. Dean takes the bat from under his pillow where he’d stashed it last night. How do you hold these things? It weighs a ton. He puts it back. “Why is everything always my fault?” Another resuscitating intake of nicotine. “I have to go to yoga in ten. Do you need some money?” Exhale.

Jacked into his iPod, Dean picks up keyboards and untangles wires. He gathers loose ribbons of stock pooled on the floor and traces cables to their source. Shirtless, he picks up overturned equipment and hides the broken stuff in Kim’s closet. He plugs cords 96 into the wall and a few red and green LED’s fire up on some of the equipment. He picks up a big camera and stands in front of the mirror in Kim’s room with it hoisted on his shoulder. Shirt off, he does his own private lap dance for an audience of one. He is the Subject. Then he throws away all the stomped-on disks and cracked LP’s. Lots of Queen. He straightens the speakers that haven’t been slashed. He piles broken equipment in the closet, covering them with a sheet he finds there. The CD player looks alright, except for a jagged hole in its side and the cheap DVD player ditto; he shoves them up against a metal case near the turntable and plugs them in. The socket is dead. The cordless phone is smashed so he throws it away. He can hear Kim’s cellphone blatting out Save Me from a flyblown mound near the border. He collects books and notebooks and spilt folders off the floor and moves them onto the bed to go through later. Then he vacuums every square inch of carpet with a dust-buster he finds in the kitchen, emptying the bag every few square yards. Dean eats half of a vegeburger he brought with him from Miracles with a sachet of Hungry Jack’s ketchup he finds in the little box of a refrigerator. He is thirsty but can’t bring himself to drink more than a mouthful of tap water. He finds a pot and puts some on to boil. He smokes a joint as an antidote for the second mouthful of unboiled water he drinks to wash down the burger that tasted in all honesty, past its prime. He spends the afternoon sitting on the bed going through the scattered papers and books he’d picked up off the floor, but they mean nothing to him: receipts, contracts for irregular work making cable videos, university enrolment forms, library fine notices and overdue fees and loans notices, credit card bills. No letters, notes, pictures, poems. NO screams. There is nothing about Kim the Cross-dresser or the Diana Lookalike, or Killer Queen and why he had to end up in a fetid trunk with a crushed oesophagus—no photographs, letters or notes, except one with a phone number on it that Dean recognises as Gemma's cell. Dean sees that as a lapse. He leafs through some software manuals—indecipherable, for now—then stuffs all the papers in an accordion file he finds on the floor, and stacks the manuals back on a shelf. He lights up a joint and lies back on the bed, thinking about the Subject. He sees his predecessor as an eleven year-old camera-man in Beaver Falls, Pa. He’s in his backyard up in the tree-house with his Dad’s Handycam, secretly filming the African 97

American family next door. Kim trains the camera on the kitchen window that frames old Mr. Reynolds playing pocket billiards behind a newspaper at the table. A mean old ginger cat jumps up on the counter and the old lady walks in and shoos it off, moving out of the frame where she must be saying something to Mr Reynolds, because he stops playing with his balls and talks to her off screen. Kim can year their muffled voices. The kid, call him Mikey is a little older than Kim. Kim pulls back out of the kitchen and pans into the backyard where Mikey is on the swing by the fence that separates the two houses. Invisible in the neighbouring tree house, Kim centres Mikey in the frame. He’s not really swinging, just kind of sitting there swaying. His eyes are closed and his head is lifted up at an angle to get what’s left of the afternoon sun, soaring high above this fenced-in square of the world. Kim frames the boy’s face just left of centre, one chain of the swing enclosing the boy in his own reality, the other shooting off-screen into space somewhere connecting him to other universes. The boy’s lips are parted slightly, a soft dark fuzz between the upper lip and the wide nostrils, a hint of pink tongue and white teeth like pearls in a clam shell, a pod bursting with seed— but not for long. …

The moment that transformed fatherhood into a monumental heroics of seeing was that in which I watched Dean float away from me. The boy had his hate-filled eyes on what lies beyond the end, wham, bang, thank-you ma'am: these are my last words: gun-gun. He was gone. So while Avi snored in Princess Sandi’s trailer I went to Laxmi’s house and tried to watch the footage using her camera attached to her computer. I sat at a table under the window, moonlight flowing in as she slept in the next room. Krishnan had warned me that the tape had possibly been encrypted by Trulli’s man in San Corolla, and that playing it without knowing what you were doing might irrevocably infect your hard-drive with a lethal virus, but I didn’t care. I could buy Laxmi a new computer. But I knew as soon as the images filled the screen that what I was seeing was just a layer, the camouflage. The low camera was stationary but at an odd angle, severing the images from any sense of 98 reality. These were mainly a series of fuzzy close-ups—gnarled hands (Trulli's I imagined), shaky equipment, angular markings scrawled on a whiteboard: plusses and minuses. Then there was the other one—you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t know what you were looking for—pixelated intrusions of a bleak empty room dislocated in time and space. I finally slept and dreamt I was pregnant with twins. Double trouble. In the morning, Avi was gone along with the laptop. Taped to the mirror, a note: “The boy for the tape.” The Princess’s trailer was trashed. …

At the very back of the closet shelf there is a small aluminium case—like photographers use. Dean pulls it forward, but he doesn’t have to open it. He knows what it contains, and that this is at least part of what he came for. But it can wait. He leaves it at the front instead of shoving it all the way back to its dark place in the closet. From the chair on which he’s standing Dean looks down at the room once occupied by the subject he killed to take its place. The subject never dies. At least there’s more floor space now. It’s nearly seven o’clock. He hadn’t noticed it getting dark outside, the rush hour roar subsiding to the faraway buzz of the freeway. Across the street a door slams and a siren wails a couple of blocks away, getting closer. It stops with a yelp near the Market. A car stereo swells and diminishes. An alien odour of cold cement caked with rot and grease snakes in through the small window. Dean is in the Dead Zone. He sees no sign of life in the apartment sprawl beyond one or two warily glowing windows among the humped and angular shadows. He likes the feeling of being neither alive nor dead, but something in between. His mind begins to work in new ways. His memory kicks in and long-forgotten events from his childhood march across his mind. The way Chalmers’s third wife didn’t speak to him on his weekends at their place. The poisonous nights there: leather and perfume and oddly, gunpowder. That must be his 99 imagination. Chalmers never had a gun. Hateboy with the fishing rods. The smell of night makes Dean remember that there is something else in Kim’s closet. He had seen it while cleaning up. It was thinking about Hateboy that reminded him, about that long ago initiation and Dean remembers why he is here. Gemma who had been asked to become the subject’s lover and had tried to get him to kill her real lover instead had imagined that Kim had made a copy of the tape. Dean gets down from the chair and peers into the closet. By the floor at one end, is the anomaly—a blip in closet space like those blips in Kim’s movie-time. He kneels down and crawls along the dusty concrete space of the closet beneath K-Mart clothing. He crawls into total darkness. Dean cannot decide if his eyes are open or closed. His hands make contact with cardboard, the side of a box filled with more boxes. Dean drags the boxes into the room, shading his eyes against the sudden light and then crawls back in. Where the wall of the closet should meet the floor at the narrow side wall, there is a narrow gap. Dean tries to poke his finger through. A dim shadow flows out through the dark slit. Dean knocks on the drywall. It’s jammed in tight, but not so tight that Dean can’t push it gently in using the handle of the cricket bat. It angles in and he is careful to push it to one side before ducking into a dark space beyond it. He reaches to his right and there, where he’d leave it if he had been Kim, is a flashlight. He pushes the button. Dean is finally standing in Kim’s secret closet, the space in every closet that is the real space. Dean is amazed at the size of this secret space, purpose built no doubt at over three metres long and two wide. A room within a room behind the walls of the bedroom and adjoining the living room. It may have once been extra storage with a door to the bedroom now hidden by shelving, or a second smaller bedroom off the living room. In any case it is crammed floor to ceiling with collectibles and memorabilia. Boxed toys with shiny cellophane windows bulge out of DIY rafters, old games and faded comic books tower on shelves. Boxed full scale models of ships and cars and tanks take up two shelves. Above and below this are models already assembled: anime, airplanes. Dean steps further in. Mr and Mrs Potato Head and their lumpy offspring in every permutation ever imagined line a shelf next to Dr Who dolls and books, Dalek salt and pepper shakers, Superman, Action Man, Wonder Woman, Batmobiles, Halloween lanterns, Mad 100

Hatter tea sets, a Franklin Mint Liberace… vinyl LP's by the stack, along with a box of autographed coasters, cards, playbills, napkins, posters and menus. Old Coke bottles, even a small Coca Cola bistro set—a dwarf table and two chairs—at one end of the tiny room. Another shelf sags with Uncle Wiggly and Twister games, Monopoly collector editions. a life-size Chewbacca, Viewmasters and a giant bouquet of Harry Potter wands. There are autographed balls from every sport—cricket, basketball, soccer, water polo, rugby, bowling—and a life-size cardboard Brad Pitt wearing a silver suit. But the wall at the end above the Coca Cola bistro set belongs to the Princess. Wedgewood plates of Diana and Charles on their wedding day, Diana dolls, Diana limos. Photo albums. Clippings albums. A tiara on a severed head. A spangly green dress on a headless torso. Books, gold-rimmed glasses, autographed china, a Man U scarf, a Les Mis playbill, and more albums and tapes—Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Phantom of the Opera on CD and DVD. Scrap books contain letters and recipes and invitations written in a wide round hand. A note to her chef reads, roast lamb and peppers for tea? Diana. Dean, who remembers Mackenzie and Chalmers arguing over which Monopoly board to play on—English or American—before they decided not to play at all, fights off the vertigo. Did Kim meet her here on moonless nights to usher her into the vault of memory? Did they sit together at the little Coca Cola bistro set, listening to Les Mis while taking a little cold comfort in the afterlife? Can I come too? Dean staggers backward into the main part of the closet, gasping for breath. He sits for a moment on the bedroom rug holding his head in his hands. He is awash in a creeping rash of b.o. He smells himself as an unwanted presence. He forces himself to his feet. He goes back in and turns off the light. He puts the board back, then shoves the boxes in front. He pushes Kim's clothes along the rail which makes it hard to remember the secret space is even there. Dean hasn’t eaten since lunchtime, but he has no appetite. He feels like he might be infected with something: feverish and weak. The room looks fuzzy, wavering. He stumbles to the bed, falls onto it and assumes Savasana… the pose of the corpse. … 101

Things come in two’s—two movies, two robberies, two sons. No daughters. Things come in two’s. Parents never fail to outlive the children. Parents live for ever. Children are dead the moment they emerge. The tape for the boy… the boy for the tape. They have both gone. Give him the tape, I thought, and he’ll be gone. So I kept it. For safekeeping. I like to keep my children where I can see them. I went to Laxmi’s house. I played the tape using my laptop and her cables. She was asleep. She got up wearing green pyjamas. I ejected the tape and put it the pocket of my leather sports jacket. She ran a bath for me. She washed my hair. She dried me in a large soft towel. I slept and dreamt of my mother by the stove. I was wrapped in a towel and couldn’t get up to help her. There was a hole in the kitchen floor. I couldn’t save her. I was wrapped in a towel. Still born. The tape was gone when I woke up. So was Laxmi. 102

8 BLIND-SIGHT

Dean drives Kim’s Focus to Mackenzie’s house avoiding the freeway and keeping to the back roads. It takes him over an hour. It is doubtful that Russell would return so soon to clean up, but you never know. He parks the car two blocks away and pushes himself up over the paling fence, catching his Dutch jeans on a nail. He walks crouching past the pool and into the neighbour’s yard and into Mackenzie’s kitchen from the side door. His mother is expecting him for dinner. She introduces him to her date, Roberto. She slips Dean a hundred cash. He takes another fifty out of her briefcase, thirty from Roberto’s wallet, and twenty from the dressing table in his step-sister’s room. Fishing for cash. Dean has the gift. The cheque waiting for him from Chalmers’s at Miracles was for a hundred. “Nice,” Dean had whispered to himself, before scrunching up the faxes and tucking the cheque into his jeans. He hadn’t forgotten to help himself to a share of Darla’s tips. He waits until his mother is on the phone before hauling the TV from his room and into the lane behind the communal pool. He covers it with a garbage bag. Inside, Mackenzie thanks him for taking out the garbage. She doesn’t ask him how he got here but he doesn’t expect her to. Instead she wants to talk about the screenplay she is writing She’s been up to a writers conference in Anaheim, where she met an agent who showed an interest in her work. “The agent will accept a partial from me at this stage,” says Mackenzie, stirring the risotto. “They usually don’t.” Her date Roberto comes into the kitchen, glares at Dean and walks out with the dip. Mackenzie's script is about a thief and a blind girl brought together when the thief accidentally shoots her father in a robbery gone wrong on their liquor store. He gets away with the crime but guilt draws him into a friendship with her. All the while he hides the 103 dirty little secret that he killed her old man. But the girl has a secret too. She has Blindsight. “Blindsight is a facility of some visually impaired people to see, behaviourally speaking, without phenomenologically experiencing sight,” Mackenzie says, her green eyes skimming an inner notepad. Her lashes are dyed a disconcerting blue-black. Disconcerting against her blond hair. “The thing with blind sight is that your brain can see even if you can’t,” she says quickly. “The trick is getting your brain to actually communicate images to you via its optic nerves. It’s true. I read about it in Time Magazine.” “What’s the twist?” says Roberto, coming back into the kitchen with a forgiving smile at Dean. “There’s got to be some kind of a twist.” Dean doesn’t look at him. Mackenzie freezes over a steamed pepper she’s peeling. Dean watches a wobbly piece of red skin drop onto the floor. Roberto’s smile fades. Dean holds his breath. Eventually she just turns around and hisses at Roberto who’s not about to make any sudden moves. “Oh, there's a twist alright. Don't you worry about that.” Exhale. …

I told the police almost everything. They exchange glances: these Amreekans. “Would you like to call your wife?” The Captain smirks. “It’s on us.” No tape and therefore no boy, now. The press will go wild with the story. The Ashtekars are beloved to all. They are local heroes. A search for clues yielded only an American cigarette butt in the Marigolds. Laxmi doesn’t—didn’t—smoke. Meanwhile another team searched Krishnan’s house, emptied my bags and went through my papers. Then they told me to either go home or get myself a good lawyer or both. 104

At the police station ashtrays overflowed and sweaty men with neat haircuts slopped aromatic tea in saucers. Assistants in pale saris and clean cardigans worked keyboards. They all came and went, picking up phones and speaking ceaselessly in a language like a door banging in the wind. Nightmarishly high piles of paper work, yellow with age, fluttered at the edges of the room. No one will tell me what happened. And I cannot understand what they say to each other. But it seems as if the usual suspects must be dealt with initially. An ragged stream of youthful separatists are brought in handcuffed and smirking. Tribal extremists dragged from jungle outposts gossip with left-wing journalists chain smoking in holding cells. Loyalists interrogated behind one-way mirrors. Women bring food. Politicians send bribes. The paramilitary has occupied the village. The presence of Rifles Corps and Counter-insurgency troops make us all feel we’ve done something wrong. But I feel in the presence of a masquerade. A show put on if not for my benefit, then as a display of extreme prejudice for Avi’s family that has gone into seclusion. The uncle has shut down the play. The name whispered beneath the spoken names is one I have heard before: B. S Chilling. A man of strange tastes, apparently, and with the means to indulge them. He runs some boutique acreage just out of town as well as the multi-million rupee Hula Hut Franchise. In addition he runs the counter- insurgence, apparently, or at least its most fundamental adherents. I am a recycled English professor. My masters thesis was on Chaucer. Now I teach Sexual Practice: kidnapping as Text. What do I know from Rocket Science, which is what they all think is the beginning and end of it—classified propulsion protocol stolen by para-governmental interests. I don’t tell them about the tape within the tape. Krishnan left for Tushwar in the night without saying good-bye. … 105

After his shift the next day, Dean walk through the small Miracles kitchen into the restaurant area, where the boss is alone in the dark counting the day’s takings. “Some chick phoned for you,” Donnie says. “From Santa Barbara. She said she’d been trying to get you on your cell for days.” “Thanks. I better get it looked at.” “She wants you to call her collect ASAP. Seeing as you seem to be between couches and phones these days, you can do it from here.” He’s counting the twenties: one-two-three-four-five-six up to ten, then folds them into a rubber band with the others. “I got eyes in my head.” “I’m sort of staying at my Dad’s. Trouble at home.” “Doesn’t matter to me,” says Donnie. “Got your allowance?” Dean waves it at him but he can tell there’s more. “That is such a bad-ass car,” Donnie says, looking up from the bills. A white glare from a passing truck on the highway sweeps across his baby-bearded face. “Your sister’s Viper.” “She not my—” “I saw something else, although I could be wrong. I was pretty distracted. Shwingg!!” He looked up from the cash drawer at Dean with a wolfish grin, and then sighs softly when Dean doesn’t respond. “Sister or not, she was being followed.” Donnie starts on the change, sliding quarters off the counter and into a little plastic bag—shlink, shlink, shlink. “No way,” says Dean. “Yes way. Like I told you I got eyes in my head. You know I think we had Eric Roberts here the other week. Sitting right there.” “Who’s Eric Roberts?” says Dean. “You don’t know who he is? Julia Roberts’s brother. Step-brother maybe. I think it was him. They don’t speak. Anyway she pulls up like she always does—” “Julia Roberts?” “Fool. Your sister. She’s got the shades on and the hair thing, blowing in the wind. She just reaches over and slides in your mail as usual not looking to the right or left and 106

I’m standing on the steps waiting as usual and—there’s a white van about three cars behind her.” “A white van?” All that cash just sitting on the counter. Easy to imagine what that .22 nestling just above Dean’s butt-crack would say to a piece of that. Don points with one hand to his eyes. He says, “What are these? These are eyes in my head. When I was your age, younger even, I knew what I wanted. And it wasn’t this.” He jerks his head in a kind of half-circle that takes in the entire universe of chicken- flavoured failure that surrounds him on a daily basis. “A white Musson van, believe it shit-for-brains. Two guys in the front, one with expensive hair.” “How do you know it was following the Viper?” Donnie has finished counting. He starts packing up the paperwork for the accounts lady who comes around every morning. “Your sister stops to put daddy’s letter in the slot. The cars all pull out to pass her, including the van, right? Then he pulls into Mozart, and disappears. And then she keeps going, but turns around into the highway to go South, and what do you know, a second later, who should pull out of Mozart and be right behind her.” “Could be another van, is all I’m asking.” “It was the same guys, kid. The sunglasses, Arnettes… older style.” “Arnettes?” “Know how else I know it?” “Not really.” “Because I noticed that its transmission was locking, and the van that came back out of Mozart had the same problem. I could hear it,” stubby fingers go to ears. “It’s got a Mercedes engine but the transmission is pure Jap. Know what I think?” “Not exactly.” “I think your old man has a tail on her, just to make sure she’s giving you your mail. Why doesn’t he just ask me?” 107

Donnie silently points to his chest, then his eyes, and then at Dean. Then he puts someone else’s money into a cloth-bag and yells for the security goon collectively contracted by the beachside restaurants. Dean slips out the back. 108

9 THE HOLE THING

From the Hula Hut on the corner, I could see up and down the main drag, but I missed the limo until it pulled up right in front of me. The ride was a new white Ambassador. They’re not uncommon here during theatre season. Like the one I saw at the Titanic premiere, not the American one in ‘97, but the one right here last week: Titanic: the Play of the Movie. The Limo was thronged by a patient tangle of brown limbs on its way to the after party. The producer was inside with a woman who looked a lot like Laxmi. Now as the tinted window glided down, a pockmarked face in sunglasses and a blue chauffeur's hat emerged out of the reflected chaos of market day in a small North Indian city. Across the street a sunken-cheeked group of Bangladeshis leaned on their rickshaws and pointed. On the seat beside the driver lay a gleaming black revolver. The driver said, “Get in please, Dr. Grant,” his hand lying casually beside the gun, a manicured pinky nail resting on the rubberised grip. The back door clicked open. I got in, eyeballed by the starving men at the rickshaw stand. We did a U-turn across ill-defined lanes of swerving white compacts, scooters, pedestrians with baskets on their heads and livestock at their feet. We headed north out of the city. It was the middle of the afternoon and people crowded back to work. We drove past the old, vaguely Medieval-looking architecture—cavernous silk emporiums and sweet shops and Internet cafes—and onto the highway, which ran through rolling green before crossing the river. We soared over the great waterway, and I looked down on cardboard and plastic-bag shanties spilling down its banks. A species of pelican wheeled and dipped below us, landing on sunlit sandbars. The call of river birds— herons and fish 109 eagles—distant behind the tinted glass. A rhythmic buzz leaked out of wires that flowed from the driver’s ears to his jacket pocket. We slowed past a wildlife reserve and sliced smoothly through a large banana plantation. Spent phallus-shaped stalks drooped in a cash-green sea of giant fronds. Then we turned into an unmarked dirt road. We slowed. I read a large wooden sign stuck into a grassy paddock:

BO CHILLING STRAWBERRIES AND EXOTIC VEGETABLES

Then into a dirt drive just past the sign before passing a couple-three greenhouses. Beside these was a long low building with a curved designer roof made out of oxidised corrugated iron. We turned into a gravel driveway and stopped in front of a large stucco villa, incongruous in the flat green and brown expanse. As was the sudden silence. I hear bird song, a breeze rustling in leaves of trees I couldn’t see. I faced a narrow terrazzo veranda and wide portico. The upper level was supported by Doric columns. An elaborate wrought iron balcony looked out over the estate and to the rumpled green hills beyond. Large windows, framed in contrasting natural teak, were etched in the same frosted pattern as the balcony. A female voice sang to an 80s pop tune which spun softly out of an upstairs window. I think it was Mad World by Tears for Fears. I sat for a while. I was hungry for the first time since I’d been here for western food. Beer and sandwiches. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, the driver stood beside the car with the door open. I pushed myself along the leather and my feet made contact with Indian earth and I stood up. I watched a new black Ford tractor move across the lawns in back of the house and stop. Two men climbed down, both dressed in denim shirts, one with a Panama hat. They walked toward the back of the building and disappeared. Behind them, pale green trees hunched breathless under the fish belly sky. I turned around. The driver stood leaning up against the car absorbed in his 110 cell phone, one hand moving absently around in his pants pocket. The door to the house opened and the figure with the Panama hat emerged out of a dark interior onto the glare of the porch. The man was at least six-two. He was slim and angular, with a low-maintenance musculature suggested by the languid hippity-hop down the white steps. I recognised him from the papers. His head under the hat was small and alert with a short thick beard. Rivet-eyes behind the yellow Oakley's radiated a vague unease unsuccessfully repressed in those whose overly easy ascent to power—making the right calls and chasing the right women—has rendered them strangely defenceless, forced to resort to extreme measures. He was wearing black jeans, Australian work boots and a denim shirt. “BS Chilling. Call me Bo.” He extended his hand to me as if it had a gun in it, waited a click and then withdrew it with a smirk. I followed him to the side of the house, where wicker furniture was set up on rolling lawns beside a freshly dug field. A white-uniformed servant came out with a tray of Strohs and some sandwiches: buffalo pastrami, ham, chicken. “Sit down please,” said Chilling. He passed me a beer and a chilled glass, and poured himself one. He waved the bottle at the field. “Gherkins. We just shipped two chartered plane loads to Egypt.” It had rained a little earlier, leaving a rank steam rising from the stripped earth. Another tractor worked a coal-black paddock in the distance. Chilling's cellphone rang out a strident Bollywood number, the plaintiff coupling of ancient fretwork and perky popstar. He spoke into it in Hindi and hung up. “My wife. She has a US degree in tissue culture. She runs the lab—state of the art, you may have noticed.” “That low building we passed.” “A western education allows for an expanded definition of agriculture, encompassing both research and farming. I myself have a PhD in seed pathology.” Chilling’s lightly pocked complexion, above the tell-tale beard, was fair, and he spoke with the international accent that can sound creepy or urbane. 111

On him it sounded creepy. I couldn’t place him. “You’ve got me on the edge of my seat.” “Not the yummiest of vitaes mind you, but it keeps the wolves from the door. Farming is in my blood, but the future is in research: exotic imports … high-yield hybrids…” “Why did you bring me here? “ I said. “Where is the boy?” “As you know, Rangeela Pradesh translates roughly as “many-coloured state” or “state of being multi-coloured”. But it isn’t real, my friend. You are a Professor of Textual Practices. You know that nothing is real. All is text. The Resistance is not real. And the counter-revolution is not real no matter what Krishnan tells you. Unlike myself, even Krishnan has forgotten why he’s here—””I didn’t ask why you are here. Or Krishnan. Why am I here?” Chilling waggled a hammy finger at me. “Ahh. Its so interwoven, so tangled and interconnected. My turn: why are you here?” I didn’t answer. “You don’t have to tell me. I understand the pull of one’s children. I am also a father. You do their bidding, even if it means also doing the bidding of those you hate: in your case you agreed to act as courier for Wilson Trulli. What’s in it for you? Apart from the handsome gratuity. The all expense paid travel. Your daughter’s forgiveness? Perhaps she will finally claim you, eh? He was a rival once for her affections, no? A triangle as contaminated as legend.” A text message beeped its arrival on his phone. He pressed some buttons and continued: “What’s in it for her? She gets to send you to the ends of the earth. The real ends of the earth. Well here you are. But here’s the thing. I thought Trulli was fucking her mother.” I stood up and turned toward the car. Two men stepped out from the shadows of the house. Chilling downed his beer, and waved for some more. ‘Sit down, my dear man. Have a drink. We will talk of other things. My grandfather fought in the Majithi Uprising of 1945 against the adivasis who were mere puppets for foreign interests. He was awarded the Maha Veer Chakra for 112 valour. I myself gained a reputation in the counter-revolution to quell the tide of pan-tribalism rising since the eighteenth century. We trained together as you know—not only Krishnan and myself but another who you may have heard of—Nirmal Prasad, the mercenary, and one other who is dead, trained together at CIJWS—Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School—CI ops, low- intensity combat. The motto there was “Fight the guerrilla like a guerrilla”. Quite catchy don’t you think. A pipedream I might add. The definition of guerrilla warfare is metamorphosis. How can you fight what you can’t define? How can you simulate what you cannot know? The Indian civil compact is built on this pack of lies. I got wise to it. While the others were perfecting methods of concealing grenades in bamboo, I was secretly consulting with experts in satellite-controlled IED facilities. I set up my own ops outside a village in a border district, distributing heroin imported from Myanmar and China, skimming profits from my grandfather’s Betel Palm plantation to support the escalating conflict. I fed it. Nurtured it. Didn’t get involved in either side. Just kept them at each other. That’s the name of the game if you want to create a new world to rule.” “If this new world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you could set yourself up as life coach for criminal masterminds. Maybe when you retire.” “What went wrong with you, Doctor of Sexual Practices? You had a good thing going all these years. You should have just stuck to the script. Stayed detached. Kept playing them off against each other: all the warring sides. The ex- wives and step-children and in-lawyers and colleagues and in-laws and parents. Get in. Get what you want. Get out. What made you change? You allowed sentiment to get the better of you this time. Why? You shouldn’t have gotten involved.” He shook his small head, and reached over to press some buttons on his phone. “What do you want with the tape?” I said. “It was during the final phase of my transformation into shall we say a consultant for counter-movements, that my interests were piqued by the imaging technology at my disposal. I boast the largest and most esoteric collection of 113

Diana Spencer footage on the planet.” “You stinky-stanky men are all the same.” “You noticed,” said Chilling sat back and winced as he crossed ankle over knee. “Hip flexibility, Chalmers, use it or lose it. I, for one, am an honest farmer. Look at my hands, dirty as they come.” “Your cucumbers. I forgot.” “Strawberries, actually. My last shipment earned me half a million US dollars. That’s a lot of rupees.” “What’s Trulli’s game?” “I like you, so here goes. I like you because you are no stranger to regret. Men like us grow gills to breathe it in.” I shook my head, chewing. The sandwich was so good. The beer like mother’s milk. “As you no doubt have long suspected, Trulli’s scientific interests are, shall we say, I little out of the mainstream. There is not even enough funding these days for real physics, never mind the sort of thing that turns reputable universities into laughing stocks. So Trulli has long had to look for outside funding. He runs, or has an interest in art theft as you know. Runs a gang out of Southern California. He’s really quite good. Much better as a criminal mastermind than he is as a scientist. You didn’t know? Ahh, you must talk to your daughter about this. She would love India. Bring her out. Get to know her again. Trulli works in a niche market. As you’d expect. His clients have unusual tastes. We are private collectors of millenialist esoteria. What would you say is the definitive artefact of the twenty-first century?” “You don’t get out much, do you?” “Exactly,” he said, leaning gleefully forward. “The image. Ten out of ten, professor. The image is all there is. Visual art brought to its sexiest form in the moving image. Doesn’t matter what it says so long as it moves and keeps on moving. Pan and track and zoom and angle. Severed from space and time. The still image has entranced us for centuries, but what makes the image truly 114 fascination is when it moves.” “Are you aware of the etymological connection between fascination and fascism? For your information: English being your second language.” “Shoot it. Frame it. Keep it for all time. Ceaselessly moving.” “I suspect that Trulli’s anti-gravity technology—cheap satellite cameras and so on—might give him a leg-up in the spy business.” “Again. Ten out of ten,” said Chilling, more quietly this time. He began to look thoughtful. “No one’s enemies are all in one place, Chalmers.” “If you hurt that boy—” “What’s new in the field of sexual practices, Dr Grant?” I stood up again, although there was nowhere to go. “Or is it textual? So easy to confuse the two. Is that what you tell your wife? Is that what you told your children? You know, you are taller in person than you are in the pictures.” “What pictures? “ The phone rang again. He picked it up, listened and passed it up to me. A sudden breeze blew my hair across my face. I pushed it away and looked into the tiny screen. A well-built brown boy with a bag over his head, kneeling in the dusty gloom, a damp corner of some abandoned warehouse on the edge of nowhere. Shirtless in the urine-spattered dust, and hooded, his identity stripped but I’d know that body anywhere. His wrists were lashed together. His boy-man shoulders wing-like from the bulky chest, scratched and bruised. They stood behind him headless and black-glad … the faceless terror, the rusty weapons. If it moves, shoot it. I looked up from the screen. Chilling reached across for his cell. “We won’t hurt the boy if you give me back the tape. “It’s gone. I don’t have it. “Find it,” he said. “You lost it. You were paid to give it to the boy. He was the decoy. We set up the break and enter so that the public would think that it was just some rebel gang wanting to get their hands on the propulsion technology. 115

End of story. When my men got there and saw no tape, well what did you expect them to do? They took the boy instead.” “Why? What do you want from it?” He traced a line down the frosted green bottle with a gold-ringed finger. “They killed her because she wouldn’t stop moving,” he said. “The more she moved, the less they were able to see of the whole.” “Is that hole or whole?” “Zinda ya murda,” he said. “Alive or dead: same thing.” “Diana? Even you can’t believe that her death was not an accident?” I said. “There are some factual anomalies that can't be ignored, yes. “ he said. He folded his hands across his waste. For a moment, he sat as still as the gasping sky and waiting earth. “The Queen herself told the bodyguard that there are powers at work in the country about which even she has no knowledge. The investigation into the “accident””—he twiddled blunt manicured fingers. “Was delayed by years. Enough time to bury the evidence. Did you know that her initial travel plans were to stay with Hewitt in America with her sons? No, of course not. These were vetoed by security so she went to France instead and was killed. The ambulance carrying her to the hospital in Paris took over an hour to travel a few kilometres. How could you know? Or that the owner of the white Fiat that clipped the Mercedes in the tunnel committed suicide under suspicious circumstances. Or that the photo agency where he worked was raided later by men in balaclavas who took hard discs and lap tops while the authorities did nothing—” “Is that how you hope to make sense of it?” He looked up at me through the yellow glasses. With eyes behind the aerodynamic lenses that were like pale blind holes. “No,” he said. “It is how I will bring her back.” … 116

Dean goes to Zilla’s, does the rounds. He turns over a smooth profit. Enough to score some coke from a connect in the ladies room. No one recognises him because of his new blond dreads. He dances, cranked on Southern Comfort and white lines, until dawn. He walks the seven pink-streaked miles to Potter street. He calls Gemma in Santa Barbara, wakes her up. They talk as Dean weaves his way across parking lots and shuttered adult stores and under torn awnings. He stops outside an all night gym. “I found a room,” he says. “It’s got all this stuff in it. Celebrity stuff and collectibles. It’s mostly junk.” “Do know what I’m wearing?” says Gemma. “Right now.” Dean steps off the curb, and a white van swerves to avoid him. “Did you find the tape?” Gemma says. “It has to be there somewhere.” He lets himself into the apartment, and stumbles over a pizza box he left by the front door. He crawls to the bathroom, throws up into the toilet. He wakes up four hours later on the cold puke and pee-streaked tiles. Dean showers, scrubs the floor, has a joint. Then he takes a flashlight and his fishing knife and crawls into Kim’s closet. He moves the boxes and the false wall. He turns on the light. Dean begins by slicing through the pristine packaging: The Simpson’s Kwik-E Mart, a Dalek still in the original 1978 box, Cinderella Barbie, Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. He opens and empties every faded box of checkers and Uncle Wiggly and Star Wars Lego. Chips and dice and jacks and cards and bubble-gum tumbles to the floor. He shakes the wigs, and turns costumes inside out. He tears pages out of albums and slits the backs out of dolls and bears. He kicks the Coca Cola bistro set on its side. He tears Brad Pitts’s head off. He rips Princess Diana’s dress to shreds. He crushes her tiara. He smashes the commemorative plates. No tape. …

“What have you done?” said Krishnan. “Bo Chilling doesn’t make deals.” The walls of Krishnan’s little home-office were a pale grape colour. It hadn’t taken me long to track him down. I skipped curfew and flew into Tushwar this 117 morning. I found the house on a wide dusty street in the old part of town. A ruined fort on a scrubby rise at one end of the street leads down to a busy temple. Flower and sweet vendors spill onto the street; sand-coloured Sadhus whispering in the dusty shade. A thin string hangs loosely around narrow waists, buttocks strong and dusty. Down from the fort is a row of old shops, caverns carved it seemed out of the crumbling hillside. A ubiquitous rickshaw stand doubles as a meeting place under a yellow, blue and red sign that reads: LUX VESTS, BRIEFS AND PANTIES. Men talk and smoke. They squat and knit. Barefoot woman rustle percussively past with baskets on their head. Pretty boys and girls smile into their cell phones. Movie music is in the air. The smell of urine, manure, frying snacks and flowers. “He said he’d trade the boy for the tape,” I said. Arun Krishnan looked up at me from his desk, centred on a pink and green durrhi. “You’ve had a haircut,” he said. “I liked it long. It made you look younger.” “Like a relic you mean,” I said. I had my hair cut by a barber under a banyan tree in the town square at Lalganj. Krishan’s face spoke to only the vaguest scraps of stolen sleep. A Venetian blind on the side window sent shards of horizontal silver across his face and polo shirt. A pipe sat in an ashtray that teetered on a pile of manila folders. Next to this stood a framed commendation from former Rangeela Chief Minister Manohar Jha. The bookshelves were stacked with volumes in Hindi, French and English: Don Quijote, Didion’s Democracy, Cornell West, Dashiell Hammett, Dickens, Homi Bhaba.On the wall behind him was a large framed photograph of four soldiers. Krishnan, ten years younger, was second from the left. I said, “I don’t know where it is.” “You’re not the only one,” he said, shaking his head and gazing dark-eyed across the scattered piles at me. “Tell me, sir, before you came here, had you heard anything of our troubles? No. The neglect of the foreign press, however, is precisely the problem. You know about the State of Unified Rule, sir? I doubt this. 118

Have I mentioned foreign investments? Yes: Rangeela Pradesh, India’s poorest state is rich in iron ore, mica, coal. The highest infant mortality rate. Two out of every three children will not live past five years old. The average life expectancy is forty-even. AIDS is endemic in villages across the north. Contracted by blood transfusion. Medieval you say? We severed ourself from Bihar in the seventies—yes, we had our own Nouvelle Vague. Now after decades of peasant and tribal unrest, the state hovers between history and actuality, myth and mayhem—India’s prodigal child, a monster. The annual flooding of the Pyari and seasonal outbreaks of cholera. Pretend it isn’t here, and it might go away. Our identity is a work in progress, a play in interminable acts.” “What is on the real film?” I said. “The one Avi wasn’t meant to know about ?” “But he did, didn’t he?” said Krishnan, running a beautiful hand through the grey-streaked city haircut. “The boy who knew too much.” All boys know too much. …

A home-made label says The Conversation, 1974. Dean who is subsisting on milk and marijuana and a case of tinned chilli he bought from Price Club on his last trip back from work, shoves the tape into the VCR. It is a relief to have his own TV here. God only knows how Kim got along with that shitbox he had. Dean picked up his TV from the alley where he left it after dinner with his mother. She’ll never notice it’s gone unless she goes into his room, which is locked. The sheets stink. Of unwashed boy and layered jism and nightmares so vague and dimly chilling that they leave Dean soaked in sweat and sometimes pee. The movie rolls. Slow high-angle shots clash with a sunny score. Digitised voices cut in. But in the real world outside the apartment a siren nears. The screen flickers. Another siren joins in and the wails stop suddenly on the corner behind the building like a throat being cut. The room in which Dean lies in another man’s bed redly pulses. Gene Hackman makes a mistake. He’s an uberbugger, a top notch A-grade wire man, but his 119 conscience isn’t dead yet. He feels guilty about a crime he helped commit. Dean fidgets, glances across at the drawn shades. When he looks back at the TV, the bugger is dancing with a lady in green. The camera circles like a bird of prey. The intrusive red flicker intensifies. Outside the room, amplified radio voices muffle their human counterparts. Men bark authoritative syllables. Dean starts to a pop-pop-pop. He glances at the lights washing across the drawn shade. The conversation between the couple in the movie seems to be about someone who is trying to kill them. The bugger tries to figure out who. The bugger plays the tape. Rewinds it. Plays it again. Stalks the couple at their ritzy corporate building. Harrison Ford is up to some Hanky Panky. Outside high-pitched shouts mingle with the snarls of the cops. A kid starts crying. Then there is another muffled pop-pop-pops. A man screams. Dean jumps out of bed and goes to the window. He peers through a crack between the blind and the window, taking care to stand by the wall. He turns and points the remote at the TV, about to pause it. His trembling hand freezes in mid-shot. A blip in the footage. No mistake there. Dean forgets about the sirens and the shooting. He stops the tape. 26: 43: 11. He rewinds it to about where he thought he saw the flash. 26:41:11. On a bus. The protag is riding back on an empty bus at night after a fight with girlfriend and his profile against a stark window fades to black and white, then out completely. It emerges back out of the darkness and bingo, there it is: a ghost hidden in the frame. The ghost is not between one image and the next. It is cut into the image itself. A ghostly wound. He inches the tape backward and forward frame by frame until he gets the one that is distinct from those that preceded it and from those that follow. He cues it at 26:43:08. He continues to watch the movie. He less interested in the story than he in cuing the anomalies. These occur about a hundred times throughout the film. He can’t really follow the story but it’s these silvery white flashes he's after: fishing fishing, come to Deano. If he can only reach into the cold stream of memory and grab them: but how? These swimming blips—a fraction of a second in duration which is no more than a frame or two—are completely indecipherable to Dean, but somehow he thinks that they contain the whole thing— 120

“Or the Hole Thing. The Great Whatsit. The Hot Spot,” said Krishnan. “Whose hole?” “Tea?” said Krishnan. “Chai lo,” he called through the open door. An indistinct response came floating back from deep in the house. “Who are you?” I asked. “Identity, you see. A fluid concept. Take your old friend Wilson Trulli. He gives the rest of us hanky panky men a bad name, don’t you agree?” I shifted in the wicker chair. “I wouldn’t know,” I said. A phone rang somewhere in the house. A child picked it up and began talking in Hindi. The last time I saw Lena was at a Del Carrera restaurant. It was on the rooftop restaurant atop a mall. Very chi chi. I used to take my parents there. Lena’s ordered the dish that had been Lily’s favourite: duck-sausages on a bed of polenta. I bought some Australian Pinot Noir. A mistake. I sent it back and ordered Coronas. She looks nothing like me with her dark hair and pert features. She turned her face to look at the ocean. I could see my reflection in her Ray Bans and found that strangely reassuring. “If it moves shoot it. Whose hole do you think?” said Krishnan. “Princess Diana. The Princess. The stolen film has nothing to do with gravity-shielding. It is a film of her—” “By her,” he said. “Call it a self portrait. The image is the thing. It’s all there is, the Great Whatsit, which is where the gravity shenanigans come in. Trulli as you know runs an art-theft gang. We have been on him for years.” “We?” I said. “You told me you’re a journalist. A regional hack. Now you’re Interpol or whatever—” “CBI, actually,” he said. “We have men in place. Undercover and whatnot. For Trulli, the image is where the art is. Through his anti-grav technology, he’s been able to promise, and deliver, images beyond the reach of even the most esoteric collector. “ No need for expensive fuel storage—liquid or solid—or cumbersome, difficult-to-conceal transportation convoys. Backyard spying at ranges of up to 121

2000 kilometres; check your co-ordinates. Lock—the local kiddie-pool; up-skirt or down-blouse; extortionable rock idol; Malaysian competitor; lorazepam-enhanced boy-on-boy action—and load. …

Dean watches another movie in the red glare of the ambulances and growling squad cars that have raided the crack house around the corner. It is Taxi Driver, and it is marked by the same blips. These are easier to see than in The Conversation because it is generally a darker film. Dean likes it better as a story. Give him DeNiro over Hackman any day. He gets so engrossed in the story, in that little blond with her sad eyes and mini-skirt and in Travis Bickle’s gun and ‘hawk and ‘tude that he misses some of the blips and has to go back and forth a few times with the remote. By the time he’s finished watching Taxi Driver, the ambulance and cops have gone. So Dean cautiously leaves the apartment. He gets into Kim’s Focus and heads downtown to that all-night gym and the Sportsmart next door. It glows like a morgue in a dark block under the freeway. He pulls into the parking lot next to a couple of older model SUV’s and a stolen, stripped down Escalade. Inside the store Dean buys himself a bowie knife just like the taxi driver. He gets sold on a shoulder strap. The clerk throws in a little Australian pig knife with a bone-look handle for free. There are some cheap plastic ankle straps in a jar on the counter and Dean takes one when the clerk turns around to answer a phone. Dean switches off the lights on Kim’s car and pulls the Focus into the parking lot behind the apartment. His new knife digging into his ribs. He lugs a sports-bag out of the front seat, and goes around the back way out of habit and because it’s better to expect the worst: Russell waiting for him with a deaths-head grin, waving a garrotte. But what Dean hears at the foot of the stairs is not Russell. It sounds more like a bear or a large animal trapped in an attic: Dean’s attic. Dean pushes back into the rank shadows and peers up the stairwell at a weak light dancing on the landing. He hears keys jangling and a non- specific rummaging underscored by heavy breathing. The light is tricky and glimmers on the lower steps. Dean’s sphincter twitches. He reaches under his jacket and silently pulls his knife out of the holster (already chafing). He pushes himself further under the stairs. 122

A flashlight beam dances and slices across Dean’s face through the gaps in the stone steps. A tall, heavy man rocks slowly down the steps. Keys jangle loudly on his pants as his body heaves one way and then the next. He holds a flashlight in one hand, and another small bulky object in the other. He makes his way down the stairs above Dean and then starts on down the walk. He moves with the effortful gait of recently fat men not used to their new bulk. He’s six three or four, but thirty pounds over his ideal weight. Dean steps out from behind the stairs and follows the man between the two buildings, palming the blade in a hand scrawled with fading phone numbers. The man stops at a corner apartment of the northern block, far from Dean’s end. So Dean is not the only inhabitant of this ruined and forgotten world. The apartment is all lit up and blaring TV noise. Dean checks his watch. It is not quite midnight. “Hoo-is?” Dean hears. “It’s me. Walter,” says the man. The door opens, drenches the big man in a yellow wash of light like a grizzly outside a tent. “Hey, whassa’, buddy,” says a high-pitched Latino voice. “Hey, yourself. You see Kim lately? From 4737, Sector 8?” “Hell no. I no’ see that one, you know, maybe once-twice I see him whole-time. “ “Ayuh,” says Walter. “That’s how I like ‘em. Nice and quiet.” “Oh, choo bet. Las’ night, other-one, keep kid awake whole-night wicha music—whole-thing: language, smoking, screaming. Kid-scream… Lucy she get the migraine. I tell em, show some respek.” The other one? There are more? “The ones from 4602? Sector 3. They been quiet for a while. Streets just got flooded with junk—heroine from China—I hear on the airwaves. Ayuh. Party time. I was at my brother-in-law’s last night, didn’t get back till after two. Cards, beer, one day I’ll learn.” “One day choo be dead, man. When choo learn choo dead.” “Ayuh. Be careful what you wish for. My mom used to say.” “No sign of that kid man, man, choo knock upstair?” Dean hears knock knock against the Mexican’s door. 123

“No joy, so I left a reminder about the rent due, a no-no on my slab. Don’t hear from him by tomorrow, I’m goin’ in. I’ll come get you, that’s alright.” “No porblem, my friend. You just come get Ronnie. Ronnie watch your back.” “I don’t care about the rent. You know that. It’s the bank’s money anyway. What do I get out of it. A little extra for my retirement. But something different about that kid. Ayuh. Gotta watch out for the good guys, like Ed Sullivan says. The ones can't watch out for themselves.” “Ed Sullivan, man? He’s old bro’, dead by now, Whas' he know?” Dean couldn’t see the Mexican, but the way Walter was looking down, he guessed he was shorter than the super. Maybe the same age, but probably not as fat. And twice as strong. “He knew. He knew that Old Uncle Sam is your mother in drag and she eats her young. And I’m saying that as a Republican. I served in the Gulf War. The first one. Ed Sullivan knows plenty. He used to say that Elvis was the one that got away. He was right.” “Yeah sure, man, Elvis the King. And Diane she the Queen. My wife she crazy over that bitch man, Diyanne. Gotta picture on the wall, she goes to the art class downtown, so she can learn how to draw Dianne. Dianne this and Dianne that. She cry to me: Ronnie look at the eyes. The eyes all wrong Ronnie. What to do? Wah wah she cries like a baby man. I hate it when the women cry, man. Makes me cry too. Look my eyes all wet. I say just draw sunglasses man. That bitch love the sunglasses. I found the picture in a magazine. Gold rimmed shades. She draw them over the eyes now. No more crying.” Dean follows Walter the Super past the closing door of Ronnie's apartment. It is a dark night. The moon is on its side, and there is maybe one star too, unless it’s a planet, because it’s huge there all by itself and its light is more of a steady burn than a twinkle. Below it, the blind swimming pool looks like one of Mackenzie’s plates—a spinning disc hovering in the night. Ready for the journey to that planet up there. Dean and Walter skirt the edges, Walter going one way and Dean going the other, any noise he's making masked by the laboured breaths and stiff-legged rustle of the fat man's khakis. Walter stops behind the corner of the building closest to the eastern parking lot where, jangling keys and mumbling, he lets himself in to the ground floor apartment and closes the door 124 behind him. Dean listens to the bolts being drawn…one, two… Then Hill and Grace comes on and Dean walks slowly back to Reed’s apartment crunching on shards of broken glass. Dean feels a little calmer as he’s fishing for his keys when something glimmers in his peripheral vision. He turns around but sees and hears nothing. The door across the dark hall is boarded up too, long time. But then it catches his eye. A soft pulsating glow from underneath the door, like the lambent gleam from an otherworldly computer. Dean watches it for a while, feeling his whole universe beginning to narrow. A switch has been flicked, and he is totally turned on. One minute you’re on auto focus, then everything’s changed. Want to really zoom in? Switch to manual. …

Krishnan’s servant brought the tea in. It was Empire style—leaves steeping in a pot instead of simmered with milk and spices on courtyard coals like I became accustomed to in the village. Krishnan reached for reading glasses I never saw him wear before. He pushed a file across the desk. I took it and leafed through the clippings, typed reports and transcribed recordings than chronicled an embarrassing career subsidised by an illicit trade in stolen images made possible by remote imaging technology. “Spying,” I said. “He want to be a kind of high-tech peeper.” “Take it one step further,” said Krishnan. “And you’ve got gravity-shielding, a system of gravity focusing that theoretically makes satellite and global positioning technology accessible to the everyman.” “So he’s looking to make millions. Why turn to petty theft?” “A cheap and simple technology with inestimable theoretical and commercial applications but so far no lab—apart from those run by crackpots like Trulli – has been able to claim effects large enough to be meaningful,” Krishnan said. “he can’t get funding. He has to turn to other means.” I flipped through images of Lena through the years, which shouldn’t have 125 surprised me, but did to the point of a jellied nausea. One from that book launch where she and Trulli had been slurringly swapping Monty Python riffs with a bunch of other grads. Something about their coupling struck me again as an abomination, and I had made the mistake of telling her. She threw a glass of beer in my face and told me she'd hated me since she was twelve. There were dozens of pictures of Lena in the file. How much they'd begun to resemble each other. I closed the folder and moved it back across the desk to Krishnan. As I did I saw the typed label on its tab: 84737. “Here’s the thing,” he began, his interlaced fingers reflected in the glass ashtray. “Beneath the science footage which isn’t worth a dime and Avi knew it—” “Don’t talk about him in the past tense,” I said, hearing the lie in my voice. “Chilling showed me the evidence. He’s alive.” “—is the real film: encrypted images of the real Diana, yes we have reason to believe it is actually her. Trulli runs a revolving door of specialists who removed the film from a collector in your home town of San Corolla. He procured it for Chilling. It isn’t the first time Chilling has bought hawk-high smut from Trulli, but this is something different.” Krishnan leant forward. He lowered his voice. “It’s really her.” “To cover their arrangement, the footage was encrypted with the science data, and you couriered it to India. Chilling had already made a substantial down payment for the footage. This is how Trulli could afford to set up the complex theft involving decoys and so on. Chilling would take it from here. The idea was that he would set up a real theft of the fake footage, without Avi supposedly knowing there was anything else on it but science. The underground would be abuzz with the theft of classified spy protocol or whatnot—” “How did he find out?” “It’s not hard, Dr Grant. There are several undergrounds, or the underground has several layers. Chilling’s mistake was to believe that hell is only one place. No: once you start digging you unearth all sort of contradictory muck. Avi became caught up in a separate set of underground shenanigans 126 surrounding Princess Diana. This particular footage was supposedly produced in Paris just days or possibly hours before her death. It has spun itself into the global mythology. She has faded away but in so doing has become total Presence. She has left the building but her image still takes up all the air in the room.” “Put me in touch with this rescuer, this Nirmal whatshisname, the one they all talk about,” I said. “You mean this one,” he said, swivelling around and pointing to the army picture behind him. Krishnan windswept second from the left, Chilling towering far right, and a grinning boy on Krishnan’s right whose indistinct figure he brushed lightly with his finger. “My cousin,” he said. “Crushed under a supply truck that went turtle in Shrinigar. See those barracks to the right? CIJWS—Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare school. Down near Zafed. We all met there.” He pointed to a narrow wide-eyed youth standing at far left. “This is Nirmal Prasad, the ‘famous mercenary’” he twiddled well-tended fingers in the air. “The restorer of Sons. A peacock cried from a neighbouring rooftop. It balanced on the high railings in distant silhouette like a static brushstroke against the white sky. Krishnan took a remote control off his desk and switched on a monitor in the corner of the room. Red numbers and white lights burned in the growing dimness. “My wire-man, best in the business. Watch.” The black screen on the monitor crystallised into a chiaroscuro space and then ballooned out like a cave. I had no way of seeing where the ceiling began, and what were walls and what mere shadows. Suddenly she moved across what seemed to be a giant screen. It was Diana, greeting owners and Jockeys at Ascot. She wore a flat-brimmed hat. It flapped around the highly ordinary face that has now outgrown itself in its mad proliferation across our consciousness. Her overdone hair fluttered in the breeze and all around her the ceaseless movement of the crowd. 127

Then the jerky hidden camera panned to a wall left of the screen within a screen. There, a bank of twenty flashing monitors each showing different Diana footage flickered and flashed. ““Don’t you love it?” came Krishnan’s voice from what seemed like another room. On the screen, a hand pressed a keyboard just to the side of the door and the camera panned back to the large monitor. It showed a smiling gamine Diana in a white satin shift studded with jewels talking to a photographer. She stood with one hand jauntily on her hip. A muffled growl came from hidden speakers. Inter-titles came on the screen. “There is something fascinating about her, wouldn't you agree?” the titles read. “But only when she moves.” Then I watched as another screen came into view: A wan little five year old girl with blue eyes and wet hair splashed in the bath with her younger brother. “Home movies.” the inter-titles said over the indistinct mumble, and the camera flew to B.S. Chilling’s face. It loomed waxy in the digitised glow, pupils dilated behind yellow-tinted lenses. Cut to a corner of the cave which served as some kind of home studio: dials and levers and LED’s. Banks of computer monitors. Then cut back to the film of little Diana and her brother in the bath and a gleaming expanse of black leather seating hunched before it. More titles: “The masters. Went missing four years ago. Know what the reward is for their return? I had to move mountains for these.” Sliding floor-to-ceiling stacks with more tapes, videos, DVD's and reels. Others were piled up on low tables and shelves around the room. The projection room was above the door, accessed by a small flight of steps barely discernible in the grainy darkness. Krishnan froze the tape. “Your daughter Lena actually stumbled onto something similar to this years ago without knowing exactly what her old friend Trulli’s involvement was. To stop her he had her framed for grade commerce. He produced the taped 128 conversations, loaded porno onto her hard drive, you name it. She never knew what hit her. You were there though, weren’t you, sir?” “Not as such. My work takes me away more frequently than I would like—” “He paid you,” he said, waving it away. “To leave. Gave you money. Pulled some strings. A fertility festival in Guam, Thai paw-paw bake-off, transgender Samoan Rugby play-offs. Anywhere but where and when she needed you. Where you could play Dad. Trulli made sure you never got the chance. And you let him.” “There was a tribunal. She was acquitted.” “And thrown out of the college and the years pass, and she crawls back from two bouts of mono, a cocaine addiction, six months in rehab, a community college course in computer science and web programming specialising in security, a short haul as a receptionist in a brothel—” Web programming? I knew that. “—and manages to sell a few film reviews around the street press in San Corolla, finagling her way into a regular lifestyle and culture blog, printed on the Tribune. Twisted Sister. All very well and good. Out of the blue, the old science codger calls her up. We have the audio of that—” I stood up. I turned toward the door. It looked about two miles away. A pot clanged in the kitchen. I smelled the ubiquitous onions frying in ghee. A child began her piano practice in a distant room… Plaisir D'amour. “I will put you in touch with Prasad. But I should tell you now that if you have any information, if you are withholding anything that you think might be relevant. Now is the time, sir. We can hold you for obstruction of justice. Now or later. Take your pick.” I looked across the room at the monitor. How you could smell the layered cum in that dread shrine. An image of an image of an image of a child in the bath, a performance that began before she was born and played out to a global lust for the hole-thing. A corner of the leather chair jutted into the frame, a dead animal crouched in mid-leer. Bam. 129

“Leather,” I turned back to Krishnan. “That night outside Avi’s trailer, I heard him fighting with Sandi and I waited for them to finish. I had the tape with me. But something made me keep it. I was afraid for him. Afraid like I’d been for my—for Lena years ago. Someone else was out there. I smelt American cigarettes … and something else. I smelt leather.” 130

10 LEATHER JACKET T.A.

Apart from her father, no one had ever looked so out of place in this round- windowed nest floating between land and sea. Jay Diaz, standing at the door in the morning haze in a white T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket. “Is that suede?” she asked. He looked down at a dark brown sleeve. “Not sure,” he said. “I got it in India.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the step and came in. She made coffee while he strode around the apartment, deftly picking up knick- knacks and putting them down. He came to the fridge and studied the picture of her and Sonny Bono above the caption, “And the beat goes on, Sonny Bono 1990” because that was really Sonny in the flesh between her and Trulli, looking just like his cardboard cut- out. The Mayor of Palm Springs had been at his offices the day she and Trulli turned up. He went along with the gag. Trulli had that effect on people. Bono pretending to be a cardboard model for the picture. The girl behind the desk, whose name-tag said Pepper, took the shot. Next to the Polaroid on the fridge was a luggage tag Lena had found in her grandmother’s apartment before the funeral. She’d stayed there for a few days to go though the things, sleeping on the couch in order to avoid the twin beds pushed together under the old tapestries from Poland. Lena been napping on those beds since she was a child, even back east, Lily chopping eggs in the kitchen, Pop tinkering in the shed only to end up in an aluminium chair out on a cement box of a balcony looking out over a SoCal parking lot. To die demented and leave Lily to make a small fortune on the stock exchange in the five years remaining to her. The luggage tag said Final Destination, San Corolla. Lena thought the two captions pretty much summed up her life. The tawny Californian hills made her aware of a distant drumming, one that met time head-on and invited her to outlive certain things if she could. 131

She made coffee and watched Diaz prowl the deceptively tiny space crammed with chunky canvasses and colourful debris piled up in corners. The silent clamour of inanimate objects—she’d let them take on the secret life dictated by their form. It spoke less to the fullness of life than a mad proliferation of emptiness. She registered muscularity under Diaz’s T-shirt, a by-product of an excessive psychic routine, she guessed, more than any deliberate physical maintenance protocol. The pectoral sweep, the hard abdominal valley. “How many sit-ups do you do each morning?” she said. “One hundred. Two hundred?” He paused at a shelf in front of a wooden carving of Don Quijote and a chunk of cement. “I wait until it starts hurting,” he said. “Then I do two hundred. Is this a piece of the Berlin Wall?” “Did you see Chalmers?” she said. Diaz’s hand froze over a yellow rubbery clock shaped like a fat naked man. The man wore a blue and gold crown. “This is interesting,” he said. “A gift from dear old dad. Did you guys hook up in India?” The clock was in the belly of the fat yellow man. Apart from the crown the man was naked. His lips were lipstick red. He held a sceptre aloft. A little yellow penis hung below his big clock belly that said 9:30. ‘Only in passing,” said Diaz. “So you don’t know if he got the tape to the boy?” Diaz carefully replaced the clock. “I think he messed up,” he said. He turned around to face her. “I think he lost the tape. Left it in a hotel room or something.” Lena took a deep breath. “Is that why you went over?” she said. “To clean up, make sure Trulli got his message across? Where is he by the way?” Diaz turned around to study an acrylic of three lurid apricots in a row. “You paint,” he said, pointing at the canvases. “Ever sell anything?” 132

“What do you think?” she said. “It’s nice,” he said. “Mainly fruit. But not what I'd call still lives. What do you call it?” “Fruit,” she said. “There’s a lot of it,” he said. “It gleams—” gleems “—How'd you do that?” The ‘d’ too soft. “It's in the glaze. You paint it with a special glaze—got egg and stuff in it—then paint the colours on then glaze it again.” From the kitchenette she heard him go to the purring fax machine under the angled ceiling of her home office. She blogged while looking out a round stained-glass window over shingled roofs and firs leading to the beach. On a clear day she could smell the taco stalls and see the stacked boards beside the surf store. He picked up one of the sheets curled up on the floor under the desk: “Across the street were old shops, caverns carved it seemed out of the crumbling hillside. A ubiquitous rickshaw stand —'“ Blocking her ears and singing, badly, “'Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree, it's been three long years, do you still want me, if I don't see a yellow ribbon round that old oak tree, I'll just stay on the bus, forget about us—'“ “What,” he said, smiling. “You don't read them?” “They’re not for me,” she said. “So it doesn’t matter what he says? He could be anywhere, in all kinds of trouble, and you guys—none of you—even glance at a single word?” “He’s telling a story,” she said. “I’ve never been exactly sure to whom, and I don’t think it matters, as long as he gets the last word.” “If the cash is for the little brother,” Diaz said. “Did you ever think: maybe the story is for you.” She turned on the oven and pulled some cinnamon bun dough out of the freezer. She sliced it up and put the flat little spirals on a cookie tray, and slid the tray into the oven. She disassembled the little espresso coffee pot she bought in Naples with Trulli long ago and put the bottom section under the faucet. When it had filled, she scooped 133 coffee into the aluminium cup and placed it in the water, screwing the top section back on. After the Viper, this little tin pot was the possession she most loved in this world. “You could get a dog,” said Diaz, standing suddenly behind her. He brought his arms around her and slid them up her T-shirt, cupping her breasts, breathing tobacco and morning into her hair. They shuffled, giggling, across the coir matting onto the bed while the coffee hissed and the kitchen filled with the heartbreaking smell of cinnamon. He spread her off the side of the bed, kneeling at its edge. They took their time. The morning came and went. They ate breakfast sometime mid-afternoon. “What drew you to university in the first place? Weren't you a little old?” he said. He lay against stacked pillows, fidgeting for a cigarette. A distant skywriter started on a powdery letter across the rainbow-coloured window behind his head. B. “The phallic power of higher learning,” she said. “Wiry professors flanked by leather-jacket TA’s. You know the classic biker style, not those 1980s girls blouses? I made it my own world just by nudging mom back onto the anthropomorphic fringe where she belonged and stashing Chalmers’s compensatory lusts—now under the auspices of, let’s see, Textual Practices if I recall—” “—into the Festering Rage drawer—” “Right. Next to the socks.” He shifted on the pillows, straightened up and rubbed his lower back, but his calm grey eyes didn't waver. “Did your relationship with Trulli help? “ “Help what?” she said, hearing the edge to her voice. “With the festering,” he said, but he was smiling. “Well, lets see. I’d enrolled in a graduate program in Communications at the advanced age of 25. I ate lunch alone on a grassy mound while the Cross Campus Stroll unfolded before me … the Socratic meaner of mismatched instructors from eatery to library, auditorium to parking lot … windswept heads bent together, strolling and nodding, nodding and strolling. Sunlight flashing off steel-rimmed spectacles or 134 anniversary-gift Seiko’s as they disembowel an analogy, flog a metaphor, retell a joke. It was like a well-worn cardigan that would never fit.” “I’m taking it your graduate program didn't lead to a degree.” “Buy Now, “said the sign in the sky. “I bumbled into one or two of his courses—Trulli's. He was just a regular science professor then, knocking around with superconductors, actually. But I wasn't one of his students, per se. I had the password to the lab, though.” “He’d dated your mother.” “Not for long,” she said, suddenly aware that this man was the last to see Trulli alive. “Twenty-five is still young, but old enough to know your way around. It's a powerful combination.” “I didn't stay twenty-five. By the time I caught his fatherly eye I was getting on for twenty-seven, twenty-eight. But he seemed to know who I was. It was flattering. And in return, I legitimised him.” “How?” “I was Chalmers’s daughter for one thing. He was a celebrity scholar much like Trulli himself.” “Gave their professional rivalry a personal focus.” “Took it to the next level, you might say,” Lena got up and went to the fridge, naked. She leaned into the tiny silver fridge and took out two beers. “I’d published two papers and a dozen short stories as an undergrad. I ran the student literary journal. Chalmers barely knew I existed.” “Is that why you took up with Trulli? As revenge?” She said nothing. Opened the beers. “But Trulli seemed to know everything, didn’t he. He took a genuine interest. Put you in touch with the right people.” “Listen, I had no idea what he was.” He swung off the bed and came around the counter to her. “But you found some disturbing evidence.” 135

She looked up at him. His flecked eyes were placid. Diffident even. They met hers. Something moved beneath those eyes, and waited. “What do you care?” He held her gaze. “You’re not exactly on his side, are you?” she suddenly realised. “You’re not his friend at all.” “We had to let him go,” said Diaz. “For lack of evidence.” She felt a tightness returning to her jaw. “You’re on your side,” she said. “Jay Diaz’s side.” “Sure,” he said. “Just tell me one thing: the stuff you found out about him long ago. The stuff he didn’t want you to know—” “He shut me down. Loaded infant porn onto my hard drive. Fed me to the wolves.” “How had you stumbled across the evidence? The stuff you mistakenly mentioned to a colleague, one of his spies? How did you get it?” The movement in his eyes had become more agitated. He had pushed himself off the counter and had taken hold of his own hands, as if to still them. She reached out and touched the hard, scarred knuckles with her fingers. She kept her eyes on their hands, entwined. “I’m not like you,” she said. “I take sides. He’d convinced me his side was safe. Deep down I always suspected that the dark matters he had his hands in went beyond science. That he wasn’t who he said he was. But it was too late.” He reached for her. Lifted her onto the counter. He took his time, paced himself to her rhythms. He became more and less than her, finding room to move in the spaces of the act. He leant panting into her neck and she touched his hair. Pulled her hand away. He reminded her of a B-actor she’d once followed: Eric Roberts, the not so famous brother of Julia. Apart from the unbroken surface of the eyes, the mug on him had a bent and dented look, like something found on the floor of a Soderbergh cattle call. He lifted his head, the beatific smile back in place. They ate in-between everything. She made sandwiches and they drank them with beer— mortadella and fresh oregano washed down with tidal swigs. They slept and once, waking to the grainy chill of a room curtained against the march of twilight, she opened 136 her eyes and saw him across the floor, goose-bumped … hunched over the faxes as they spewed out of the machine. “You don’t know it, do you?” she said thickly. He looked up. “The password. It’s the one thing you don’t know.” “You used it once to find out what he was.” “Yes but he doesn’t know that.” “So use it again, “he said, still kneeling on the floor. “Bring him down.” ““Who are you?” she said. “Let's trade,” he said. “For what?” “For the password to Trulli's lab.” “He never told you?” “We got other stuff. But the key is behind that password. You are the only one in the world who knows. You alone can access all his files. My employers are not willing to channel those kind of resources into the case. Not yet. They know you know. You can save me—them— a lot of time and money.” “You came all this way for that? Tell your employers they’re not working hard enough.” He stood up. “Tell them yourself.” He reached into his flung jeans and pulled out his cell. He pushed a button, and passed it to her. Lena put it to her ear. “Lena?” “Mom?” Her heart rattling so hard she couldn’t move off the bed. She let her arm drop and the phone with it. Diaz walked over and picked it up, pushed a button. Walked back and placed the phone carefully beside the computer, in front of the thesaurus and Scooby Doo pencil caddy. She looked back at him, at the unselfconscious nakedness, at the weariness behind those luminous eyes. At the wavering belief. 137

“The password,” he said. “It’s the key to his files, to everything. He gave it to you long ago, before he got into all this. He forgot you still have it. Even men like him make mistakes. It’s your only weapon. Yet you haven’t used it.” “He changes it all the time.” Diaz turned to the window, peered through a blood-red pane. “It’s always the same characters though. Isn’t it? Alternative versions. Dots and dashes. Case up. Case down. Numerical equivalents. But always the same five characters. “He shut me down. Killed my career. I died. My friends think I used my hacking skills to download and distribute infant porn. I have no more friends. I refuse to get a cat. My university record describes me as a profligate, as a grade-merchant. I know what he is. But he scares me.” “Then why did you go back?” She couldn’t think it. Much less voice it. “So you slept together. Once. Maybe twice. But that was before you knew what he was.” “Viper,” she said between clenched jaw to the naked man kneeling underneath a glass rainbow. “The password is - -P—8_®. “ “Show me,” he said. He pointed to the computer with one hand. The other he held out to her. …

Dean paces the apartment wearing only the pig knife strapped to his ankle. He reads and rereads the Super's fatherly note: K:Your rent was due on Friday last. W. PS. I noticed you changed the locks. Is there a problem?? WB Dean hasn’t slept well. At three o’clock in the morning, he had to roll a joint and eat a bowl of Cheerios just to stop himself from racing over to Walter’s and fish-filleting his fat ass. He goes over the lie again and again, and is even too wired to watch another movie. He had it all picked out before he went to bed: The China Syndrome. But he has to stop because he isn’t concentrating, and keeps forgetting to cue Reed’s weird blips. 138

When he finally falls asleep with the knife under his pillow next to the cricket bat, he dreams of his father. Chalmers is piloting a big flat flying saucer with Dean as co- pilot. The ship is vast, as big and white as a small moon or Mackenzie's plates and it doubles as a submarine plundering the bottomless seas of faraway worlds, teeming with virulent life forms. His father yells, “Dive, dive,” and the commands reverberate endlessly around the ship, until the words become immersed in unfathomable distance and become, “Die, die.” But the most terrifying thing about being on the bottom of the ocean, Dean recalls on waking in a cold and sticky sweat… was the total absence of stars. …

I slept on infested bedding in the designated rooming house, and woke guilty and sweating after a dream that I was in bed with one of your old girlfriends—Gena or Lena. There was an urgent scuffle outside the streaked and dented door. Four interchangeable boys, masked and toting the ubiquitous weaponry burst into the room milling and bickering. They swept me up in a net of underfed testosterone, rushing out of the hotel and into a waiting hatchback where they hoisted me into the back seat, squeezed between bony knees and funky pits. The car hurtled through a half-light of sleepwalkers and alley dwellers and squatting purveyors of steaming food… buyers and sellers congregating in fragrant caves dwarfed by towering goods of an unspecified nature. They blindfolded me at the outskirts of town and as the bag went over my head, my thoughts flew to the boy. This was how it was for you, Avi. When they took you also. Hold on, I’m coming— …

He’s up at seven, smokes a joint, listens to some music and falls asleep again until nine, waking up with a boner. He straps on his knife, jacks off, then counts up some money and leaves the apartment in sunless daylight for the first time. 139

Dean stands on the landing and has a good look across the hall at the empty apartment across the way. Silent in all this emptiness. It is too empty for words. Wordless silence. The boarding looks weathered but solid. No one has tried to mess with it and no one will. Even in daylight, a strange shadow still oozes weakly out from under the door. Dean thinks of the pearly glow from the Pilluyvit flying saucer in his dream. Dean walks down the stairs. A thick layer of clouds bears down on the dark empty sprawl of the complex. Boarded windows and rusty homemade cages over on doors that never open. The stairwell is stained with nameless textured smears that might explain the smell of human waste that is especially strong during the day. There’s an autumnal bite in heavy damp air trapped between the LA smog and a smouldering Tijuana. Dean shoulders his way through the monumental lifelessness. The emptiness comes up to meet him, to eat him. Emptiness rains down from the sky. The halls echo. The windows turn away. Dust swirls. He is Lord of the Void, He is beginning to find room to move in the role. The aborted landscaping has taken on an anguished life of its own. Misshapen geraniums couple with plastic bags; stunted hibiscuses sprout stiffening scraps of discarded clothing. Still-born saplings cry tears of broken glass. Dean stumbles on the cracked pavement, aware of some kind of nameless proliferation between the sound of a delivery truck stuck in reverse and the ubiquitous rush of snaking interstates. He arrives at the super’s apartment. He stands before a shiny new security grille. Marigolds flower in a tiny plot beside the door. Dean presses the doorbell. Looks into the eye of the peep hole. It looks away. The door opens. “Yeah?” says Walter through the security grille. He’s in grey sweats, clean and pressed. “Hi. I’m Kim’s friend. Kim Reed, from number 4737?” Walter says nothing. Then he says, “Sector 8?” Dean nods. The guy is definitely ex-muscle. Don’t make any sudden moves. “So?” “Kim’s away. I’m paying the rent while he’s gone. I got the days wrong. Sorry about that.” Walter says through the security door, “Where’s Kim?” 140

Dean inhales. “He’s up in Spokane at FEST(ur). He’s entered a couple of short films.” “I never knew.” “It’s all here in this note.” Dean waves it—fresh from Mackenzie's word- processor—at the screen door. “He says he’s sorry, he tried to get a hold of you at the last minute, but it was, like a Tuesday, and you weren’t around. He says you were probably at your brother-in-law’s, ‘cause it’s your card night or something.” “He left at night?” “Right.” Walter opens the door, and steps out into the chill white morning. He takes the cash from Dean and reads the note. “He never said good-bye,” he says, looking up at Dean in momentary confusion. Big mistake. Dean sees the sad old fat guy now behind the height and build and concealed .45. Dean shrugs, playing to Walter’s revealed weakness for young boys. Walter looks up at Dean, “Who are you?” he says. “Eric,” says Dean, holds out an unwashed hand, barely shaking. “Eric Roberts.” 141

PART III

I watched you walking away from me. Floating in Hate’s shadow. I tooted, but you were gone. I watched him take you away. You never went fishing. You stole candy from the Market and went to the river. He left you there. I watched as you reeled in nothing. I watched as you ate your candy alone there by the cold river. Always alone. 142

11 BLUE MOVES

Dean turns a corner and he’s in different terrain, standing at one end of a long empty street under the off-ramp sometime after midnight. Warehouses and a packing plant and a self-storage bunker line the narrow street on the track side. On the other side and above him is the blazing howl of the freeway. Dean heads toward blue neon beckoning from the end of the line, loping in oversized skate-shoes across gleaming mica, his flares making a swoosh, swoosh sound against the starless hush of a Tuesday night. This was Kim's night to trip in princess heels down the splintered runway of a fallen planet. Don’t look down. He passes graffiti scrawl and waiting cars parked at intervals along the kerb. Lone smokers dangling pale anonymity behind the company wheels, out of a still serviceable deuce-and-a-half. Dean had found a bottle of yellow nail varnish in Kim’s bedside table. He doesn’t know if it’s Gemma’s or Kim’s. He imagines them taking turns to paint each other fingers and toes. Galactic yellow. He threw the bottle away. He got up in the chill afternoon and got it out of the bin. He painted his nails while watching Parallax View. Dean lights up a cigarette outside the closed black door of the club, underneath a blue neon sign saying Blue Moves. The bouncer is a huge white guy with pecs in need of a wax. He wears a stained tank top and shiny black jeans. He checks out Dean’s fake ID. Then he pats him down without looking at him. Dean made sure to ingest his recreational substances a block away. The bouncer lets Dean in. He hasn’t looked at Dean once, but Dean bets the bouncer could describe him from memory if pushed, from Dean’s blond dreads to the scar on his forehead to the murky green of his eyes. Height: average. Build: average. The one good thing Chalmers could have given him—stature—and the old bastard withheld even that. Dean pays at the desk inside and walks into the upper level bar that looks down on the cavernous dance floor. It’s late so the dance floor is packed. 143

Arms raise and wave. Fingers point. No one seems to be enjoying themselves. They take care not to touch. The bar is along one wall. The lighting is blue. Blue-toned stools and cushions in shades of indigo, purple, cobalt are scattered in the phosphorous darkness. Giant monitors suspended from the star-flecked ceiling play an old black and white movie. At first Dean thinks it is Two-Lane Black-top. There is a black road and a white line and a scared girl running along it in a trench coat. Her feet are bare. Her mouth is pulled back in a grimace. Her eyes are wild. The usual crowd buzzes at the bar, and the usual dealers cruise the hive mind, and the usual chemical honey holds it all together. Dean leans on the rail that looks down on the dance-floor below. The DJ is right below him—a slim and sculpted Queen of the night. He wears silver hotpants and a chain mail bikini top across his rippled chest. On his feet that he occasionally kicks up to the deck he wears steel-tipped platform boots. Dean watches him spin, scratch, groove and grovel. Break, mash, load, and brew. DJ Koma works the keyboard, dropping phat ones, blue-black fingers marching across the consul, sliding levers that generate, distort, warp and replicate orgasms, machine guns, sirens, a woman's scream, a feral yell, and augment his own Ebonic commands. Like a minister for the chemical age, DJ Koma whips his congregation into a ritualistic frenzy, a mind-freeing adventure of the body fuelled by dance and desire, by glistening skin, shiny clothes … and little blue pills. And the music … the familiar melody weaving through the layered beat and the flinty remix like a silver thread. It sweeps you up in its fecund rhythms and fluid embrace. You didn’t know you could dance. Dean doesn’t know how he got to the dance floor, but there he is with his shirt off, tied around his neck like a cape. He scored from a buff white guy with a heavy brow, also bare-chested. There's only one way to be of instead of just in the ‘hood, and that's to score. The only drugs Dean had found at Kim's apartment were Tylenol, sleeping pills and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Walter probably supplied the Viagra. Dean turns seventeen tomorrow. Sweat trickles down his fuzzy abdomen into his jeans. He’s dancing near a group of college girls. They are jumping and bobbing rapidly. 144

Their heads swivel on slim white necks—stems, flowers of the future. Sweaty strands of hair falls across expressionless eyes. Their breasts jiggle beneath filmy tops. Dean moves in toward a small delicate blond in a wrap-around skirt hanging from her hips. She moves away, giving him a glimpse, as she swirls, of hairless cunt. The DJ is everybody. You are nobody. But being nobody was never Dean's strong point. He pushes his way past the dancers, his genitals singing. He limps upstairs. A brother is coming down towards him. This man has got it all going on—black tank top, black baggy jeans with the crotch dragging halfway to the floor, heavy, heavy bling and a white cowboy hat. Their eyes meet, and Dean looks away and keeps climbing the stairs, groin still yodelling. Then Dean is aware that the brother has stopped on the stairs and is watching him through purple-tinted shades. Streaming movement on all sides. Dean swims against the tide until and arm snaps into the stream and fishes him out. Dean is suddenly standing by the rail and a vice-like grip around his bare white arm is all that keeping him there. “You the new tenant? The one took over in Sector 8?” Dean looks at the guy who is slender like a tree and strong as a whip. He reeks of bourbon and stale ganga. “Where'd Kim get to? I didn’t even know he was gone.” The man sways on the step. Dean shakes his arm free. The man appears not have noticed, but Dean decides not to risk a sudden bolt. “Old Walter tells me, says Kim’s gone, Pete. Gone up to some film thing up North, got some white bitch in his place. That you?” Dean just looks at him. The guy looks surprised then smiles widely and suddenly like a Bull Terrier. Jaws like a steel trap. “My bad,” he says, shaking his head and giggling, jingling. “I should have said. I’m Pete, Pete The Meat.” He grabs his crotch, then shoots his other hand back out at Dean, laughing wildly. “I live in 4802. Sector 7. Who the hell are you.” Dean thinks of the rows of closed windows, the layers of empty winding hallways and barred doors. The false echoes. He shakes Pete’s hand and tells him. “Eric Roberts? Do I know that name?” 145

“Like Julia Robert's brother. He made a couple of movies.” “Shut up don't tell me. I know it … I seen it on VH1, I swear? Strange Frequency or some such crazy shit. He does look like her.” “They hate each other,” says Dean. “Snappy,” says Pete the Meat. They have a drink together upstairs and Dean feeds Pete the same line he gave Walter, and Pete bites too and soon they’re old buddies. Dean finds out that Pete typically doesn’t come here on Tuesdays. Thursday night is his big night out. Sunday to Wednesday he does the graveyard shift at a local nursing home. “Besides,” Pete says with a glance down at Dean’s yellow nails. “Tuesday night is fag’s night.” …

They keep a bag over my head. They march me up paths and across streams. We stop. I dial the numbers. Somewhere in space an eye opens and winks this message to you. Forgive me. … Wham bang: giving Pete the Meat a ride home in the Focus. Dean gets an earful. Pete's daddy ran high stakes card games for a local operator, but then the gangs squeezed him out. After a recent jail spell, he’s going straight or trying to. The owner of the corner market’s fed up with trash ruining his legitimate trade by hustling on that very corner, so he offered Pete’ daddy a full buy-in opportunity. A partnership, with Pete’s father working off the rest of his share by working as full-time manager. “That’s pretty generous,” says Dean. “Not when you think about how my old man’s got the street cred to make him an asset to any business in this neighbourhood.” “Street cred?” says Dean.” The dealers, they mingle with the customers to look like them and the regular folk try and mimic the hard core, cause it makes them feel invulnerable, going for bad like that,” says Pete, sounding, or trying to, like a friendly 146 community college sociology teacher. “It's that kind of neighbourhood. Everything’s an act… everyone's in camouflage. And you know what camouflage is, bro?” Dean shakes his head. Stifles a yawn. “Warfare, man. Guerrilla freaken warfare.” “You’ve lost me,” says Dean. “Wake-up. The owner of the market hopes that the presence of my daddy as a man respected at street level wills send a message to the element.” “I get it,” says Dean. “A war cry.” “You get it,” says Pete, emulating an Indian war cry. “You are there.” “I’m totally there,” asks Dean at the wheel, wishing he has something to stem the come-down. “Totally, ER,” says Pete, in his preppiest vowels. He turns away from Dean to stare out at the dim city streets spinning past. Yellow squares of light just going on for the early shift. The old houses give way to cookie-cutter condos and back again to the sagging porches and overgrown yards that wind around the Potter Street apartments like a medieval village. “Mind if I call you that?” Pete says, turning back to Dean. “ER?” Dean shrugs. Pete says, “Snappy, ER.” At the wheel, Dean feels Pete blinking at him in the dark. Dean thinks of the pig knife stashed in the glove box. “You look familiar,” Pete says, his jewellery tinkling. “We been introduced before? Kim didn’t have a lot of friends.” It is only later in his own castle keep that Dean remembers how Pete talked about Kim in the past tense. Dean throws up in the kitchen sink and then passes out on a dead man's bed. In his dreams, a caped but otherwise naked Pete is chasing him through a draughty castle, screaming: “Die, Die, Die!” Or is it “Di, Di, Di”? … 147

It’s die or be dead here in the jungle where, layered between the vines and bamboo stands and hidden stilted shacks another life form proliferates: the paramilitary in basic black, camouflaged counter-revolutionaries, infiltrators in village rags, insurgents in desert fatigues, well-read leftists in Tokyo drag. You guessed it: the bag is off my head. But I still have no idea where I am. Guessing, I’d say the mountainous region in Rangeela’s southwest. We’d been trekking since before dawn. My guides wore dhotis knotted over manic eyes and aggressive stubble. They led us off the path. The gorge opened out into a small valley that was still in the shadow of night. To east, the sun had begun its pink- knuckled climb over the mountains. When we left the path, the dark cliffs and jagged river banks gave way to sloping verdure covered with dark giant ferns on either side of the river which was no more than a stream for a kilometre or so before widening again. By then it was almost light. We veered away to the right up a wide rise with the river still on our left. We came to a wide pool in a clearing. Here they stopped. I backed onto a fallen trunk and watched as they prepared a fire and made tea. They gave me some bread and a little cold mutton and I ate slowly. I watched a small black dog chase bubbles of detergent waste that had washed downstream. I must have nodded off. I awoke to new voices.” Get up,” in English. “Fuck yourself,” I said. That cracked them up. “Saaley Gorey,” they said and laughed some more before waving their AKs at me. “Chalo!” I wondered what he would be like, this mercenary rescuer, and what his rates were. We crossed the river again and continued to climb. Ferns towered on either side of the path. Barnacled boulders crouched like gargoyles over narrow passes. I saw a spattering of huts above us on either side of the stream, and we finally stopped at a rocky clearing guarded by another stand of huts on stilts. Three men rested on their packs in the shelter of two giant rocks. A fat boy sitting on his haunches was prodding a fire into life. A lean, sharp-eyed man was leaning against a stump and leafing through a book. Near him lay two rusting 148 bicycles. The man with the book looked up and said in English, “We can not help you unless you tell us who you really are and what you want.” He had a moustache and high, smooth cheek bones. He wore a long- sleeved white shirt, crumpled trousers and sandals. He was gaunt to the point of emaciation but his taut brown flesh lent him a surreal look of superhuman strength. “Are you Nirmal Prasad?” I said, handing him over a wad of rupees. “I need a rescue.” 149

12 PIDGEON DISCO

A sliver of moon hangs in the fading night outside the dust-coated window. Someone or something has pushed their fist up through his penis into his bladder. He staggers to the bathroom and the lurid yellow-green stream, when it comes, nearly takes his dick off. He gasps and pushes his palm into his clenched eyeballs. He staggers back to the bedroom, takes two valiums and drags on the quilt he brought over from Mackenzie’s house. He’s still shivering when sleep finally takes hold. His cellphone goes off. He registers the time: eleven am. It’s still dark inside, always dark. He lets it ring. He gets up and drinks a pint of fake orange juice. Pees again. His bladder empties more easily, but he is left with a cold tingle that makes him want to tear his own tubes out. The phone rings again. A welcome distraction. “Precious.” “Hello?” “You’ve been constantly in my thoughts, Dean, although I don’t like to bother you with phone calls, but am sending positive vibes and prayers.” “Snappy.” “Snappy yo’self, doggy dogg dogg.” says Mackenzie. “I sent you a copy of my screenplay, Blind-sight. Did you get it?” Dean remembers where he’s supposed to be. “Maybe. There's a pile of mail. Here on Dad’s rug. I’m looking right at it.” “On the hallstand, isn’t it? The maid puts it there while he’s away.” “Who?” “Your father, Chalmers, while he’s away.” “Sure. It’s here alright on the hall-thing. I'll go through it,” he says.” Thanks. I value your opinion, Deano.” Dean walks over to the blind. The sun is out but not for long. A bank of hungry clouds from the west rises to eat it. 150

“No problem. Listen I better go. I have to pee.” “Listen pet, before you go—” Dean's grabs his crotch. The warmth helps. “Thing is,” she says with something rising up in her voice. “Auntie Gwen’s getting married again. And she wants me there. Duh. Well I'm all she's got, unless you count the pack of dickheads we grew up with. And my Lou of course. We both have to go. So that’s two airfares, and God knows what else, and, well it's not a good time, Dean for me financially speaking. Blindsight will change all that, of course. I’m counting on that. The agent is in Frankfurt right now apparently, according to her machine. And Grandad's gone feral of course. Won’t cough up because the groom’s Jewish, all that glass-throwing and chanting as you do. Poor Gwennie. She’s a searcher like me. She’s a Kabbalist now, you know. Well some of us are born followers. I’m more of a go my own way type.” Click hiss rasp. “Anyway, so Gwennie’s in a state—cum-pleetly mental—just got off the phone now. Dehhhh-vastated. So—” She inhales deeply and Dean gets a glimmer of something like a strange fragment lying somewhere between that long-ago river of hate and the hidden door to Kim’s deranged closet. A fragment half buried in the tangled ties that bind, the choking nets of kinship, caught up in the lies of shared and unspeakable histories. He sees himself kneeling by the fragment, brushing away the dirt, and he looks up and there’s his mother standing over him, her blond hair aureoled against the setting sun, holding out a goddam shovel, the kind you kill zombies with. “Anyway, Dean, you know the money from Grandma Lil, how it’s tied up in your college fund and the compensation money and everything,” Dean remembers: the time she sued the surgeon for getting Dean’s nose wrong. There’s probably nearly fifty grand there by now. Dean sits down on the bed, burning balls momentarily forgotten. He reaches out with pale hands like an octopus and takes the shovel from his mother. He starts to dig. The shovel sinks into the blood-soaked earth, and it pushes the fragment closer to the surface. “Take as much as you need, “he says. 151

“Oh Deanie,” Mackenzie starts to cry. “Angel. When Chalmers came along and he ditched that other one, Abbey the architect or whatnot to dump me on the other side of the world, I mean where the hell is San Corolla in the scheme of things?” “Archaeologist,” says Dean. Why do Mackenzie’s sobs always sound so heart-wrenchingly rehearsed? Is it because she has no real emotion left? “Anthropologist, actually,” she says between hiccoughs. “You’re all I’ve got, Boo- Boo bear: “Just you and me.” Dean feels a swelling in his own throat. He swallows quickly. “Just take as much as you need. College is what. I'm only sixteen.” “Seventeen today,” she says, lighting up again and sounding brighter. “I just remembered! Happy birthday, boo-boo bear. When all this is over, we’ll go out somewhere special. Somewhere fabulous. We’ll go to LA. I’ll buy you a whisky sour. It was Pop’s favourite drink, remember?” Dean blinks in the bleak and silent morning. Lily had let Dean make Pop his whisky sour once or twice on family visits back east in that tiny kitchen in the house by the tracks. The sour came out of a packet, tart sugary powder that you mixed with warm water and added to the cheap whisky. Before she died and after she made all her money, Lily had taken to drinking whisky sours. She made them for herself in the little kitchenette at the home with Johnny Walker Black Label and real lemons. “Not really,” Dean says. ‘That was a long time ago.” “Look, “ his mother says sharply. “This is so in the vault, do you hear me? I do not need another stint at the family court. Not a word to your father, comprende?”. Dean pushes the shovel in further and lifts the fragment out of the earth on a pile of dry, cascading dirt. He gently places the load on the ground, where the precious relic lies glittering in the noonday sun, its intricate patterns gleaming through the ages. “Copy that,” he says. “Wuv you Deanie-beanie.” “Wuv you too,” he says. “Coincidentally I could use some cash as well. In an urgent kind of way.” 152

In one of the blips or broken frames of the films, he’s seen or thought he saw a gelatinous form that looked vaguely human. “Jesus,” says Mackenzie, sounding more like her pissed off old self again, but it is too late. She breathes in deeply. She's passed Dean the shovel and it’s all out in the open now. She’s holding the Talisman in her hand finally, feeling its cold beauty, watching the sun glint off its smooth surface. She’s not putting it back in the earth, no way. She's in its power. They both are. “How much?” “A few grand.” “Hell.” she says. “What for?” “I'm making a movie,” says Dean. Exhale. Dean spends the rest of morning taking inventory of all Reed’s damaged or obliterated equipment. Then he goes to the library and spends the afternoon on the internet. Then he goes to an audio-video store and spends the morning browsing. He makes a shopping list, which looks like this: Canon XL1S mini DV camera Tripod Camera battery re-charger, lens filters Microphone DAT recorder 1 Power Mac G4 Final Cut Pro 1 Canon Video Camcorder 1 Sony 29” TV 1 Sony VCR 1 Philips DVD player He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to raise enough cash, even with the settlement money. He figures his total expenses at about twenty, twenty-five thousand retail—at street rates, maybe half that. He owes his connect so the drug business is on hold until he gets 153 the cash from Mackenzie. She’d forgotten it was his birthday and has plans for tonight, but told him to come by in a day or two after she’s been to the bank. Dean drives south to a drug store he knows where you can buy prescription medicine for an exorbitant price. He uses a large portion of his allowance from Chalmers to buys himself some penicillin and a box of baking soda to deal his birthday urinary tract infection. There’s a pile of videos by his bed: Parallax View, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, China Syndrome, Two-Lane Blacktop, Norma Rae, Dog Day Afternoon, All The President’s Men, Groundstar Conspiracy, Serpico, The Fury, Star Wars. All made between 1971 and 1980 and all riddled with tiny rips in the footage. Dean has cued each tape to where the blips are, and also kept a log book as a back-up that looks like this:

Parallax The China All the Race with Taxi driver Serpico View Conversatio Syndrome President’s the Devil n Men 1:09 4:23 1:25 5:14 2:20 1:26 2:10 1:53 11:24 3:57 10:50 2:55 5:25 4:11 2:17 11:55 4:05 11:22 5:05 5:58 4:26 3:46 13:13 4:19 13:23 7:13 9:11 7:12 4:50 14:31 5:06 13:46 9:07 10:09 9:17 5:07 14:36 6:18 13:56 10:49 11:49 9:24 6:04 15:34 6:40 16:11 11:09 17:43 10:12 9:34 17:55 9:38 17:16 11:28 18:05 11:13 9:47 26:15:00 12:31 20:36 11:50 18:48 11:41 10:55 31:31:00 14:03 21:25 13:13 19:58 11:41 11:52 32:24:00 15:05 21:26 14:34 22:02 13:51 13:10 32:40:00 17:15 23:23 19:05 25:46:00 20:51 13:34 33:13:00 17:28 24:17:00 19:09 26:58:00 25:03:00 15:16 33:40:00 17:52 24:22:00 20:15 28:10:00 26:03:00 17:55 35:36:00 18:03 25:28:00 21:06 28:30:00 27:09:00 18:49 35:40:00 18:07 28:58:00 21:48 29:05:00 27:16:00 18:59 41:04:00 20:05 31:00:00 28:51:00 34:43:00 27:48:00 19:14 46:09:00 21:00 31:29:00 34:54:00 38:16:00 28:15:00 20:38 47:56:00 22:53 32:03:00 37:00:00 40:40:00 30:20:00 22:40 48:25:00 24:05:00 32:18:00 38:06:00 41:56:00 33:49:00 24:47:00 52:28:00 25:17:00 32:19:00 40:29:00 42:53:00 35:22:00 25:56:00 52:33:00 26:51:00 33:16:00 42:50:00 43:55:00 40:00:00 32:38:00 52:56:00 28:10:00 36:06:00 43:08:00 49:04:00 40:29:00 154

33:42:00 54:35:00 28:48:00 41:41:00 43:37:00 49:50:00 40:38:00 33:54:00 57:02:00 33:19:00 45:47:00 45:08:00 50:28:00 41:54:00 36:04:00 59:09:00 33:37:00 47:42:00 45:15:00 50:51:00 44:02:00 36:47:00 60:27:00 34:10:00 47:48:00 48:41:00 51:58:00 45:15:00 37:42:00 62:43:00 34:27:00 48:23:00 54:22:00 53:33:00 45:26:00 38:59:00 62:49:00 35:06:00 49:07:00 54:43:00 54:06:00 50:54:00 41:27:00 65:58:00 38:35:00 51:35:00 55:30:00 55:30:00 51:20:00 43:19:00 66:12:00 38:47:00 53:45:00 58:09:00 55:43:00 55:00:00 44:18:00 67:43:00 40:24:00 55:46:00 58:38:00 59:44:00 58:46:00 46:03:00 69:29:00 43:07:00 56:18:00 59:28:00 59:48:00 61:59:00 46:50:00 72:37:00 43:23:00 59:13:00 63:07:00 62:37:00 63:33:00 47:16:00 73:56:00 54:15:00 60:22:00 63:57:00 64:56:00 66:02:00 47:44:00 76:22:00 56:17:00 61:21:00 65:48:00 65:22:00 69:22:00 48:37:00 76:25:00 56:25:00 63:27:00 66:02:00 65:52:00 70:30:00 51:45:00 76:33:00 56:48:00 66:25:00 66:04:00 66:15:00 70:42:00 52:56:00 77:39:00 59:04:00 68:21:00 66:30:00 70:50:00 74:19:00 59:44:00 81:50:00 61:00:00 70:19:00 68:40:00 72:25:00 75:33:00 61:16:00 86:09:00 64:21:00 70:33:00 68:45:00 73:10:00 76:24:00 62:27:00 88:20:00 66:31:00 71:28:00 68:47:00 74:56:00 77:28:00 66:35:00 88:38:00 67:17:00 72:45:00 72:16:00 79:55:00 84:36:00 68:00:00 88:39:00 68:59:00 72:56:00 72:26:00 80:43:00 85:06:00 69:32:00 89:03:00 69:48:00 73:09:00 75:10:00 83:32:00 86:23:00 72:08:00 95:45:00 70:25:00 73:53:00 77:14:00 85:32:00 86:26:00 73:13:00 96:42:00 71:49:00 74:15:00 78:11:00 85:49:00 88:24:00 75:30:00 97:49:00 73:56:00 74:47:00 81:26:00 87:44:00 89:58:00 77:12:00 100:51:00 74:20:00 75:06:00 83:01:00 87:48:00 90:21:00 77:15:00 105:14:00 75:05:00 78:01:00 83:09:00 88:25:00 90:59:00 77:59:00 105:57:00 77:26:00 79:29:00 83:17:00 90:29:00 91:43:00 80:16:00 106:07:00 77:43:00 79:43:00 83:26:00 90:48:00 92:03:00 82:08:00 106:11:00 80:52:00 80:02:00 84:17:00 90:51:00 95:07:00 87:22:00 107:45:00 82:01:00 82:02:00 86:19:00 92:45:00 95:18:00 90:17:00 108:03:00 83:12:00 84:22:00 88:33:00 93:20:00 98:10:00 91:25:00 109:52:00 83:30:00 85:21:00 90:38:00 93:38:00 100:27:00 91:32:00 113:36:00 84:02:00 89:06:00 91:17:00 95:39:00 101:00:00 94:32:00 114:12:00 87:45:00 93:12:00 94:25:00 98:22:00 104:11:00 96:18:00 117:18:00 88:08:00 94:08:00 97:01:00 98:57:00 104:21:00 96:40:00 117:34:00 89:29:00 97:25:00 98:20:00 100:42:00 106:23:00 96:55:00 117:51:00 98:31:00 98:46:00 106:37:00 103:32:00 107:01:00 155

Still three to go: Silkwood, Three Days of the Condor and finally Star Wars.

Beneath the chaos of the break-in, Kim’s apartment had been surprisingly empty. As if he’d been prepared for sudden flight. Dean had found no letters or knick-knacks. There were clean squares on the wall where pictures had been. No books or magazines or ornaments, postcards, souvenirs or individualised clutter. In the back of a drawer Dean finds some notepads with most of the pages torn out. Squeezed between two video cassettes he finds a photograph of the Subject. Kim is a monochromatic slash seated next to Leonard Nimoy in a booth crowded with handlers and nameless acolytes. Beneath bottle-black razor-cut hair his hollow eyes smile at someone or something outside the frame. Dean touches the angry cheekbones with a jittery finger, the nail chewed down to the quick. The world ends and you get out if you can. If you’re smart. If you’re paid enough. If you know the right people. If you’re clean. If you’re not infected. If you are sane. If you’re not naked. If the TV tells you to. If your hungers don’t run to hot cock or a cool fix. If you can, you get out. The rest stay. They stay and listen to the silence. Stay tuned in to the random static. In the vast buildings and under disused on-ramps and deserted streets, silence unleashes itself from the piled garbage and broken appliances and snow- drifted wrecks and it oozes from drains and dripping taps and blows across the broken glass and sad jagged tags. From the useless power sockets in Kim’s apartment the silence oozes to mesh with the vast and wordless descent of itself from the cracked and fly- specked ceiling. As he holds the photograph Dean knows he is beginning to experience the silence as his predecessor did. Greedy and hungry and alive. Better, for now, to turn on the TV. Oprah won’t watch itself. …

Dean walks through the ruined castle to Walter’s apartment to pay the rent. The castle they built in the seventies for the defence workers and families of the marines trained at San Corolla base. Three hundred and fifty units in all: and the developers just walked away sometime in the late eighties. It’s unclear to Dean if Walter is employed by the bank or the management firm that got involved, the one who filled in the pool. From 156 talk he hears at the local market between the customers and two men he now knows are Pete’s dad and his partner, Dean believes that the bank fired the management firm and either hired another or is waiting for Walter and some of his card-playing buddies to put together a syndicate to take over. It makes no real difference to Dean. What’s to take over? But, even though he’s fixed up the apartment with a new TV and VCR to replace Kim’s and it looks as close to how he imagined it before Russell’s psychos trashed it, he doesn’t want any visitors. He leaves Sector 8. He passes the Mexican family’s squat but sees no sign of life. He turns a corner into another sector with its own boarded up Laundromat and a covered courtyard room that once held a pool table but is now just a windblown corridor with canvas sheeting flapping in a sullen breeze. He comes to a chained and padlocked and steel-shuttered corner apartment that he guesses belongs to Pete and his dad. He keeps walking, hearing nothing but the swoosh of his jeans and the crunch of glass underfoot. He comes to Sector 1 with a looming brick wall covered with six stories of sprawled and layered graffiti. The smell of ganga blows over from a place on the other side of the pool and Dean steers well clear. Sometimes at night he wakes up to the throbbing baseline of their parties, the throaty dialect and hard female banter. Apart form that, silence. Beside Walter’s door, a plastic bag has found its way into the marigolds, held there by a shallow pool of what looks like piss. Dean knocks on Walter’s door. Walter pockets the cash and then looks up at from behind new gold-rimmed glasses. “Hey Eric, you ever hear from that girlfriend of his?” “Whose?” “Kim’s. They only just started dating over the summer, I guess. I never knew he had a girlfriend. He didn’t introduce her, not to me anyway. I saw her come and go a couple a times. Spend the night. Not much to look at not that hour of the morning, but what do I know about young girls. Fashions change. You know that bright hair,”—he wiggles fat fingers around his fat head—”pale face, rings everywhere, definitely not a morning face. I never saw them together. She always left alone. I was thinking maybe 157 they went up together to that film festival you told me about except I just saw her yesterday.” A pigeon comes into view from around the corner of the building. Silently skidding to a stop on the balcony that Dean thinks belongs to Pete the Meat. Dean realises that there are a dozens of pigeons already there. Pete must feed them or something. “Who?” says Dean. “Who? The girl. I told you. They go up together? Because she’s back already. I saw her.” “Red hair?” “Right. Untidy, I want to brush it for her,” He waves meaty hands across his piggy little eyes again. Dean draws breath. “Sure. I know her, not personally. I know of her. She did go on up with the Sub—with Kim, I think. Where’d you say you ran into her. Mr. Budge? Around here?” “It's Walter, please. Downtown at the mall. Up top. I was buying tickets for a show. And she was at one of them juice places. With a fellow. Kind of Spanish looking. But well-dressed.” Freakin pigeon disco. Crowding up on Pete's balcony and staring at him with eyes beading in their empty bird-heads. “A Spanish guy?” “Of the Spanish persuasion, I have to say. Eric. Cuban maybe, but I don’t really think so. A Mex. He was tall because I saw him walk to the table with the juices. Five eleven. Six foot. Had sunglasses on, a nice haircut. I have an eye for nationalities. Faces and mouths move in such way that reveals your mother-tongue. You can turn the sound off. And tell just by the way they move their mouths. That's the difference between a good and bad accent in the movies. If the actor gets it right, their whole face plays along—more than a thousand muscles, did you know? In a face.” Dean shakes his head. More than thirty of them up there now. Forty. Flapping and silently shitting and mouthing the secrets of the world with the thousand muscles in their bird-faces. 158

“So I could just tell his first language wasn't American by the set of his mouth. And the jacket he wore.” The grey and black and brown pigeons are massed and strutting on the balcony because some old black guy who’d be Pete Senior has come out there with a cigarette and a bag of crumbs, tossing it at them. Lord of the freakin manor. “The jacket?” says Dean, unable to look away from the birds. “Leather,” says Walter Budge. “But not American. And not Italian. I could tell by the cut. I may not look it, but I have an eye for fashion, Eric.” Dean turns back to the towering Super all puffed up in his clean flannel shirt and new gold-rimmed glasses, all the better to enjoy Hairspray or Guys n Dolls or some such. “I bet you do,” Dean says. “Walter.” “Sure,” says Walter, but Dean can hardly hear him above the wordless descent of the pigeons. “The Mex was driving. The van’s called a Musson. Bet you didn’t know it has a Mercedes engine. They got the Merc logo on the back. So small you can hardly see it.” 159

13 GONE BOY

“A rescue,” began Nirmal Prasad. “In Rangeela Pradesh can be a hit and miss affair.” The sky had smudged into violet by the time we arrived at the new camp high above the muddy green river. To focus my strength I had breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth—blue air in, pink out. We emerged into a clearing where two rudimentary shacks perched on the edge that overlooked the valley below. On the canyon side was a lean-to for meal preparation and a small firing range. A midden of metal shells—rifle and shotgun—rings the clearing. A dozen men between the ages of fourteen and forty squat cleaning their guns or stand smoking or poke at the fire. Some dangle iPods, MP3s, even old Discmans. As I type I can see perimeter guards slouching at casual attention through the jungle screen that surrounds us on three sides. Nirmal Prasad wears a dirty red and white dhoti around his head. He has two minders: one is a sturdy tribal with long hair and the other is an older man with glasses, short hair and a gold tooth. They both carry rifles and grenades and knives strapped to their ankles beneath filthy fatigues. Prasad speaks elegant English, of course. Think: a degree in Civil Engineering from Penn State. “Arizona actually” he said, self-consciously smiling through bad teeth. “Commerce and accounting.” The mornings up here are cold. I squatted down beside them in the feeble sun. A one-legged teenage girl on crutches brought sweet strong tea in metal cups. I started to speak but Prasad waved the words away. The tribal bodyguard glared me into silence. “This is a high-profile case. Not my metier. I prefer to work for the common man.” 160

I nodded. “To represent those who cannot represent themselves?” He looked at me sharply, “Do not give me that Marxist bull. Or condescend to us in any way. You have made enough mistakes for one lifetime.” “What mistakes would they be?” I said. “You come asking me to rescue a boy, but what you really want is for me to find your missing conscience. What makes you think it is in India, sir?” “I saw it,” I said. “In Avi’s eyes. I saw myself as I could have been. I owe him for that.” “The boy cannot be found without the tape. I rescue humans, not artefacts, especially not for some old pervert like Chilling.” The gold-toothed man said something in Hindi. The other two nodded. “You need money,” I said. “For the cause. I have plenty of cash. My mother died a rich woman.” “Instead of money, or conscience, go back to using your brain,” said Prasad gently. “We will go to all this effort to get the tape, and then we find out Chilling has sold Avi to Myanmar or Chinese extremists, maybe even El Quaeda? He would have got a good price. Enough for a hundred dirty movies.” “I gather this is not your average dirty movie,” I said. “If I agree to do this, your only hope is to mobilise the underground to locate the film, while we concentrate on the boy,” he said with a shrug of his wide gaunt shoulders. The tribal was drawing letters in the sand in the Hindi. I wondered if this was the equivalent of passing notes to his boss. “The fundamentalists know the power of symbols,” Prasad said. “Avi’s own father died defending the theatre’s right to perform western texts. He explained that the Ashtekar family is a symbol of the Old and New left, a passing of the torch. “His father wrote an open letter to the terrorists who would eventually murder him. The letter was published in the Hindustan Times, and in every local rag in our region. He wrote well. He was polite, respectful to the various warlords and hardliners he addressed. He claimed that total control, even as a means to an end would destroy the democratic spirit of performance. The mobile theatre, 161 with its thousand year old tradition in the region, is an allegory for our entire culture, he said. It runs through its ambiguities and contradictions, its unanswered questions and its questionable answers. Performance is as important to the region as the wild and fertile Pyari itself, the river we call beloved. Acting out is a powerful instrument of our abiding reality. We have survived through adaptations—western or otherwise. Like the river and nature itself, art will not bend to terror, the most totalising artefact of all. Total politics, Ashtekar said, lays claim to everything—even death. After the letter was published he was gunned down by a separatist gang at an opening of Waiting for Godot. “ I winced as the scalding tea went down. The men looked at me, and then at each other. One said something in the vernacular, then Prasad sighed and nodded. “Our job in the first instance is to get word out that we need the footage back to use as leverage against Chilling who is Public Enemy No. 1.” “Won’t they fear reprisal?” “His or mine?” asked the restorer of sons. …

That Damien was one star-struck Jap. “Dead celebrities are the fossil fuel that drives this global village. Take Eric Roberts who is still alive but only in a sense,” he’d said to Cliff and Dean one day at the mall. “Eric Roberts’s capacity for endless self-reproduction from an infinite number of angles is proof he’s dead. His life flashing before the collective gaze. That’s the attraction.” This helps Dean to know what to look for in the broken frames of these old 70s films: the same crystalline image of Diana, shaved and slivered into unrecognisable fragments. He looks for a shadowy head, a distorted section of torso. In every blip and every inserted frame within a frame is the whole thing but from a different angle. All Dean has to do is collect them one by one, reassemble them and live long enough to find 162 a buyer. He steels a magazine from a newsstand with her face on the cover and draws her in rough outline on the walls of Kim’s bathroom with his excrement. Drawings on the walls of his cave like a prayer for luck in the hunt. …

I sit and type in this mountain hideaway. The dial-up isn’t always as smooth as Trulli promised. I press the button and stare into the eye of the sky for some sign it has seen me and will see you. I have no idea where I am. Somewhere close to heaven? I look down the steep fall to the valley settlements and fishing towns below. A tiger took a villager half-way down. The news reaches the men. They receive it with nervous laughter and shrug it away. But Prasad places two more sentries on guard duty. He lets the one-legged girl sleep in the hut with him. Officially now, the stolen footage has launched an inter-guerrilla war over classified antigravity propulsion protocol to be sold to the highest bidder. But there is the unofficial story also. “What is really on the tape?” Prasad asked me over breakfast of cigarettes and tea. I take comfort in this return to reckless habits. The bidis taste leafy- sweet and the smoke catches the throat on the way out like a small horned beast. I cough, unable to speak for minutes or hours. Ya…. “It is encrypted,” I said. “It looks like a film of some science experiment but it is actually a home-movie made by Diana Spencer. Autopoeisis. Trulli procured it for Chilling, and I was meant to courier it from the US and give it to Avi, from who in turn it would be stolen by men overtly working for the counter-revolution but covertly working for Chilling’s private cause. Everyone would think they took it for the war effort, but in fact it would be something much more banal than that.” “Nothing is more banal than war.” Prasad said, smoke curling out through his chapped and colourless lips. “The boy of course knew exactly what was on the tape?” one of the men asked, and Prasad repeated it in English. “I gather so. I would say he hoped to intercept it, to somehow liberate it from 163 the footage so that Chilling couldn’t get his hands on it. Collectors like Avi are different from the Chillings of the world. They collect as in collective. Private hoarders like Chilling go against the very nature of art.” “She was the people’s princess,” said Prasad. “Maybe Avi wanted to return her to the people somehow—protect her from Chilling’s defilement.” “You talk like you know him.” Prasad looked across the encampment. “He looked like he knew me,” I said. “The search for the tape has begun,” he said. He turned to me. “Can you hear the drumming? The underground is alive. They are looking for the tape, trying to stop it from leaving the country. Hoping to convince the thieves that they are working against the common good.” “If Chilling gets to them first, he may just be able to convince them that their own good comes before that of the commons,” I said. “I gather he can be very persuasive.” “You have become cynical, Dr Grant,” Nirmal said. “India can do that do you.” “My daughter reads my faxes word for word,” I said. “ So don’t try anything. What are you doing to find the boy?” He looked at me quizzically. He said something to his men. They laughed. The gold-toothed man said something. “Minohj here wants to know why you address them to your son if it the daughter who reads them.” When she was your age, Lena read my letters and pasted them in a scrap book, like a relic or a prayer that one day I would come back to stay and claim her. Is this why she has sent me on this final errand? “Gone boy,” said one of the men softly in English. Then something else in Hindi but I caught a name: Avinash. “And your daughter?” Prasad said. “Achchha beti, nahi? Is she gone too?” “She was never there,” I said, trying to remember. “Or maybe that was me.” “What about your son?” 164

“Which one?” I said. “Your real one.” I lost you in the slipstream. “A ravening wolf,” I said. …

Donnie cuts back on Dean’s shifts. He only calls Dean in when he needs him. That may have something to do with Dean’s unkempt appearance and generally hunted and hunting demeanour. His unwashed dreads are growing matted and fuzzy down his shoulders. His breath and feet smell. His clothes feel stiff and stale on his body. Dean makes sure to take at least two different buses and sometimes he diverts and doubles back. He wears the bowie knife under his shirt. The .22 in his pants. He eats the same food every day: a candy bar for breakfast. Some speed and a tin of chilli for lunch. Xanax and pot for dinner. If he has enough cash he goes to the club, to Blue Moves. Once, along the street where the homos wait he sees a white van. All that squinting into the computer monitor at night has caned his eyes. He can’t tell what make the van is. Dean knows one thing: he has to find Gemma before she finds him. He doesn’t need a partner in crime. Dean was destined to go it alone. The gangs—Israel’s, various suburban Lads—they were just a means to an end. Dean stopped looking for friends the day Chalmers left for good. The gangs showed Dean the ropes so he could blow them all out of the water one day. Dean was always on the look-out for the main chance. Now he’s found it: several minutes of lost film of a dead celebrity, and not just any freakin Queen. She is the one. It’s here. He’s seen her. There in the shadows. He’s her Knight in Digital Armour. Liberate her from Kim’s museum. Put her back together again. Dean knows there’s a copy out there. Some guy on a mountain thinks he’s got the only one, the whole thing. Ideally Dean would like to get in touch with this collector and extort some serious cash out of him, but Dean doesn’t have those kind of connections. Not yet. 165

Dean calls Mackenzie to try and squeeze a home-cooked meal out of her. Hell he’ll even talk about her screenplay. That’s when he finds out Gemma’s been staying in his room. Had Dean given her a key? “She wants to know where the TV is,” Mackenzie says with a sour edge to her voice. “I’m packing mate. Frantic. Our plane leaves tonight.” The wedding. Gwennie’s Big Day. Dean feels a sudden clutch of nostalgia for the Australian smell of sweet leaves and dry road and cold brick and something flowery blowing through it all. Something blue and flowery. “I’ve got it here, at Chalmers’s house. His is too big. Besides I need an extra one for the movie I’m—” “Yeahyeah,” says Mackenzie. “Listen: I’ve got to go.” Dean hears the click of a suitcase and his stepsister’s sharp call. Dean drops the phone on the bed. He packs all the tapes into a sports bag. He locks and double-triple boards up the apartment and begins a circuitous journey up north to his father’s house at Rancho De Ville. Stops at Miracles to collect his mail. Who knows when he’ll be back this way again? Before it veers inland the bus follows the coastal route a while and the sun is falling into the ocean in a blaze of De Palma oranges and purples. Pelicans wheel and dive against the lurid backdrop. The domes and creamy sprawl of Swami’s is lavender against the burning sky. Dean gets off on a side street and walks two blocks to his father’s Ramada-style house—all Mexican waves around a pool with rotting citrus on the lawns around it. Dean lets himself in using the keys he’s had since he was a kid. House of Hell. House of Horrors. Dean steps onto snowy carpet and nearly slips on the mail spread across the carpet. The wife must have cancelled the help. Dean sees Blindisight in the pile and leaves it there. He stashes the bag of tapes in the hall closet behind some boxes on the top shelf and goes into the bedroom they call his but which is actually some kind of store room for an unused stationary bike, a broken heater, guest linen piled in the closet. Dean finds an old sweatshirt of his in a drawer: Harry Potter on the front. Must have been when he was eleven or so, about the time he met Hateboy. The sweatshirt is wrapped around a small piece of concrete: a piece of the Berlin Wall Chalmers brought home for Dean as a souvenir. 166

Of what? Dean unmakes the picture-perfect bed. He takes some clothes out of another bag and drapes them around the room to look like he’s been here a while. He gets a glass of water and an ashtray from the kitchen and puts them beside the bed. He goes into the bathroom and takes a long hot shower. Spits toothpaste into the sink. Leaves his towels bunched on the floor. He goes into the kitchen. Pristine. But it is not as if Gemma would expect him to cook or anything. No one ever cooks in this kitchen anyway. On the rare evenings when Chalmers and the current Mrs Grant are both under the same roof, they order in and then the maid comes the next day to make it all disappear. Chalmers must need a clean world to make his mistakes in. Maybe Mackenzie gave him enough mess to put him off the concept. The new wife came with a dog, and it’s an angry little fix but clean as hell. Always at the groomer's. Before his childhood such as it was ended that day he stole his first candy bar from the Village Mart, Dean had wanted a dog more than anything else, except to be Claude. When Chalmers left for good, Mackenzie changed and whatever was left of her brash Australian spirit became a little mean around the edges. She got shitty about the dog thing. Told Dean to stop asking her. But Dean kept on listing just one wish on his Christmas list, and that would make her even shittier. Why don’t you ask Chalmers, she said. And Dean did and kept hoping that Chalmers would come back from one of his trips with a messy, shiny, wiggling puppy. But there was only the usual eclectica: a didgeridoo, a Javanese Guardian puppet. A chunk of the Berlin wall. But no Red Setter puppy he could call Prince. Claude and Prince on long walks together following the tracks away from Pop’s house to the cold clear shallows where trout trembled above their waiting shadows. Dean stands on the cold slate floor. He remembers how Chalmers and the wife argued like hell over those tiles. Chalmers wanted wood. Wide boards throughout. “Boards aren’t Spanish, “ the wife had snapped. “So get some dirt and stomp on it,” Chalmers had told her. “O-fucking-lé.” Dean gets out his phone to dial Gemma. She picks up. “Where are you?” Dean says. 167

“In your mother’s kitchen,” she says. “Where are you?” Unlike this one, Mackenzie’s kitchen could belong to Snow White and the seven drag queens: sticky recipe books stacked on the shelf above the microwave; baskets and knick-knacks balanced on the top of the Tuscan yellow cupboards; a shrivelled pot of basil on the window sill. Alluvial crud lines the microwave. The oven door opens to primordial glop. Before you so much as boil water, you have to push aside scattered objets to make room on the Caesar-stone counter-tops. An Australian brown jug cracked from being pushed aside, and anodised canisters bought at a swap meet, a gum nut sugar bowl, a towering, grease-splattered pepper-mill. The refrigerator is full of Australian wine and a half-empty container of pesto and some fossilised produce stuck to the cooling element and in the door, between a bottle of ketchup and a hunk of dried Parmesan, there is an ancient block of hash wrapped in old foil next to the jar of Evening Primrose Oil. Possibly out of date. “I’m at my dad’s house. Get in a cab and come over.” So she does. …

Nirmal Prasad launches Avi’s rescue through a network of scouts and decoys. They fan out from at least three nodal points along the foothills, including this one. They use cell phones; coded classified ads; radio broadcasts; plants, moles, spies and diversionary tactics. After a week there is still no sign of Avi. “ A week is too long,” says Prasad. “Dead or alive. Zinda ya murda.” We get news from home. We hear that Wilson Trulli is no longer a threat to anyone, and may in fact be under government surveillance. He cannot get to me or to Lena, who also may be finally under the protection of certain sympathetic interests. That would be a first for her. The cadre spends its day in exercises, complex jungle manoeuvres, basic training. They hide grenades in bamboo stalks. They dig traps. They lay satchels and send out decoy runners. They have work to do, other rescues. The organization has “negotiated” the release of a hostage and is bringing him to us. 168

Prasad will then “sell” him back to his family and the money will go back into the cause and on it goes. Between the smart quotes is the escalating rivalry between Prasad and Chilling. Chilling’s counter-insurgents organise ritualised kidnappings of the innocent for ransom, or to send a message. Prasad kidnaps them from the kidnappers, converts them and gets them back to their villages—no longer innocent. “But no longer afraid either. They will spread this message of fearlessness that will diminish Chilling in the collective paranoia. They will no longer look on him as the Final Cause. They will know they have me, because I have them. Together we can bring down the counter-revolution.” “And separate yourself from India?” He said, “In all its history, India has never lost an inch of territory to secessionists.” He drew grimly in the sand with his finger. I made a fist and gently touched his knuckles with my own. Stay strong till the end. I see the boy in a pit somewhere, body covered with scabs and mouth encrusted with sores, a bag over his undivining head. Prasad the freedom fighter and his men spend their down time in lazy speculation. Who will this prisoner be, eh? You tell me. They are certain that he is another victim of Chilling’s terminal network, or certain enough. The rebels fish and hunt. A lad arrives with supplies from a nearby village. People come and go. The men play with the laptop, watch me write to you, dialling up the connection on the Iridium. They ask me if you write back and I say no, never. Then why do I do it, they ask? Who are you talking to? Who will have the last word? (Prasad translates for me, smiling, sitting off to one side and cleaning his rifle). “People think words are to communicate with others,” I tell him. “But words are more and less than that. They’re the crumbs we carefully scatter along the trail of this random search for meaning we call life. The only thing you can do is to let them fall where they may. Words give us hope that something may be found where we have most fervently attempted to lose ourselves. You don’t need words to communicate. That’s what cash is for.” 169

“Paise le ke bhago,” One of them says. And another say in Hindi, that it’s probably just because I’ve pressed the wrong button. “Maybe you’re saving, not sending,” says Prasad, with a gummy smile. “Koi baat nahi,” says his tribal minder. “No one cares what goes on here. Saving, sending—it wouldn’t matter what he writes, just as long as he can have the last words.” No translation necessary. Prasad chooses to send and receive his messages through meat space runners, strategic rumours and hearsay, recreating the movement and causing it to turn against itself and open up new space for the region’s recovery. It doesn’t always work as planned because there is so much noise in the system. He hears about an ambush of army vehicles across a mountain pass. He commands a splinter group to send two men undercover to buy grenades from Chilling to deliver to rebels in the mountains. Chilling sells the men the grenades, and offers to throw in a box of old carbines if they bring him the head of a health inspector who is on his case about staff hygiene at the Tushwar Hula Hut. They take the guns and spare the bureaucrat, heading for the mountains. A rival group gets wind of the plot on the Health Inspector who is a hated deikhu, a Punjabi, and they kidnap his diabetic ten year old son for a ransom of Rs. 1 lakh. They frame the first cadre, drawing the arming away from them. But Chilling gets wind of the double-cross and leaks information about the ambush to the army who raids the mountain village where the rebels are rumoured to be hiding. They kill the remaining family of one of the alleged insurgents—a boy of seventeen whose father disappeared the year before. They slit the mother's throat. The slit grins grotesquely at the boy on his return that evening from feeding the goats. Her dead eyes stare at her ten year old son, the boy’s brother, who hangs by a rope around his neck from the rafters. He is naked, mutilated. His sister is also pinned naked to the bed with a fishing spear through her breast. Her head is flung to the side, and she looks out the small window, where wisps of night-time clouds race across a pitted moon. The boy gently takes a silver amulet from around his sister’s neck. He pulls on the prescription goggles he wears for hockey practice 170 and vanishes into the scurrying darkness. …

—Dean lets her in. She steps over the piled mail. She has put on a little weight which makes her look younger and she’s not as tall as he remembers. “When did you change the colour of your hair?” Dean says. “Yesterday. Your sister did it for me,” “She’s not my—”Dean begins, but she just walks past him and down the hall. She’s wearing a corduroy jacket over a black T-shirt with a glittery alien or is it a skull, stretched across her breasts. Dashiell perches on her shoulder. Dean picks up the mail and puts it on the stand. He follows girl and rat into this father’s South of the Border living room. He sits next to her on the pony skin couch with real brass studs. He rolls her a joint. She waves it away. “You got any music?” she says. “And a drink?” A week with his mother and she’s drinking already. He comes back with a two beers and turns the radio on before he sits down. “That’s a nice chair,” she says. “It looks buttery.” He follows her gaze to the big yellow leather arm chair the wife had shipped from Italy. “Have you heard from anybody?” she says. “Like who?” says Dean. “Like the others.” “They’ve all gone to ground,” says Dean. “Like we should.” “Who are you worried about? Israel?” Gemma sighs. With her eyes closed, she says. “I very much doubt Israel is among the living, don’t you?” “What about Russell?” Dean says. She opens her eyes. They stare dully at the ceiling. “He’ll be back. But not for a while. We’ve got time.” 171

“For what?” “To find the tape. I told you. I think Kim made a copy. Don’t you want to?” Dean reaches over and starts stroking her arm. “Sure,” he says. “I’ve been sniffing around.” She narrows those icy eyes. “Sniffing around those stupid clubs. What would those robots know? Incidentally, all that techno rots your brain.” Dean keeps stroking her arm. She lies there with her eyes closed. Dashiell has crawled under the couch. Dean can hear him gnawing at something, possibly one of the antique oak legs. “You want to watch TV?” he says. “I want you to find that tape,” she says. So he doesn’t turn it on. “You want a massage?” he says. “The footage: before Russell gets back and kills us.” He takes her shoes off and starts rubbing her feet, then he takes her jeans off and starts kissing her calves and thighs and pulls the crotch of her panties aside and starts kissing the downy opening mound. She slides off his father’s couch and she’s lying between it and the sixteenth century coffee table on the Navajo rug wearing only the alien T-shirt. She had her navel pierced in Santa Barbara and it's looking a little inflamed. Dean kisses that too and then he kneels on top of her and pulls her up and puts a pillow under her buttocks. She smiles at him from behind tired eyelids like rare but lethal night- flowers. Later in the bedroom, Dean lies next to her watching TV and trying to relax but he can’t. He’s not used to it here. It's too quiet—no sirens or back-alley action. He feels like he's no where. This is how he used to feel in Australia in his Aunt's empty house while she and Mackenzie did the markets and lingered over a beer-garden meal on a steamy week-day afternoon leaving Dean to surf porn until it got dark and cold in the inner-city terrace. He gets up now and wanders around his father’s home,. He looks out the back windows at the pool. Its soft gleam is more unfathomable to Dean this starless night than the sightless hole on Potter St. He goes into the hallway and leafs through Chalmers’s mail, the subscriptions and invitations to openings and requested reprints and nursery- 172 school notices. There are only two actual letters, one to Dean from his mother. It's a copy of her Blindsight screenplay. The other is to Chalmers from a doctor at Theodore Geisel General Hospital. Dean stacks them all up again, and wanders into the master bedroom and shuts the door behind him. Teal woollen carpet, Super-King Size Sleigh bed, a set of Indian miniatures on the wall, a shaker cabinet and her collection of slipware on glass shelves. He pulls the curtains aside and looks out the sliding doors to the orchards. Checks the lock. He heads for the bathroom and finds what he’s looking for in a little bottle in the medicine cabinet and ritualistically dry-swallows one or three. He drinks some water from the faucet and then goes back into their bedroom. He urinates on the floor, then goes out and closes the door behind him. The formula always works. The panic has subsided. Sleep is on its way. 173

14 ALMOND JOY

Prasad tore his chapatti in half. He folded up one piece in a clean cloth napkin and put it in the pocket of his shirt. He tore a smaller off the remaining half and dipped it in the watery dahl. “So Diana Spencer holed herself up in a dockside warehouse in Paris and shot a movie, if what you say is true,” he said. “And apparently she's got her clothes on.” “Chilling will be pissed,” I said to Prasad “If it's not sexy.” “If it is her and she moves that's sexy enough for Chilling. Besides,” said Prasad. “The camera bestows its own sex appeal.” “How?” “The moving image answers our prayers. “ “For what?” I said.. “To look down,” said Prasad “And not to fall.” The skin stretches tight across his pocked cheeks. His eyes sunken and red. Gaps in his teeth. Makes him look even more skull-like. The leader of the counter-counter revolution. They didn’t make it in time to save twin daughters of a prominent intellectual family. The girls were missing for three days and found strung up by one ankle from a leafless tree. Both had been decapitated. The girls’ grandfather has offered Prasad more money to find the heads. Prasad told him to use the money instead to put a hit on Chilling. Prasad himself doesn’t take those kind of contracts. Be careful what you wish for, babhu-ji. A messenger runs up and tells us that the cadre guarding the unidentified hostage is moving in. Even Prasad doesn’t know who the hostage is. It could be any number of rescues he is trying to manage. All on half a chapatti a day. Death. It's the absolute vantage point. 174

…

Hanging out with an older woman. The weight Gemma gained is falling off and she’s got back most of her old mystique, which, Dean is ready to admit, has its maternal side. Like Mackenzie, Gemma’s fascination begins and ends with her guilty beauty. The yielding body beneath the overdone shell doesn’t really give Dean much room to move. He tries to find out whose side his little jewel is on. He tries to find out about the Mexican in the van. They have sex, watch TV, order in, eat, snort, smoke and freebase pretty much anything. They exhaust Dean’s supply of contraband. They sleep a lot. Dean finds the keys to Chalmers’s Honda in the main bedroom and drives to work at Miracle’s. He uses Chalmers’s money to make more money, dealing more pills at clubs and bars and schools. One or two of his junior high clients like to pay in kind, and that keeps him away late some nights, and she’s usually asleep on the couch in front of the TV when he comes home and he usually leaves her there. Dean is no where. He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take. He stands and stares at the hall closet where she waits for him: the other one. He’d found something, an emptiness that met his needs and now it’s gone: Sector 8, apt. 4737. What if someone else finds the apartment as he did and moves in? What if Walter breaks down the door and finds out what Dean did to Kim’s closet? What if it’s all gone when he gets back, just a dream? Dean went in there a spy but he became something else: the subject. If he can’t be the subject, Dean can’t be anybody. He doesn’t know how. There is an emptiness inside of Dean. He’s always felt it. A hunger so strong it surprises him. The forgotten pull of ancient primal yearnings: for a world of his own to rule. This is how men make mistakes, by listening to the siren song of the past, he thinks, but he feels the pull. A little look won’t hurt, just to make sure it’s still there. He takes the car: another mistake. He drives past the apartments, slows, checks to make sure no one is behind him. They look just the same: a piled monument to silence and ruin. He restrains himself from getting out. 175

It is a Thursday night, and he gets an idea. He continues through the low dark streets, lit only by the occasionally street lamp or yellow square of window. He gets to Blue Moves, drives on and parks at the front of the row of cars. A truck idles behind him. The doorman is new, and won’t let Dean in because he’s wearing sweats. The doorman knows Pete and agrees to get him for Dean when Dean holds out a folded fifty. “Hey wassup, lanky white brother,” big doggy smiles from Pete. Slavering. Hungry. Sweat’s trickling down Pete’s tight brown belly into black jeans hanging down past his pubes. He’s got on a satin sweatshirt and a hounds-tooth deer hunter’s cap. He’s swigging from a bottle of water. Dean says, “I have to go away for a while.” “I miss you already.” “Can you look after the place while I’m gone. It’s Kim’s place and I feel responsible.” Sweat is beading on Dean’s upper lip. His dreads itch like hell. “You’re right there, white boy.” Dean smiles and waits. “About it being Kim’s place. What the hell you doing there if you gots to go away?” Dean’s smile fades. Pete has a point. The time to take a side. “Look. It’s only for a day. Maybe two. Three at the most. Forget I said anything.” He should never have come. They’re standing off to one side of the door, beside the block-long line to get in. Pete’s skin glows blue-black under the Blue Moves sign above them. Dean turns to leave. “What’s in it for me?” says Pete. Dean freezes. “To watch your back, white boy? I don’t even know you.” Dean turns. He reaches for his wallet. Pete rifles out a long brown, bangled arm. Palm flat and facing Dean like a red flag. “Save it. I got my own money. Tell me where you got to go.” Quickly, Dean says: “I got to help my mom. She’s moving.” “Your mom?” Pete says, and suddenly Dean sees it: what’s in it for him. “Yeah yeah, you know: family.” 176

Pete nods and unscrews the bottle. Swigs. Water runs down his chin, down his neck, down his hard pure heart. “Got to stand for something,” Pete says. “Family.” Oh, and can’t Dean see it now? Lying there gleaming, glittering. Clear as day. “How’s your father?” Dean says. “Ever since you told me about him I’ve been anxious to meet him.” Bing-freakin-oh. “Daddy?” Pete says. “You gotsta meet him. You’d love my daddy. Everyone does. He’s the man to know. Got the respect of the whole community. Rebuilt his life from scratch, like I told you. Got to stand for something.” “OK then,” says Dean. “I’ll see you in a day or two.” “I’ll introduce you,” says Pete, again mocking Dean’s California drawl. But he is still grinning his sweet smile in the beautiful neon light: the terrible moonlight. “Wicked,” says Dean. “I am there.” “White boy,” says Pete laughing with his red doggy mouth. “You are wicked.” “Excellent. I’m there, man, “Dean laughs too. He can feel the muscles in his face—all one thousand of them—laughing. “You are there, dogg,” Pete slaps Dean on the shoulder. Dean turn to leave again. “I’m there too,” says Pete. Dean stops, doesn’t look around. “Watching your back while you’re gone. Don’t worry. I watched out for Kim, and I watch out for you. We watch out for all the white boys, Daddy and me.” …

Some men just in, there is a situation. We are moving right— …

Dean likes to think of the world as divided up into wolves and sheep. Hunters versus the hunted: either slash or. But you can’t be both. Gemma sits by the pool and 177 reads Chalmers’s Time Magazines. She asks Dean about Australia. She paints her toenails. She naps. Dean goes through her things. Finds a business card. Bryan Black, it says. Systems Consultant. Access Certified. He pockets the card. The other waits for him in the dark closet, multiplying. Dean worries that by the time he gets back to her she will have dispersed or incrementally disappeared, all the crystalline fragments going stratospheric and taking on a life of their own. That can’t happen. Dean is the only giver of life around here. Wait for me, he whispers. Gemma wakes up. She watches Dean clean the pool. She says, “I think I may have found a buyer for the footage. An operator: good- looking guy. Hispanic or something. You know it’s all over the underground, what happened. How the tape got boosted from an apartment downtown and everyone got killed, boom-boom, because someone got their timing wrong. This guy, this buyer, traced me all the way up to Santa Barbara. That’s how interested he is. I told him that you were keeping an eye out for it. Sniffing around. We had a few drinks up there, some sushi down here. I came back to tell you about him. Wait. Let me find his card.” …

—incoming. The unnamed prisoner on his way. We are on the move again. I struggle along with the silent, hunted underlings. It’s a physical strain, but on a psychic level I feel a merge, a fitting in for once. Ya ya. We trudged through the lifting mist. We crawled through undergrowth beside the river under a dripping canopy of teaks and clawing Maruahs. Avi has been sold on, they tell me. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t gotten involved. A lifetime of detachment and I stoop to the human sentiment at this late stage. Was it too late? “You interfered in a self-regulating system, “ says Prasad. “Who knows how far along the chain he is, gone to the power of n. We may never get him back.” … 178

Chalmers seems to be running out of things to say. At Miracles, Dean skims over a confused ramble involving prisoners and jungles. Dean has a head-ache from lack of sleep and his thoughts are skittering over themselves from the Dexxies he eats just to get through the long days with Gemma. Dean peeks through the kitchen door at the customers and all the dirty dishes yet to do. All those women sitting there with their skinny lattes and cell phones. The blondes in tailored jackets and fitted blouses on dates with Tacoma Valley brokers; the Asian students in baggy jeans sipping iced mochas; the power-suited media types stirring decafs and blowing narrow noses with tissues they poke back into black leather purses. At seventeen Dean finds the Californian women foxy but only in a frost-bitten kind of way. He thinks of Gemma, with her soft, blue-veined breasts and mousy hair and chapped mouth smeared with indigo grease. Dean likes to think of her the way he saw her that time at Hungry Jacks, all lit up like a neon princess, Queen of the Night, Blue Angel. But even without make-up, and Dean does wish she’d wear it occasionally, those pale blue eyes still don’t miss a beat. Maybe he could work with her after all. She’s the one who made the contact with the man in the van: Mr Black. Even if it is Dean who is taking all the risks down at the apartment trying to piece together the film, there’s nothing worth selling without a buyer. Likewise, without the film, Gemma has nothing. Maybe they need each other after all. Dean steps back into the kitchen and decides he’s had enough. It’s time to up the ante. Time to take a stand. It takes a big man to admit he’s big enough to need a woman. But Dean doesn’t need this Miracles shit. Time to move on. He’ll collect his allowance as long as Donnie will let him, but if things go right with him and Gemma and Bryan Black, he won’t be needing a cent from Chalmers ever again. He’s a big man now. Seventeen and with his own woman. Dean takes off his apron, balls it up and tosses it in with the dishrags. He walks right past Darla and the cook and the busboy and out the swinging screen door. He peels out of the parking lot in the Honda and pulls into the Texaco just before the on-ramp. He fills up, and even though he’s removed Chalmers’s plates, he goes in to pay anyway to bring him good karma. He buys Gemma a Tigger balloon that 179 says: You make me hoppy. He buys her favourite candy bar, an Almond Joy. From the booth Dean looks down on a the endless snaking headlights on the freeway. All joined together like an alien red worm. Dean merges with the wordless lucent stream and thinks about the last time he and Gemma had a shower together in the guest bathroom. The way the suds rivered down her breasts splitting into two and then four streams. How she soaped his balls and his cock, getting hard again. The way she got out quickly laughing. How he stayed in and turned up the heat a little. Stood under the pounding hot spray for a while and heard her phone go off. And when he got out she was waiting naked under the sheets for him just like their first time together. Dean gets off the freeway and winds his way past gated haciendas set back so far from the narrow road you need a map to find them. Cute wooden signs hang from knobbly rails. The Rancho De Ville Village with its Ramada-style courtyards and horse- posts. He stops suddenly. Backs up. A familiar looking car parked in a side street that runs perpendicular to the winding road: a stripped-down La Baron with rust blooming near the bottom of the driver’s door. Last time he saw this heap was in the parking lot behind the subject’s apartment many Pilluvyt plates ago. Dean has become the subject. Dean parks in a lane off the road but on the other side. He slides his worthless .22 out of the glove compartment and sticks it back into his jeans. He rubs his eyes. Stretches his neck. Inhales sharply three times. Oxygenates the brain. He jogs to the house. He listens to silence at the front door. After a while, the crickets start up again. He edges along the side of the house and around the corner, staying well back from the sliding doors that open out to the pool. None of the outside lights are on, as they agreed, and there is only a faint gleam from somewhere deep in the house. Dean crouches under an orange tree near the master bedroom. He creeps forward with his gun extended. He unlocks the door and moves past the bed, moving silently out the door into the darkened hall. The TV is on too loudly. There is a light at the end of the hallway. Dean sniffs that timeless acrid odour that belongs exclusively to scenes like these. He releases the safety and inches along the hallway, swinging himself into the bright doorway of the living room with his legs braced and arms extended. 180

American Idol blares loudly from the plasma. Gemma is snuggled into cushions on the couch cradling a shiny black Colt .45. Russell is sitting on the big butter-yellow leather armchair on the other side of the living room with his shirt off. His face is as a sheet of paper. He nestles an unfired shotgun in his lap and there's a hole in his chest that looks like burning charcoal. Dean goes over to Gemma. She is staring straight ahead. He takes the gun, then picks up the remote and mutes the TV. “Where did you get the gun?” “I found it in some filing cabinets in your father’s office. I keep it under the couch when you're at work. Just in case.” She still hasn’t looked at him. Dean empties the gun onto the coffee table and sits down next to Gemma on the couch. They both look across at Russell who looks back at them from beneath colourless hair hanging over his face like an old shower curtain. “I knew he'd come after me,” she says. “It was just a matter of time.” She giggles. Her eyes were dancing around like Christmas lights. Blood begins to drip in a sticky stream down the yellow chair's solid Spruce legs. It doesn't seem to bother Russell. Dean thinks of the footage lurking in the shadows of the tapes like an actor waiting for her cue. “But I was hunting back,” she said. “And I got him, lured him here just like I planned.” “Thanks a lot,” says Dean. “Smart.” “Kim was innocent. Russell—” nodding toward the dead man “—took him away from me.” “Next time,” Dean says carefully. “when you are asked to become the subject’s lover, maybe you shouldn’t actually fall in love with him.” Gemma turns a stricken icy stare at him, “What do you know about love? If you loved me, you’d find that goddam tape. “ 181

“If you loved him so much, why did you tip him off?” Dean says. “That’s what got him killed. Russell knew you’d do it. Knew you were working both sides. He had it all set up: first Kevin and then Kim. We both played into his hands.” “I could only be myself with Kim,” she says and begins to sob. “Only Kim.” Dean thinks of the beautifully boned face in the photograph smiling at something outside the frame. He says, “I found a picture of him at the apartment. Apart from that it looks pretty cleaned out. In the picture, he’s playing chess with Dr Spock from Star Trek. Must have won a competition or something. Like his dream comes true. But he’s not even paying attention. I mean he’s smiling but at someone outside the frame. And not the photographer. Who do you think he was looking at?” She puts both hands over her lips and turns to him, quiet, but her eyes fill up again. The eyes that are winter-lake blue, melting. She takes her hands away. Her lipstick is smeared. “Maybe, “ she says. “He was smiling at God.” Russell watches them from the yellow armchair. “We better get out of here,” says Dean. “You go first. Go to the airport and get on the first flight to Australia. I have the money. I’ll come in a few days.” She stands up, brushing down a new dress. She’d gotten dressed up for him. He remembers the candy and balloon in the car. “Don’t come unless you find the tape,” she says dully. She looks down at him for a moment. “Poor boy.” Then she turns around and goes into the kitchen for a garbage bag and some rags. …

Final destination. We reached the new campsite just after dawn. It is set back into the hillside high above a small village of stilted shanties. On the edge of a rough clear a couple of huts sag on short stilts. Once used by goatherds, they now serve the Lost Cause. … 182

Dean finds Russell's keys and drives the funky Le Baron into the garage. They tie Russell's wrists to his ankles—dead man's yoga—and bundle him into two giant garden refuse bags. Together they lug him into the trunk. Lucky junkies weigh nothing. Gemma stuffs more garbage bags with old newspaper and rags from the garage,. They fill bags with rotting mulch and rank compost. Dean pours all their accumulated take-out from the refrigerator and recycled soda and beer cans into more bags, ties them up and throws them on top of the bundle containing Russell. Dean ties down the trunk with bungie cord from Chalmers’s garage so all the stuffed garbage bags are bulging out. No one will want to interfere with this white trash-cart. He buys Gemma a one-way ticket to Sydney on the Internet with his father's credit card. The plane leaves at 6:45 in the morning. That’s two hours away. The night is hanging on by its dread teeth. Dean calls the cab. He walks her outside. The oranges on Chalmers trees are tarnished silver in the moonlight. They look at each other. There is nothing more to be said. Her eyes are clear, transparent in that wide old-young face. They both reach for the door handle at the same time. She gets there first. She slides in and places the big black bag beside her. The driver waits. Gemma checks her reflection in the rear view mirror and Dean shuts the door. The cab moves off slowly and the last thing Dean sees is the severed perfection of her profile floating in the night's dead centre. He is alone again at last. He finishes the clean-up before dawn. There is a stain on the yellow leather from Russell’s lacerated lungs, but Chalmers might be able to convince the wife that it’s patina. Dean is careful to remove every trace of Gemma: bobby pins and magazines and tubes and bottles and wrappers and shopping bags and every panty, broken vial, strewn magazine, dirty glass, sticky pan. He cleans his father’s .45, puts it back in the filing cabinet. He empties the cache on the computer. Goes into her hotmail account and deletes all the messages He washes and dries the sheets and towels and vacuums the Honda. He packs his clothes, including the old Harry Potter sweatshirt and the chunk of the Berlin Wall into his own back pack. Then he grabs the sports bag from the closet, locks up the house and emerges at first light. Like a vampire, he blinks eyes that immediately begin to burn in the rose-grey dawn. Far-off the smell of smog from Orange County. The acrid bite of burning from Mexico. He wishes he had sunglasses. There are some in the 183

LeBaron, buried beneath takeout boxes and cans and fifths and unspeakable napkins. Dean gingerly digs for them and slips them on. If you only knew what I have seen through your eyes, he admits. He drives all the way out to Riverside, where he off loads in a sulphurous illegal dump between the burnt-out old farm and the freeway. Then he drives to Russell's neat little brown farmhouse and parks the car in the garage and throws the key down a stormwater drain on his way back to the highway. He’s hitching South when he thinks: did Gemma take Dashiell or did he leave the rat behind at his father’s house? …

Guards squat in the doorways of the huts, rifles in hand. Men wait and watch, camouflaged in the majestic bamboo that hangs over the clearing like thatch. The rebels are the same as always: dream-bitten boys whose vision of an independent state is based on ingesting too much second-hand Mao and Chef with too little perception of the unbreakable ties that bind them to India. “In its entire history, India has never lost a single metre to secessionists,” I said. “You know that.” “But we are not exactly Indian,” one of Prasad’s men said to me, the educated man with the gold tooth. “We descend from the ancient tribes.” “Decades of colonial rule by our own State have crippled the area’s economy, infrastructure, and culture,” he said. State-sponsored immigration from stricken neighbours on a massive scale has created a migrant voter base loyal to the Government and unlikely to want to be stranded in an autonomous region hostile to their presence. “It’s a question of identity,” the tribal bodyguard continued. “Who we really are.” Prasad is not here. Another rebel translates. “Why don't you just shoot him,” I asked. “Collaborators get killed by the resistance all the time.” “You refer to Chilling, I gather?” I turned at the familiar accented voice. It 184 was Prasad. I hadn’t heard him approach. “The complexity of Chilling's collaboration precludes such actions,” said the older man. “Besides,” said Prasad. “There's no money in it.” I sleep standing up. I sleep while trudging. I fall asleep over meals. I nod off mid-sentence. I woke up to someone shaking my arm. “Come, come,” said a whiskery face with uneven brown eyes. He helped me up, and led me slowly across the compound to one of the shanties. The twilit chill closed in around us. He showed me the bamboo ladder up to the hut, and the guard moved aside. I climbed up and stepped hunched and alone through the doorway. Against the low back wall sat a man. He was middle-aged, and of an average build. His eyes behind glasses were puffy eyes but his mouth was friendly. Serene. A closed notebook rested on his lap. He met my gaze with an uncertain smile. The old guard waited at the threshold. At that moment I understood my role in this. I turned and walked out of the hut and past the man guarding the long- awaited ex-hostage. I stood on the little porch and looked down across the massed forest, washed a bleak khaki in the dying day. The dark ribbon of river glinting like mica through the arboreal veil. Directly below me clustered the shanties of the village, mostly hidden by the jungle growth, but the laughter of a child floated up and I glimpsed an old woman with her sari draped over naked breasts taking a shit under a tree. …

The silence welcomes his return. The silence forgives. Dean knows there will be hell to pay, all the same. He returns to Kim's old movies right away, but even now that he knows what he is doing, it is a painstaking process. He doesn’t want to miss a single anomalous frame, which means he has to watch each film at least twice, in order to check 185 that he’s cued them properly for later retrieval. On the first night back he watched Three Days of the Condor, and then The Fury, and Silkwood over the next two nights. Now he’s onto Race with the Devil, another corny chase movie with No Way Out. That seems to be the message of the 70s that are ultimately about death in the second person. Yours. And Dean's getting more and more jittery, pausing the tape and jumping up every few minutes to look through the curtains, or listen at the door. He listens for a break in the silence. Dean knows that emptiness is a lie. At about ten o’clock in the middle of Race with the Devil, there’s a tappetytap. Dean peeps through the eyehole. Pete peeps back. Gives a stagey wink. “Hey Eee-Arre. I thought it was you, when you get back?” With a sigh, Dean unlatches and unlocks. Slowly. “Couple days. So here I am.” Pete is dressed in a soft textures tonight: nylon sweats, cotton sweater, quilted jacket, beanie. It makes him look twelve years old and twice as scary. “So here you are?” Pete says. “Sure?” says Dean. “You want to come in?” “I rented a movie,” says Pete. “Why don't you come over and watch it with us? Unless you already saw it. It’s my daddy’s favourite.” “What is it?” says Dean. “Dances With Wolves,” says Pete. “I’ve seen it maybe eight times.” “I did see it a while ago,” says Dean doubtfully. It had been playing one night on cable at some reform school while he was freebasing with his roommate. He hadn't paid it much attention. “Go. Get your keys.” They move through the dark sectors. Cinderblock fragments accrue in corners. An old microwave rocks on its side draped with sodden plastic bags stuffed with more plastic bags. Pete takes him the back way, behind the Mexican family’s apartment where the light is on tonight. Pete and his father live in Sector 6. It’s like another country: walls layered with spray-bombed faces, slogans and tags. Signs of more recent habitation than Sector 8. 186

“We used to live downstairs, but then when this one came up, we took it. We still store some stuff down there, free of charge. You get on the good side of Walter, you’re all set. He would have done anything for, you know.” Pete refers to Kim in a nameless past tense. Their apartment is laid out differently from Dean’s. The front door opens out onto a living dining room, with the main bedroom off it, and the kitchen to your left. Off a short hall in front of the kitchen from the living room is the bathroom and opposite, Pete’s little room with a window looking out onto more towering ruins. Pete’s father is sitting at the table under a lamp working his cheque book. An empty beer bottle is in front of him. He looks up at the boys over rimless glasses. He’s thin like Pete, but taller, with grey hair and a sagging grey-brown face. Dean recognises him from the pigeon disco. “Daddy, this is Eric Roberts, Kim's roommate I was telling you about. Eric, this is my father, Ray Pierce.” Ray shakes hands with Dean under the soft light of the clean plastic shade. “We’ll just watch a movie. You be done soon?” Mr. Pierce looks down at his cheque book and the piles of paper stacked around it. “I’m never done, son. Nothing adds up.” “It does when I do it,” says Pete, opening the small refrigerator at the end of the black and white kitchen and taking out a couple of Mountain Dews. “Leave it alone. I’ll take a look at it tomorrow.” “You boys know anyone wants a part time job in a market?” says Ray looking at Dean. “What happened to Floyd?” Pete says, putting the popcorn in the smallest whitest microwave Dean has ever seen. He thinks of Mackenzie’s giant silver microwave- convection oven installed over the breakfast bar. When he was little, Dean poured over the manual that showed colour pictures of how you could cook a whole turkey dinner in it—the bird on one shelf, a pie on another. If you’d wanted to. “I let Floyd go,” growls old Mr Pierce, shaking his head. “Came to work late today, again, smelling like a science experiment. Told him to get out—never mind even putting down his things. So now we’re short.” 187

“Well I guess I know what I’m doing tomorrow,” says Pete, winking at Dean. “Got to get us some of those fancy toothpicks with the coloured cellophane, Daddy? Make life more interesting. All the good places use them fancy toothpicks. Why we got to use the boring ones? It is unprofessional in the extreme.” “And I got the health inspector on my back.” “Yeah, well that’s because you’re just getting started. They have to keep their eye on things and keep the roaches back in Chula Verde where they came from. Once the inspector get to know you, get to know you run a straight place, he'll be sending all his health inspector buddies over to buy their lunch at Ray’s Deli, and no extra charge for the toothpicks, neither.” “Yeah yeah,” Pierce takes off his glasses and rubs eyes as wrinkled and baggy as an old turtle’s. “I just wish they’d come sooner rather than later: health inspector, building inspector, panty inspector, I don’t care just so long as its some inspector come along and bag up that human trash piling in front of my store.” Pete shoots Dean a Look. He sips the soda. “Eric knows all about it, Daddy.” “And how’s that cure world hunger?” Pete says, “You need to get someone there’ll scare them off.” Ray glares at Dean while reaching for his beer, which is empty. Pete quietly slips a fresh one into the man’s shaky paw, which he chugs down without missing a beat. Later Pete gets Dean settled down on the leatherette two-seater under a large fake- oil painting of a canoe in the moonlight rowed by two men who look like twins except that one’s white, one’s Indian. Pete assembles popcorn, drinks and remote on the wood grain coffee-table and sinks into a purple velveteen Laziboy to Dean’s right. Above the big TV, there is a picture of Pete at his high-school graduation and another picture of a woman in a cap and gown with a heart-shaped face and straightened hair. Pete starts playing the tape, and half an hour into it, Dean sneaks a glance at him. Pete is soundlessly sobbing. His face is wet with streaming tears. There is a mucousy sheen on his smooth upper lip and his nuggetty shoulders are silently heaving. … 188

“The footage I hear is a royal revelation and it seems that the high level manoeuvrings have not abated,” said Debi Nath, the rescued hostage and my new room mate. Chilling may have sold Avi on, but our efforts to retrieve the footage may have caused some interference in the system. Rumour has it that Chilling’s nerves are not what they should be. Men make mistakes in such a state. Prasad is in negotiations with middle-men. Nath talks in a dotcom lilt with a mouth full of chanha. He was kidnapped by a Shunya splinter group on his way home by bicycle from his job—systems manager—in Tushwar. His youngest daughter found the bicycle tossed in some weeds by the side of the road. She waited beside it until nightfall because it was her birthday and he was bringing her present from town, a camera. The birthday dinner grew cold while a neighbour set out from the house. He found the girl by the bicycle just out of town. He propped her up on the handlebars and rode back to the family waiting in the apartment, a cloth over the festive pakoras to protect them from the flies. Nath has taken our young guard under his wing. He is a skinny boy who spends most of his time bent over a notebook, AK swinging off a bony neck. He is fifteen or so with a sketchbook full of drawings of movie stars and monsters, gods and super-women and weapons … the usual boy-art. But there is a lyrical quality to the lines, especially in the calm of the deities and in the drape of costume—the way a skirt swirls over a thigh, the strong stance of a sandalled toe, the haunted lonely eyes of the demons—that sets his work apart from the usual adolescent scrawl. Nath praises him and makes suggestions—how to fix a hand or fill in some shadow and in return for this—and for letting him sleep inside on a blanket on the floor instead of on the porch where he risks falling into the valley below—the boy is doing Nath's portrait in charcoal collected from the camp fires. The form sings off the page—a father-figure’s fleshy face with worried eyes and the serene smiling mouth. “The harder it is for the movement to define their stance, the more unyielding they become,” said Nath. 189

I saw Avi drugged and beaten, loaded into a bullock cart, and taken to the edge of the Lalganj where his family wait. I saw his enemies dragging him out of the cart, and taking him to a ditch by the side of the red road that runs through the town, and shooting him between the eyes in a statement of total identity. I told Nath about the pictures of Avi that Chilling showed me on his cell. “Can you describe exactly what the terrorists were wearing and how they had tied the prisoner’s hands and where they were standing—inside or outside?” he said. I tried to remember. The boy’s charcoal scratched on the page. …

Pete winds up helping out at the market on the corner. The market with the new sign on it in red, white and blue that says “Ray’s Market.” Dean visits him there sometimes. Dean goes over to Pete’s house and watches movies with him. They watch Austin Powers, the Spy Who Shagged Me, and father and son nearly die laughing … literally. Ray falls off the couch and yells and that makes Pete choke on his popcorn and he’s gasping and going red and Dean has to do a Heimlich manoeuvre on Pete like they taught him at Survival School in Minnesota, and Pete says a life for a life and that now Dean’s life belongs to him. And they all have another beer. Pete wipes away the tears. Sometimes they go clubbing afterwards, always to Blue Moves. Pete likes Thursdays, but Dean likes Tuesdays, because all the pretty girls are there, comfortable because it’s fags’ night. “How do you know they’re girls?” says old Mr Pierce. Days pass. Dean is almost finished putting the pieces of princess back together again. He remembers Gemma’s big iridescent eyes in the light of the Hungry Jacks sign the night of the pre-caper dinner. He calls collect once or twice to his aunt’s number in Australia. But no one answers. 190

15 EMERGENCY ROOM

Every starving splinter groups claims to have the footage, or know something about it. Prasad’s men follow up all the leads, more as an excuse to deliver care packages of food and ammunition than anything else. “Why do you take on all this responsibility?” I ask. “I am just making some room to move for all of us in this multi-coloured state,” he says. “This state of being many-coloured.” Tonight Nath and I sat in the long windowless hut, listening to movie songs coming from the kid’s scratchy transistor on the tiny platform outside. Prasad has promised to get Nath back to his family as soon as it is safe. “As soon as they have the money, you mean.” I said. A jackal or endangered primate howled in the distance. We smoked in the lantern light. Nath wrote to his family, me to you. As always, he had the pictures of his two daughters on the cot beside him. I slept on a mat. He yawned and spread his arms then brought them down and rubbed his hands. He looked at me. He smiled and pointed at one of the pictures. “My daughter wants to buy a Mini Cooper, not like in the remade Italian Job, mind you: but a real vintage one. She's already started saving up for it. She wants to be a fashion designer with a vintage car— ““My daughter has some rubbish car she's into. Some American muscle job. I don’t know what else she does for fun.” “You must miss her.” The door was ajar. I watched the boy hunched and jittery over his pad in the crack of light from our room. “I don’t really know her,” I said. “She will come for you,” he said. “Achchha beti.” I shook my head, feeling sleepy. “No. Why should she?” 191

He looked up surprised. “Because she is family. You are her only father.” “No,” I said. “I’m not.” …

The world is turning Japanese. Diana rules the world but the world turns back on itself for reel or real: either slash or. Dean and Pete are waiting in the line outside Blue Moves. It is only a couple weeks past Thanksgiving and the ravers are wearing jackets—suede, ultra-suede, leatherette, vinyl, rubber, denim, fake fur, biker, retro, trench, wraparound, and boots—knee-high, thigh-high, ankle, zippered, steel-toed, strapped, studded, buckled, bondage, stiletto, platformed, rocker, retro, Harajuku, cowgirl. They wait quietly in line, shivering and stomping against the plastered gig posters and graffiti. Inside, Dean dances with a pretty white girl and she takes him home to a Bravada Beach apartment she shares with two waitresses, one of whom turns out to be Darla from Miracles, who calls him Dean, instead of Eric, but his little white girl is too far gone to notice. She makes him watch her have shower sex with herself. Dean is OK with that. This is the time of rituals. Of retracing the nameless exchanges so the God of the Hunt will be good to you. In the morning the girl is coy. She says, “I like your hair, it looks nice.” Dean says, touching the matted pile, “Wicked.” She says, “It’s like, high, but in a good way, you look like one of those guys, you know.” He says, “Which guys?” He offers her a dexxy. She take one. She says, “You know. Those guys—with the high hair.” Sheesh. These white girls. But step out of the routine, skip your devotions, pick the wrong girl and things get complicated in unusual ways. So then Dean picks up the wrong girl. Later Pete says, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Dean picks up a girl who is the wrong colour. She is the sister of the wrong man. One of the brothers in Sector 2, Potter Street. Dean doesn’t know. They dance and then 192 do lines and then fuck in the ladies room. Dean comes out and dances some more. Pete glares at him across the floor. When Dean looks for Pete later, he finds out that Pete has already gone. It is a cold night, and good for a walk. Dean walks into the waiting silence that surrounds the ruins like a caul. He walks past the Giant Hole. The ruins are bathed in full moon gleam. Distant sirens snake at the edge of thought. The smashed windows and grimy cinderblock, bleached of their everyday reality, take on the majesty of ruins. You're an accidental tourist stumbling through Percepolis. Hieroglyphically fragged graffiti floats on the walls and terminal hoardings. A dead language weaving its web of silence around the funereal web of history. Dean hesitates at the dark mouth of the funky stairwell and hoppity-hips up into his stolen world two steps at a time. Mid stride, a cold ringed hand closes over his mouth and a steel forearm presses the air out of his lungs and superhuman metacarpals cuff his ankles. These hands toss Dean against the boards that are nailed up over the opposite door with telekinetic fury that breaks a couple of ribs and splits the wood. The assailant kicks the rest of the board away, and hurls Dean through it, where he lands on rank carpet in the middle of a living room pulsating with light from an outside source. It illuminates a sagging couch and two chairs, one of which burns itself indelibly onto Dean's consciousness before total system shut-down … what do you want your computer to do? Dean registers through his own screams what he recognises as a captains chair, like Pop had back east in the shed behind the house. The fox’s skull nailed up over the door. Pop's Gun and Pop's Chair. Dean whirled on that chair called while Pop tinkered at the workbench, cleaned his rifle and twiddled dials on the ham radio. Dean had whirled on the captains chair long ago and he had surrendering to the dizziness. Let his head flop. Don’t look down. “Spin the other way,” Pop had said. Dean screams again as a steel toe thuds into his crotch. His balls explode into a thousand fragments like a hologram and in each fragment Dean sees the captains chair reflected in each sliver, the whole thing reflected back to him but from a different angle: like a crystal. His balls and bones and blood crystallising under a wide gash in the ceiling and drifting out into space. 193

Beneath his screams, Dean hears the last words: Fuck your own sister, Emergency Room. …

A gibbon screeched in the night. Then something else. I turned to face the wall on the mat. “Army issue rifles,” said Debi Nath, starting up from his cot. “A change of plan.” Gunfire approached: ratta, ratta. I opened my eyes to the black wall. Were my eyes open or closed? Nath lit the lantern. I turned slowly to see him packing. He began to pick through his things, taking everything quickly out of his pockets and then putting it back in: the pen and notebook, the wallet and photos still on his pillow. He changed his mind and fumbled for his comb and started smoothing his hair . He stopped suddenly and reached for the photos of his girls. Pounding feet and shouts from the main cluster of huts just below us. A buffalo roared, then a shot rang out and another. Prasad’s racing commands above the ruckus and the clatter of thrown cups, hastily hefted weapons, a ruptured yelp from the boy at the door. It hit us like a wave from the shanties below— the scream of mothers as husbands and sons reached under thin mattresses for WWII rifles, axes, hoes, ancestral spears. The sounds changed. Harsh cries cut off mid-arc, the disbelieving grunts and futile pleas in a language as universal as a flowing stream … the language of last words. Swarms of black berets swimming into view. Then the boy, our teenage guard, burst into the room and swung his rifle wildly first at me, and then Nath, then back. He became airborne before us, skinny legs dangling and surprise the expression in eyes that finally registered the bayonet piercing his chest from behind. His rifle went off and Nath slumped over on the bed. A serenely rueful army operations commander reassured me later that the story of our courageous rescue would unify the nation against the guerrilla dog. 194

He stationed a new guard on the veranda. Smoke roiled up from the village and flames crackled above the voices of strangers. I waited for the guard to fall asleep before I hooked the laptop over my shoulder. I walked past my roommate, still slumped sideways on the bed with the photos of his children fallen to the floor. I picked them up. Our “rescuers”, the paramilitary, had left the boy’s sketchbook. I took that and put Nath’s pictures inside the pages. I kept my back against the wall as I slipped out of the hut on the side opposite to where the guard slept sitting up against the stilts. Palm fronds razored into my flesh as I skirted the huts and scrambled up the hill behind. The laptop banged against my ribs. I let myself look down only once at the smouldering village, upwind from the smell of burning flesh. …

The two fingers on his right hand, his clicking hand are bent back oddly. Dean comes to on the floor of 4736. Staring up at two suns, two holes, until the suns and holes come together and he’s staring at the one sky through a hole in the ceiling. The hole in the ceiling would explain the otherworldly light that comes out of the gap in the door sometimes. Dean lifts a hand to his face, and even though his face doesn’t know it is being touched, the hand tells him that it's still there. He has pissed himself. Dean starts to cry. He hears footsteps on the stairs outside but he can't stop crying. The footsteps belong to Pete who steps over the smashed door and the voice coming from far away belongs to Pete’s sad silly face that looks down at Dean and says: “I knew it,” says Pete. “White boy’s wet his diapey.” Now Pete's gently lifting him up and then air, and then nothing and he’s back in Pop’s captain chair which Pete is wheeling across the hall. The bumps reverberate up and down Dean’s broken body and he wakes up next in Kim’s bath. Pete is pouring baking soda into the water from a white and blue box in one hand and in the other is a large bottle of iodine. 195

Dean is able to open his right eye a little by the next day and in a couple more he can feel his face. His broken nose is still a no go zone. Pete straightens Dean’s fingers which makes Dean black out again. He comes to after the splint has been fixed. “Did a lot of these in my hoop days,” Pete says. Dean yawns through his pain. The ribs will heal fine too, Pete said. Nothing you can do. Just don’t breathe. Dean’s balls are the size of oranges and he can’t get an erection and it hurts to piss again. He mentions this to Pete and Pete’s thumb and forefinger plays a tiny violin. Dean leaves the apartment for the first time six days after he got beat up. He goes down to Ray’s market to get some juice and some aspirin. Pete’s not at the Market today, but Ray is behind the deli, and there is a lightness to his movements. He says to Dean. “Looking good, son. That’ll heal in no time.” I’m not your freakin son. “Got some California Rolls in this morning, fresh from the supplier. Here, take one for your lunch.” “I’m good, thanks.” “Go on now, son. It’s on me.” He shoves a roll wrapped in plastic across the high counter. Dean takes it and starts to turn toward the back of the store to get his juice. He stops when a man comes out of the back room behind the deli section with a block of Swiss under one arm and a brace of salamis under the other. The man is wearing a white apron stretched tight over a big hard belly. He has a light brown beard and moustache and teak-coloured hair tied back in a pony tail. His face is smooth and pale with grey eyes. There is something vaguely South of the Border to the cruel set of his mouth, but when Ray introduces the man as his new manager, the guarded response is pure SoCal: “Hey Eric,” Byrd smiles, half yells, saluting Dean’s bruises with the salami. “Ouch.” “Boy had a run-in with the neighbours, “ Ray says to Chuck Byrd. “Over a girl of course.” At the register Ray whispers to Dean: “He comes with impeccable references, if you know what I mean.” 196

That explains it. That thing about the guy that Dean can’t quite put his finger on is not a foreign thing. The guy’s just an operator, gone to fat. This is a trans-national designation, like Starbucks. You got to know your way out to get back in. The usual element on the corner does seem a little thinner today. No wonder old Ray is dancing. …

Prasad found me just before dawn under an ancient stand of bamboo. He gave me a little water and made me swallow a little yellow pill and then led us deep into the forest. I gave him the boy’s drawings and the pictures. He told me to ditch the laptop, but I won’t. How else will you know where to find me? Follow my words: pink in, blue out. The cadre has vaporised. The survivors if there were more than us have slunk back into the jungle. But a day or two after the raid, a figure had apparently emerged from the shadows: a boy. Prasad told me that he was half-dead from hunger and wild-eyed under prescription sports goggles. Prasad fed him and gave him a job as his new body guard. He is half-starved but well built. “He’ll be strong one day. Shame about his eyesight,” Prasad says. The boy is about seventeen and his name is Dipak and his family are all dead. He wears hockey goggles to see. Around his neck he wears a silver amulet on a leather cord. The three of us moved silently in the upper columns of jungle, deeper than the dawn could reach and where silent slender evergreens replaced the teak and bamboo from lower down. We came to a nasty little clearing where Dipak set up camp. We huddled together beneath the soggy vines and crawling bugs. He lit a sputtering fire, and Prasad and I slept while the boy kept watch. I woke to see Prasad leafing though the sketches. Although it must have been nearly noon, the sun barely penetrated our dank and sodden little glade. Prasad sent the boy down the mountain to dispatch the book and pictures to Nath’s family and to bring back some food and money using my travellers checks. Like a natural or the best Myanmar-trained rebel, the boy moved deftly 197 down the black-soiled slopes. I imagined him stepping lightly through giant ferns and tunnelling through vines as old and impenetrable as song, a dark dhoti wrapped around his face to keep out the insects. Prasad told him to keep the gunfire to the north. The chatter of minivets and mynahs heralded his return. He told Prasad how he could sense, but never see, an animal moving somewhere close, a tiger perhaps or, lower down, a lonely buck. He had rupees and rice and a little mutton for dinner, some bananas for our breakfast the next day. “What now?” I asked Prasad. “Keep looking,” he said. “One of them will turn up—the boy or the film. Never say die. Besides, we need the money.” “We?” I asked him what he thought it was worth. “A genuine sex romp with Princess Diana?” he said wearily, accepting a piece of meat from Dipak, proffered to him on a leaf. “What’s it worth? Enough. Cash, guns and safe passage for our people in the event of Chilling’s inevitable ascent to power. Ghandhiji himself exhorted us to use any means possible to secure freedom. Alliances are not selling out, merely the cultural politics of difference.” “But what,” I said, “if it isn’t real?” “Where sex on film is concerned,” he said. “The less real the better.” We took turns tending the fire to keep away the bugs and snakes. The clearing undulated in the flickering night like an ancient colon. I unwound out of a dream involving the banging of a door in a storm but it was only Dipak nudging me viciously out of sleep with his gun handle. It was my turn to guard. In the dream I had been lying in a room somewhere, in a house like that of my parents' back East. The door to Pop’s shed had been left open in the rain and the door was banging rhythmically in the wind, b-bang, b-bang. I was a child lying in my bed listening to it getting louder then fading a way almost to nothing, then getting louder again. I sat and stoked the fire while the other two slept. I tried to follow the beat of my own irregular heart and felt in my pockets for the pills from Prasad’s connect. I dry-swallowed the last two and dropped the empty plastic bottle in the fire, 198 watching the flames around it change from red and yellow and finally to a toxic techno-blue. …

Star Wars takes Dean several days because of the headaches he gets since the attack. He still can’t use his right hand, and his left is just not up to the painstaking task of all the jogging, rewinding and fast-forwarding required to isolate the anomalous frames with total accuracy. The last thing Dean wants to do is to have to go back and watch a whole movie again just because he’s missing one 25th of a second of footage. He counts one hundred and twenty five frames in Hustle, roughly five seconds of anomalous and randomly buried footage he’s going to have to exhume and re-construct— …

I am aware of how Dipak listens behind his balaclava as I tap away on this scratched and mud-caked keyboard. Other than that his eyes never leave Prasad. I watch the boy obsessively fiddling with the amulet around his neck. …

Flash! Pause, rewind, jog forward until you hit the smoky frame, a flash of grainy texture, an uncertain form, buried and dreamy within the relentless flicker of irrelevant narrative. It’s her and she moves. Jot down the time: 0:22:16. Cue the tape. Keep an eye out for the next one. He isolates her figure or face but there are so many frames in- between that he can’t keep track of what she’s doing, or how each image remembers the one before. The films each conceal between four and eight seconds of imported footage, cut up into hundreds of separate frames, but what it all means Dean has yet to work out. He’s exhausted his supply of Demerol. He needs money, but there’s no cheque from Chalmers this time … and no fax either. 199

So he returns to petty crime. This is somehow connected to the facts of a life reduced to a dark regimen of pointing and clicking, the intensity of his headaches growing exponentially with time spent staring into the Martian glow of a seventeen inch monitor. But the software he bought with his stolen college money makes it easy … point, click, dump. He cannot believe his eyes. Try running into a Taco Bells not in your neighbourhood. There's seven hundred in it for you, just keep your mask on and wave the .22 around. Then you know you’re alive. Alive. Try ripping off the Ramada Inn where the night manager's reaching for his piece behind the booth. Try teaming up with the local surf nazis and holding up a small TV and hifi store. Try living on a candy bar a day for three days between gigs. While you wait for your share to come back from the fence—$800. Walter has to have $240 for the rent. Don’t want him asking questions. Try ripping out the ATM machine from the Best Western and dragging it through a smashed window with two three hundred pound brothers who haul it into a stolen Chevy Suburban at 4 am with a parolee you don’t know for shit just to rustle up another lousy grand so you can finish making the freakin movie. Then you know you’re alive. 200

16 VIPER

Dipak thought it was safe to move. We started down the mountain the next evening, a Thursday or a Friday, I can’t remember, Dipak scouting for food, water, enemies, ammunition, batteries … above all information about Avi, or the Diana tape. Koi bath nahi. We hear that there’s another version somewhere, cut up into chunks and buried in some video library in the US. Double-trouble: the jungle buzz of rumour. She’s alive! She’s a communist! She’s a lesbian! Prasad is determined to rescue some meaning out of all this. I just want to sleep. One dawn we made camp under a black limestone outcrop near a stream where the forest thinned out a little. Below us fisherman were setting out in teak canoes, bamboo huts clustered on the edge of a scrubby field. Prasad brewed some tea from a packet in his kit, and we drank it in silence for while. I asked him about his parents. “They live in a village to the south, near the border. They remain under the protection of the separatists and its enemies are now theirs which includes the army, the Centre. So they live in fear and under their breath it is their saviours they curse.” Prasad, the freedom-fighter sipped his sugarless tea and rolled a brown cigarette. He may have been thirty five, but in the early morning glare after another night of hacking through the Monstera, he looked a broken fifty. He has an oozing scab on one high cheekbone, and his hair falls out in dull tufts when he unwraps his dhoti. In one eye, a blood vessel had exploded in a raw spreading web. He shrugs off the hardship, tells me it's just an act. “Ok,” I said. “What about me?” 201

“Conscience got you into this, Chalmers. Guilt for the past crimes you helped to commit. Conscience will get you out.” Dipak fiddles with his amulet and stares at the freedom fighter with rapt devotion. …

An empty warehouse in black and white. Supporting columns fan out in sweeping diagonals. A row of hanging fluorescent lights slices across the upper right corner of the frame. A door is ajar just off centre in the far wall, which places it in mid-frame. The camera is fixed and angled low in this space. Dean leans to the right to keep from falling off the edge of the world. She enters through the door, eyes characteristically lowered. She throws a furtive glance to her left, smile and extends her right hand, arm straight out from the shoulders. Her body is tense and pulled back slightly in the unique meet and greet groove that she repeats along an invisible jagged line moving to her right across the screen. The frame darkens as she passes close in front of the camera. Then she disappears at screen left leaving the camera running in an empty space for a while. Dean waits leaning until someone shuts it off.

Dean has made a dark world to rule. Pizza boxes accrue in corners. Drinking water stagnates in coffee jars. He has constant diarrhoea. Cigarette butts pile up in an ice-cream cup by his bed. He has dumped over 1500 anomalous frames, each less than a 25th of a second into specially designated bins on the program. Each bin contains only one shot of about 150 frames, making about five or six seconds of footage. He sits in the dark and watches her enter his world through a hole in a wall and it’s really her.

An empty room in black and white. The position of the camera has not changed, but its low angle tilts slightly differently in each shot, like a dread voyeur shifting in his seat. 202

Dean holds onto the arms of the chair so he won’t fall off. She enters through the same door, makes her way through the sparse forest of concrete. The only available light comes from the hanging lamps, which bring out her cheekbones, Garbo style, but which also shape the room into vertical planes of light and dark through which she moves. The camera seems to be self-operating. This time she goes to her right and shakes a non-existent hand and kneels down on one knee to accept and admire an invisible something. A bunch of flowers? She offers a gaunt cheek to the imaginary child pressing up against her, and mouths a few smiling nothings before standing up and moving on down the line of columns, her hands clutching the flowers that aren’t really there. Is this some kind of training video? She smiles and her mouth begins to silently move. There is no sound. She looks like she’s in drag. That’s what Dean thinks at first. She’s wearing a tight grey suit, slightly worn and cinched at the waist with a wide black belt over a blouse that’s a little big for her. The skin at her throat and neck looks a little coarse. Her high platform heels are scuffed and appear to be slipping off one heel. On the collar of the jacket is a gold abstract brooch. Her hair is darker than Dean remembers, although it is hard to tell. With its curled and heavy bangs it looks like a wig. She looks like an eighties pop star, or … a drag queen. She’s wearing chunky gold earrings and her eyes look puffy. She falls off the world and a second later, the screen goes black.

…

Dean sells some pills to the kids waiting in the line outside The Edge, a club down at Bravada Beach. He doesn’t hang around to get beaten up by the runners. When he gets back into Kim’s little Focus around the corner he passes a white van parked a few cars up from the club. A sidelong glance suggests a smoking figure sitting behind the driver’s seat. Later Dean tries to remember what make it was. 203

With the money from the pills he buys groceries from Ray’s market. The old man slices him up some roast beef, and he buys some cereal and eggs, maybe lay off the chili for a while with all the shitting he’s been doing. “You been quiet lately son. Working hard?” Son, son, son. “How’s Pete? “ Dean says. “Fine, why not? Enjoying life, why not. He don’t have to pay for my sins. God knows, he paid enough already,” Ray says. He’s packing up Dean’s groceries like they were pieces in a puzzle, putting an item in the bag, then taking it out, and trying it in another way that might fit better. “What’d you hear from Kim? He coming back any time soon?” “I hear he’s pretty busy up there. Got himself some extra work producing music videos for a band up in Oakland.” “Though you said he was up in Seattle. Or was it LA, you said.” “No, San Francisco definitely. I’m pretty sure of that.” “Well, somewhere up there anyway. I’ve never been past Santa Barbara. That’s where his old lady’s from though ain’t it?” “Whose old lady?” “Kim's girl. The redhead, or whatever she is. Walter said.” “Oh yeah. Walter. “ Dean says shivering involuntarily. “So where’s the new guy, Mr P? The pony tail. You get rid of him already?” “Hell no,” says Pierce. “He’ll save my hide. Every businessman should have one of him for keeps. Been busy “relocating” those small timers outside there. Got the place back now just how I like it. He just don’t work every night. It's OK. I can handle the nights.” Dean sees himself and the three hundred pound brothers rushing into Ray’s market about closing time with balaclavas, semi-automatics waving, closing the door, and Dean cutting old man Ray up good and prop-pah before they burn through, taking everything with them that isn’t nailed down. “I bet you can, Mr. P,” Dean says. 204

“Ray. And don’t you forget it,” says Ray with a wink, shooting Dean with his finger. Dean acts shot. …

Dipak has news, all verifiable, none of it true. Or is it the other way around? Avi is still in India but has fallen in love with his captors. Or he is disfigured beyond recognition and smuggled across the border into Myanmar, or reborn as a young tiger recently escaped from a new eco-park at Harimunda. He beats a silent trail up the river and back to Zaribagh, where night-time poachers have spotted him drinking from a shallow stream. He has become a song, a story, a legend. The stolen footage of Princess Diana belongs to everyone. To history. All claim to have seen it, heard of it, stolen it, given it back. Does the image of an individual come under the same protection under law as the individual itself? She’s naked, she’s dead, she’s a man. When does a model become indiscernible from its image? When the properties of image and not-image become indiscernible in a reversible exchange. The sun sends out pink and gold tentacles a lilac river below. A distant figure, only vaguely human, bends over a pottery wheel. Men untangle a net. A girl brings the breakfast fire to life … masses named and numbered poised on the brink of endless toil. Labour and love, Lily, ya? How to stop the proliferating image on its line of flight? The answer is that you must force it, through technology, into submission. Force the image to be a good copy. Form forces the image to submit to the model. Make the woman mean something again. Reassert the mastery of the whole—another word for irony. I think of my mother. … 205

And she won’t look at him. Dean stares into the screen but she looks away. Lady Diana as performance artist. Who knew? The still camera is an unexpected vehicle for total suspense: who or what is just out of shot? You. Why won’t she look at him? Dean is unmanned by her refusal to look directly into the camera, Dean plays back the footage a hundred times, willing her to stop, turn and face. Why won’t she admit to what she is? Why won’t she play dead? Instead she comes and goes, ignoring him, sometimes with her back to the camera and it is her virtual gaze, the diabolical force of her denial that he feels breathing down his neck and contaminating this stolen world. You are freakin killing me. His intestine explodes into the toilet. He sits there and listens to the sound of his body dropping through the floor. Her profile drawn in shit all over the tiles. He wishes he could talk to Damien about it. Damien could fix it so it was something true, give her a model to live by, yeah. Rescue some meaning out of all this s- h-i-t. Give her back her face … yeah, and a new voice. See my Nike scar? “I’m branded for life, baby. And look where it’s got me,” Dean says hunched on the toilet. Smelling his smells. Listening to his sounds: the grunt and pop and spurt of a body in revolt. He gets up finally and goes to the mirror: bent nose, filthy dreads. Yellow bruising. Left iris looking a little untethered, like a stone rolling. He returns to the silent footage for the hundredth time and for the hundredth time backs away. He crawls along the floor, finds a rock. It’s that chunk of the Berlin Wall Chalmers gave him. Dean throws it at the TV. It bounces off. Princess Diana curtsies. Sex it up. He finds her power in this primordial space-time unforgivable and irresistible, just the moving reality of her in any room. She makes him come to her, over and over again. He loads the frames into the bins on iMovie one by one. It is a painstaking process. He's proud of his work. He works in the dark. He plays them back as a single shot. 206

She walks through the door and stands there waving for about three seconds, talking fake talk to nobody. One more wave, then she walks back out through the door. The framing doesn’t change. The still camera is angled lower than in the previous shot and the vast empty space looks like a page torn out of the devil's notepad. Is this some kind of revelation? Who wants this? Who needs it? Darkness for just over a second because her body blocks the lens. As she backs away it opens into the same warehouse space. She is wearing the same outfit. She is an addled burlesque, a Garbo-kooky super- freak. Big butch hair framing the averted gaze. She sits down on a packing box near the door, arranges her clothing, composes herself into an expression of intent listening. She nods, looking out of the dangerously tilted frame, serious. Then begins to soundlessly move her mouth, using her hands, tucking a piece of hair behind her ears. Her furtive gaze is fixed on an imaginary interviewer. She finishes speaking, listens again, smiling, then laughs, leaning back so far on the box that her upper body disappears leaving only severed legs in slutty heels left in the frame. The fake interview lasts about eight seconds, the longest shot yet. The princess is in the middle of listening to the next question when she stops abruptly, rises and approaches the camera, her body blocking the lens before it shuts down. Dean sings: “She's tall and she's blond and way/ Past her prime—a mess/My charred Barbie doll from the rubble of time. “ He beats out a jazzy beat on the arm of the chair with his good hand. …

Lena stepped out of the super market into a wet morning. The parking lot was still only a third full. The Viper was waiting for her, crouching in the mist like a pet griffin. She adjusted her bag of groceries on her hip and cut across the asphalt. She was pulling her sunglasses down onto her face when a great white whale pushed past her blind spot. 207

“Get in,” Diaz smiled at her over the tinted window in descent, submerging SoCal reflections in dirty paintwork. “Don't you ever wash that thing?” Lena said, still walking. Diaz smiled at her from the creeping van. “I have a message from your mother.” “You ever been in a ‘96 Viper?” she said. “It's one sweet ride.” She felt better once they are on the freeway. They drove South, and their hair whipped in the wind. She got off at the La Ramos Exit. She parked on the beach about a mile north of Miracles. “You ever been there?” he said nodding over at Swami's on the point. “When I was a kid they had a Halloween party every year. I went once as a Dinosaur. Chalmers carried me around on his shoulders,” she stopped as he opened the passenger door and got out. They sat on the cooling bonnet. The highway was empty behind them, and down on the beach, the tide hurtled in beneath the heavy sky. Lena shivered into her vintage sweater. “I started off in security,’ Diaz said. “I got a job as a high-level body guard for a high-level scumbag. But I was a dead ringer for this other guy, a heroin importer moving between here and Columbia who suddenly disappeared. The Feds pulled me in, arrested me thinking I was him, but when they found out who I was and what I knew they hired me. They slipped me in as infiltrator. I cracked some pretty big cases for them and then got moved sideways. Covert Ops, DEA and such. Working on this new thing now. You know who for.” “Anthropologists usually end up working for the government, even if they don’t know it. Still, top-level spooking? Go mother.” “Mid level actually.” He looked across the beach at some kids untangling seaweed from an old fishing line. The wind carrying their laughter and cussing up to the road. “So now you know what VIPER stands for?” “Verifiable Imagery Processing Energy Research. And your mother always knew, but wasn’t sure what it all meant. Now she knows. She says she’s sorry. She said to tell you that.” 208

“To tell me?” She looked at him. She could see his eyes: tired and grey-flecked behind dirty sunglasses. “There’s more,” he said. “I know.” He kept staring straight ahead. She said: “I didn’t know Trulli was my father when I slept with him.” He kept staring at the gunmetal waves. “Why doesn’t that make it better?” she whispered. He finally turned around then. “Trulli knew. That doesn’t make it better, but it makes it what it was. He may have planned it for years.” His face had hardened since she’d seen him last. He reached into his jacket and passed her a yellow envelope. It had something sharp-edged and bulky in it, the size of a toy block or very small book. “What do you want me to do with this?” “It’s the Diana tape. We had to check it out first before we could give it to you. It’s yours now. You know Chalmers needs it. And I know you read the faxes. The ones that get through. Send the footage to him. It won’t do him any good in one way, but he needs it in another. He needs to be the one to lure Chilling in. Chilling will then turn against Trulli. Chalmers needs to be the one to set this in motion. Then go over there and bring Chalmers back.” She just looked at it a while in his long-fingered and possibly lethal hands. A tiny drop of rain appeared on his finger. Then another. “Why?” she said. “Why should I?” “You’re all he’s got,” said Diaz. “In the end.” “How did you manage this?” she said, still looking at him as she shook the envelope. He continued to face out toward the horizon. His hair had begun to stick to his head in the vaporous drizzle. His profile was beautiful and fixed like a stone sculpture. “We had a plant in Rangeela Pradesh.” “A woman, of course. Knowing Chalmers’s weakness.” 209

She took it and they sat there for a while, leaning against the blunt nose of the Viper. A bulky silver watch peeked out from under his leather sleeve. Self-consciously he brought his wet hands together on his lap and turned to smiled at her. His face was stony beneath the darkening hair. The grey eyes haunted. “What’s the deal here, Jay? You going blood simple on me?” “The human sentiment, “ he said. “Gets me every time. I was hired to infiltrate Trulli’s ring, and realised there was more to it: all that peeping Tom stuff. That was OK. I could deal with that. Then I met you. Your mother said how you’d end up getting involved in the end. But not why. He told me about the two of you. I did the maths and realised he had to be your real father. That time Chalmers was away and she went to one of Trulli’s seminars. You were born exactly nine months later.” “December 28, 1971.” “Right, a Capricorn, “ he said. She waited while two trucks roared single file down the highway behind them. “You wouldn’t be a Taurus, would you?” she said. “Another time,” he said. “Will there be another time?” “Why don’t you want to talk about this?” “Why didn’t my mother tell me?” she said. “Why did you sleep with her ex?” He’d turned away again. “So talk,” she said to the curved and uncaring sweep of horizon that encircled them. “Listen,” he said. “You didn’t know. Trulli seduced you just like he seduced Abby. Why should she have admitted her lapse and made you hate her too? She didn’t know what would happen.” She sighed. “He hung me out to dry.” “No. Trulli hung you out to dry. He lured you in. Last time and this time. Chalmers helped to commit these crimes, yes, by taking refuge in a life of ceaseless motion. His crime against you is that of inaction. So is how you will take revenge? By leaving him to die alone in a cave?” She looked down at the rectangle in its paper envelope. 210

“Lena,” he said, pushing himself off the car. “How many more men will die for this? I lost a partner. A cop down from Nevada working undercover with the gang who tried, and failed, to steal the footage. He got made. We found his body in a Rosarita dumpster.” He stared grimly down at the asphalt. “You have gone blood simple,” she said. “You’ve come back just want to avenge your partner.” He looked up and shook his head. “I found a girl who did it for me. She was a real gem about it.” “How much did you pay her?” said Lena. “Plenty, “said Diaz. “I let her live. But you’re right. I still have some unfinished business.” The wind blew his hair across the face now worn and hard and for the moment, a stranger. “Look in the envelope,” he said. He turned toward the highway and started walking down it. Lena opened the envelope and slid out the tape. A black and white photograph came out with it. She looked at it. It was shot at night time. It was Lena and Chalmers one Halloween long ago. Behind them were rows of Jack O Lanterns of all shapes, sizes and permutations: white eyes and leering toothless grins. Lena was three or four. She sat on Chalmers’s shoulders holding the sides of his head with her small pale hands and her dark eyes peered out through the cloth jaws of a dinosaur. Her father’s lighter eyes were smiling and his hair brushed his shoulders. …

Sources place the footage back in the USA. Either that or in the hands of fundamentalists hiding out south of Tushwar. Due to a wound on his back that has become septic Avi is rumoured to be barely alive. He is possibly in the care of tribal sympathisers here in Rangeela Pradesh, but a few hundred kilometres to the north. Or not. Rumour has it that his body has been already returned to his 211 parents and is being prepared for a secret cremation. Dipak brought back a newspaper clipping that suggests Arun Ashtekar, his uncle, refuses to give the criminals the satisfaction of any media coverage. This information has been substantiated by any number of equally unreliable sources. Prasad wants to separate. Divide and Conquer. I was slowing them down, and he is determined to get to the bottom of this, but don’t look down. Dipak will take me north to follow Avi’s trail, while Prasad heads toward the footage—South. We will meet again at a Zafed. Those are the plans. “Pyari,” he tells me. “The name of the river, means beloved. Bahut Pyari.” Dipak brought back money and medicine and a battery for the laptop, complaining to Prasad that I should write letters like everybody else. The revolutionary coughs violently and shrugs. Who would mail them, he says. The faxing is efficient, he says. Maybe not so reliable. Who knows if they ever reach their destination. Dial me up. “The new pills aren’t the same pills.” “What does it matter?” Dipak said to Prasad as he handed him a little plastic bottle. He refuses to communicate with me directly. He is furious that he is burdened with an old man, an ignorant American. Dipak never addresses me and doesn’t look me in the eye. But I feel his sideways glares heavy with resentment. I gave him some rupees and he bought himself a cheap Discman and a CD of some Indian pop star. I gave Prasad what I had left. He told Dipak to stay with me, but I don’t know whether the boy heard him, because he was plugged into the Discman. After a lunch of bamboo shoots and rice, Prasad washed and retied his headgear. He checked his kit: ammunition, water, smokes and my rupees in a leather pouch. I lay beside the embers, watching. He squatted beside me and extended his hand. I started to get up, but he shook his head and smiled the serene smile of the slowly starving. He stole a quick glance at the glazed adolescent squatting behind me, thumping static bleeding from his ears. Prasad took my hand in his own that is dry and hot and as ravined as the beloved land itself. 212

“When will you be back?” I said. “Do you know what Fellini said when they asked when the movie would be finished?” he said. I weakly shook my head at the wasted face gently resolute in the dappled morning-night. “Actually, my friend, he said the movie is finished when the money is gone. So we are nearly there. Stay strong.” He got up and slipped silently away through the sea of brown and green that closed in around him. …

Families squabble behind genetically engineered Christmas trees. They nail reindeer to their rooftops. Dean is driving to Miracles looking for a cheque. He slows down as he approaches the restaurant and there she is pulling up in front of him to drop off his mail. It’s still light and he would have noticed the Viper first, if it wasn’t for his headache. One of his eyes feels a little loose in its socket. By the time he sees the car for real, she is pulling out again. That damn ride is blue like the deepest ocean, like the ocean as he imagines it where silence is all there is—a blood-blue—dark and depthless. The Viper hovers for a moment. It hangs motionless but building like the waves out at sea rising to merge with themselves in their permanent midnight. Then it drops thunderously out into the lane. She checks the oncoming traffic, pushing light brown hair out of her eyes, squaring narrow denim shoulders. Even as he’s turning around and heading back south where he belongs, he keeps an eye out for a deep blue Dodge Viper in the distance. It is late when Dean gets back to Potter Street. He needs supplies from Ray’s but he stops at Walter’s first to pay the rent. Walter has company. Dean can see them through the window sitting around the table under a white plastic light shade. He can see wooden bowls of snacks, bottles of beer and whisky and no smoke because Walter doesn’t allow it in his house. Dean thinks he’ll just knock and slip the bills under the door and leave. He 213 starts counting them out and the door opens suddenly and it’s one of the guys. He comes out of the front door and lights up. He takes a deep drag while standing there in front of Walter’s marigolds as night falls. Walter comes out then. “How you been anyways?” he says to Dean. “You on a diet or something?” Dean’s head is pounding. He keeps his broken eye away from the super, holds out the bills and begins to turn away. “You goynta be hanging around when Kim gets back?” Walter says. Freeze. Dean turns back and stares at Walter. He has to shade his bad eyes from the glare coming out of the front door. “You OK?” says Walter. “Byrd told me about Kim. Over at Ray's. Byrd: the new manager?” Walter and his friend are staring warily at Dean who steadies himself by reaching a hand out to the side of the building. The bricks feel cold and reassuringly rough. The old guy with the cigarette bends down to pinch off a dead marigold blossom. He lets it drop back into the dirt. Squats down there looking up at Dean. “Yeah, Byrd,” says Dean. “The pony tail.” Walter chuckles. “Looks like a drug lawyer, don’t he?” “You coming back in?” says Walter’s friend, standing. “Ayuh. Deal me in. Ned this is Eric Roberts over at Sector 8. Eric, Ned. Used to be a cop. Like me. You looking forward to Kim coming back? I know I am.” Deal’s hand grabs rough brick. “Sure am,” he says. “We all are. Byrd knows him too. But you’d know that. So we’re all friends. We can have a real welcome party when he gets here. Like regular people.” “A party,” says Dean. “You alright kid? You sick? Doing drugs?” “No sir,” says Dean. “Byrd said he tried to come around and tell you a few times, but you were out.” “He came round?” The man lights up another Winston and looks away to hide a smirk. 214

“Sure. We can get you the apartment next door, if you want. It’s empty, got a hole in the ceiling, but you boys can give me a hand. Fix it up good as new.” The pavement rushing up. Dean pushing back. “Wicked. So when’s the party?” “Soon as can be, ayuh. Byrd said Kim was on the final edit of some big project. Some secret thing and he couldn’t wait to be back in his own apartment with his own equipment. Me,” says Walter, beaming at Dean. “I get my boy back. That's what I call wicked.” 215

17 OTOHTO

It’s a little confusing … Prasad is gone and Dipak went away for a few hours or a few days. Koi baat nahi. He came back with some other boys who carried me to another place and left me in the back of a smoky cave. An old woman with a round crinkled face tends to me with the help of a dark-eyed girl. She came to stay with us once. Very pretty girl, very. If memory serves, the mother wasn’t bad either. The wife didn’t like her very much. I perk up at times, just after they bring me food and the special tea, achcha chaha. That’s when I perk up and write, or someone does… This is when I sleep and dream and it seems that whenever I wake up it’s neither night or day, but somewhere in-between. Beech mein. I don't see Dipak for days. I ask the woman about him and she tells me he’s fine just fine, looking for Avi. Take the money and run she says. Paise le ke bhago. I don’t know how I understand her but I do. I spent a life on the road. Motion without action. I was a world traveller painting pictures of myself as a hunter and collector to stick to the mirror-wall of my mind. …

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Princess says, beseeching Dean with outstretched hands. Darkness fills the screen. She moves away from it to stand there monumental in black and white. She’s in another kind of drag—metal-rimmed black sunglasses and a sheet fashioned as a cape over her suit and a Halloween store Princess Leia wig. 216

She stands to one side of a column. She kneels, bows her head, stands again and moves forward to switch off the tape. Just like in the reel thing, heh heh… Dean snickers in the darkness. He can’t feel his hands. She mouths the silent dialogue and moves through the tightly choreographed routine. The image of her opaque glasses and raised hand burn into Dean’s one good eye. She is haggard after days of filming. She comes forward to turn off the camera, backs off and repeats the Princess Leia scene. She comes forward, and then does it again twice. Then stands up and shrugs off the character as she comes toward the camera, arm raised and fingers spread. And then the camera eats her hand. It just burns a hole in it that spreads and consumes the whole freakin thing. Six seconds of footage assembled from over 150 frames buried in Groundstar Conspiracy. Is this the first one or the last one? What was the original order of the shots? Did the waving from the balcony come before or after the interview? Did she film herself dancing at the White House with an invisible prince before or after the shot where she cradles a non-existent baby for the media outside the invisible hospital? Did Kim write down the order of the shots somewhere, or did he just remember? Does the order of the shots matter? Maybe not, except for the last one. Dean doesn’t know what to do with the whole thing. The initial shock has subsided, virtual emptiness flopped out on the table for all to see, the blind quivering creature writhing under the heartless scrutiny of Dean’s own tunnelling desires. Maybe he just doesn’t get it. It’s a hole thing. Better that than Chalmers unending lusts … that a man’s reach should exceed his ability to keep his eye on the hole. Who needs a conscience anyway? I don’t know what it’s like to be you. Try, Chalmers always says. Just use your imagination, Dean. Imagine what it’s like to be someone else. That’s what we do. We imagine what it is like to be a bat, or Elvis. We go into that mode. That’s how we reanimate these relics in the classroom setting. We put ourselves in their position. We listen to Madonna, we watch Jelly Wrestling Down Under or the Jerry Springer show or go to theme parks with new eyes, with Diana's eyes behind dark shades of possibility. 217

Dance at the White House. Meet Joan Collins. Bette Davis eyes. Journey to America like Alexis de Tocqueville. Take sides. You can’t imagine what I have seen with your eyes. But try. Screw you and the screwing Batmobile you came in on. “I tried to tell her. She wouldn’t be told So I stole her story, and got it sold.” Dean dances to his own song. Dancing around the apartment naked. He records it in Garage Band. Plays it back. Dances. Dean finally digs up Damien in San Francisco after shelling out cash and drugs to the usual suspects. They speak on pay phones. Dean tells Damien as little as he can, leaving out whole chapters, like where he actually is, for example. Damien says he knows an actress at UCLA does a mean English accent. He can write a script for voice-over, get her to record it up there, no questions asked. Cost maybe a grand. And the rest. He's got access to libraries of footage, friends with equipment. Dean doesn't mention that when it gets to that stage, he's got all the equipment he needs right here. And he has the vision. Because he’s outside the frame. Dean sketches out what’s on the footage and Damien keeps saying uh-huh, uh-huh, and then he interrupts Dean to say, “Sounds like some kind of digital intermediate process. I mean that’s how she made it in the first place. Sure she shot on film, that’s how you got that burn-out at the end. I mean you need a projector for that. Then whoever got it next cut it on DV. We could use a laser burn transfer, I’d wager, get it onto a neg: 35 mm. Done it before, otohto.” Little brother? Dean hangs up real slow. …

Dean decides not to call Damien back. He has become adept at Photoshop and Flash. He wonders if he can do it himself. But first Dean gets down with the order of the original shots until he’s happy with the result. The random nature of their burial and his recovery gives him plenty of room to move. 218

It goes like this. Darkness. An empty room in black and white, rows and columns in a dread matrix. She enters through the door, in fugitive drag, eyes averted, a virtual gaze camouflaged by the high-concept act. The shot ends just after she walks past the camera and behind it, where she turns it off. She enters in the usual way, smiling wearily as she meets and greets her audience in a diagonal past the camera and behind it. Then darkness. The interview. We’re going back in time. A grand entrance that segues into a stiff yet sexy dance on the arm of an invisible Prince. She lifts up a pretend ball gown, wobbling in dress-up heels past the camera and darkness. Enter. Meet and greet on a village green Enter. Present a trophy at a polo match, cold-shoulder turned to Charles. Enter. Step out of a car, dodge the media fighting back tears. Enter. Holding a baby. Sacrifice it to the ravenous mob. Enter. Stroll along the heath. Enter. That kiss, then. Go on do it again. Once more for the cameras. Di-di. We love you Diana. Die again and again. Die forever. You’re our Princess. On close inspection and in this light, she looks like hell. Pockets of age drag at the aristocratic jaw line. There is a frown etched between unkempt brows and a hardness to the eyes that matches the wiggy drag. Darkness, she moves away from the camera in space opera costume. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” she says. The wig is slightly askew. She moves menacingly toward the camera in opaque sunglasses. Her jaw is set. Her mouth is grim. She shoots a hand out with the palm open and facing the lens as if to stop it. But it eats her anyway. She disappears in a white-hot hole It's not what you'd expect. One minute it's running its course, then it just eats itself up in a blaze of melting white. 219

Melts her hand and burns into her face and around her jewellery and hair, and eats up her chin and then it’s just her crazy shades floating in space. Fade to black. …

It is always both daytime and night time. Never beech mein. Bats beat their wings in the ceiling of the cave that is not a cave all the time, but sometimes a lake: deep and blue. Prasad is here but not here. Although sometimes I think he is Avi. Prasad told me he will wait for me. Anante . For all time. What did I expect? I was never there so Trulli took my place. Yours, Trulli. Who can blame her or either of them: Abby or Lena .Neither nor. The bats are quiet when the old woman comes back, but they start their flapping again when she’s gone. They flap all through the day-night of my dreams. Din meh raat meh. They are beating the blood through my veins with their bird slash batwing. When they stop, I can feel the slow trickle in my ears, pankha the ebb and flow. 220

18 SLASH

Dean is an adept. He is self-taught. He is no one’s otohto. He makes the movie by himself. For himself. This is a first for him. It is something to be proud of. It is something to sell. He plays it back. He programs his computer to play it in an endless loop on the desktop. He walks past it on the way to the kitchen, from the bathroom where his bowel is worming its way out of his body to the bedroom where the drugs worm a hole his brain. He watches the footage across the breakfast bar from the kitchen, drinking juice he stole from a market near the club. He doesn’t go to Ray’s these days. His gut feels a little better today. Because he’s not afraid of her anymore. He’s got her beat, right where he wants her. He tweaked it. Home improvements. DIY. Cut and paste, drag and drop. Sound and movement. Face the camera, bitch. Three-point lighting, shot-reverse shut. Candid interview, rare childhood footage, digitised stills, a compilation soundtrack of period tunes he mixed himself on Garage Band. Human League, Duran Duran, George Michael remixed with a pounding techno bass-line running through. I want your sex. And the presence of a white van these days in his peripheral vision assures him that someone else wants it too, especially with the first-person voice-over he’s downloaded from an aspiring actress he contacted on MySpace: oral pleasure. Dean moves the monitor into the bedroom. He snorts and watches and jacks off. Mackenzie calls from Sydney. He watches the new movie in bed, listening to his mom talk about maybe renting out the Del Carrera place while she spends a year in Sydney, you’ll be alright, love? Precious. Deanie beanie? He gets higher and higher and watches it some more, waking up to the oldest show in town. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi to find Mr Bryan Black slash Man in a Van.… 221

Dipak is back. The woman never comes. The bats are all there is. Shunya I feel better now that Dipak is here, writing these words for me like the son I will never have. Or was that the beti, achchha beti? I don’t know how you’ll understand this but you will. He takes the laptop, but he doesn’t know the number to dial on the Iridium. I can’t tell him because I have forgotten it. You’re a good boy. Achcha beta. Prasad is coming back. He has the footage, or knows how to get it. “You have it,” he says. “Forget the faxes. Check your email. I’ll come to help.” Does he come? Instead he tells Dipak how to access the code for the file. How to send the code to where he is. He told me who sent it to me. I tried to hear him above the beating of the bats. The Internet is our own Flemish tapestry, heavy with emergent pattern. Not what you would expect, Prasad says. At all, at all, at ALL, at ALL, at ALL, at ALL. The woman never comes. The dark hangs in the shadows, like a bat, upside down and her sari falling over bare thighs. Her legs are well apart slash smiling. She looks nakedly at me with her eyes upside down and her eyebrows are like a double smile or bird wings. Ab hin natri. Viper slash footage. In the Department of Textual Practices they called it being time-poor. So pay attention: Nirmal came back for coded access to the footage sent to me on my laptop, and then got word to Chilling. He told Chilling this: “The code for a sign of life. The entire file when I have my hands on him.” Chilling sent in a chopper to pick him up just outside of Safed. The CIJWS soldiers had been tipped off. They lay in wait and opened fire on the helicopter as it took off. Prasad barely made it onto the running board. Chilling’s men retaliated and there were the usual casualties on both sides. Dipak writes and writes. What is he writing? Does he press send or save? “They tailed them back to Chilling’s compound, and now,” says Dipak. “It is just a matter of time. “ This are the first words he has spoken to me. 222

Prasad gets the code from my computer and takes it to Chilling on a flash drive in exchange for a sign of life, as agreed. Prasad knows his Rangeela Pradesh days are numbered, but even Chilling knows better than to cross a runaway train, a man at the end of the line. The two old rivals flew off together in a cloud of machine-gun fire toward the rising sun of India. Prasad tells me that the dark eyed girl is constructing a safe-site for the footage in a proliferating line of flight that can’t be stopped by Chilling or anyone else. She has seen to it. She sends me the link to the code but leaves no footprints for the bad guys and no crumbs for good little girls to find their way back either. It’s not all on the Web yet but that’s just a matter of time for this Princess … I wonder what she does for fun. I never knew what to say to the girl. Avi had said, “I have your daughter to thank for this.” …

Dean spends all of his time in bed except to go to the club. He only goes on Tuesday nights now like Kim, because he is the only subject left. Dean opens the silver case in the closet and takes out only one item each night to wear dancing: the blouse, the boots. The girls think he’s a musician or a punk or something with the skirt on over his jeans or because of the make-up. He likes to walk past the homos in their trucks and early model sedans. Likes the sound of the high-heeled boots on the pavement. Ack ack ack. …

It is not what you’d expect. They arrived at Chilling's Nilla Hill farm mid-morning. To an aid, he said, “Hold my calls.” They walked down some steps to his secret shrine. He entered his code on the key pad. They sat in utter darkness on black leather couches clustered around a giant monitor. Her image moved on myriad screens around them in the 223 dark like curious creatures from the bottom of the ocean. The white-uniformed servants brought refreshments. Two black-suited men stood at the door with machine guns. Prasad called later and said the pakoras were delicious. “And the juice,” he said. “Was a Hula Huts special: an invigorating blend of guava and papaya with a dash of lime.” Someone pushed the drive in, and Chilling drew his gun. It took them to the link and Chilling’s tech support sat in the dark trying to hack in at the back end but the imagery’s defences were up: metacode buried in an enchanted forest of viral counter-attack. “I never knew what to say to the girl,” I tell Dipak. “What can you say to the one that got away?” Is he listening? He must be, because he puts down his pencil and takes out his wires and says to me: “Let her have the last word,” he says. “She has a story to tell.” …

Dean keeps hacking and cutting at her until he gets the whole story out of her. It was there all along, just waiting to be made. Sometimes you have to re-present those who cannot represent themselves. Dean made her presentable, a work of art. He plays the tape in an endless loop.

“It is not what he expected,” Prasad said to me when he came back to the cave. Or did he? Someone puts a cell phone to my ear. Poor Prasad smiles his upside down smile and beats his wings. Punkah walla. “No one could have expected this from her.” In his dark cave, Chilling had pointed his gun at the computer monitor, but his eyes were on the images moving across the multiplying screens in his mind. “Is this some kind of training video?” Chilling said. “She’s in training, look, to 224 be a royal, very funny.” “It’s art,” Prasad said. Chilling shrugged, “She was an artist, an ab hin natri. Who knew?” Prasad’s mouth is a single eyebrow on his poor tired face. When he becomes a bat, he will see straight again. Surya. “I applaud it as a curiousity,” said Prasad “Haunting and memorable.” “Tell someone who cares.” Chilling said. “This is not the Diana I want. Who does she think she is—Cindy Sherman?” Chilling licked the pearly spume off his moustache. “She moves. It’s an erotic quality in itself,” said Prasad. “She looks like a drag queen,” he said. “She leaks. Into the world as I speak—illumination from an unknown source. Gravity bytes. Who built this code, can anyone tell me? And why?” Prasad said, “I can’t divulge my sources.” She was the only daughter I'll ever have, Trulli. You gave her to me. I won’t give her back. “Fine,” said Chilling. “Divulge this—.” His henchmen stiffened respectfully. Chilling pressed numbers on his cell, and said something into it. Then he passed it to Prasad. Headless figures jostled each other on the small screen. Prasad peered down into the digital well. In the centre knelt the thin shirtless figure I had seen at Chilling’s farm, the boy with a bag on his head. A black- hooded man drew a knife … but only to cut the ropes from around the captive’s neck and draw off the bag. A well-built thirty year-old man with a beard and a large nose emerged squinting from the hood. The man got up, staring into the camera, smiling tentatively, a little wave, a bow. He nodded to someone off screen and then turned to face his fellow actors. They clapped. Fade to black. “Give my regards to your friend Chalmers Grant,” said B.S Chilling. Prasad looked up from the tiny screen to see Chilling reach for his gun. Chilling aimed it at Diana freeze-framed in Star Wars drag with her back to him. He shot the computer in the back of the head. Blew her brains out. 225

…

Dean hears a knock at the door in his sleep. He ignores it. He hears it again when he wakes up no time later. It won’t stop. K-nock, k-nock, k-nock. The computer says 3 a.m. He gets up naked. He wraps a damp towel around his waist and closes the bedroom door behind him. He conceals the knife in the folds of the towel He opens the door. Chuck Byrd standing there in the dark and fetid landing with a note in his right hand, and a paper bag under his left arm. “This was taped to your door,” he says to Dean, with a stagy curiosity in his voice and a wraparound accent Dean hadn’t noticed before. Dean takes the paper and reads it. It is from Pete. “R u snappy?” Dean’s fingers feel weak and spongy around the paper as he crunches it up and drops to the floor. “What do you want?” he says to Byrd. “Well, that depends. Ray asked me to give you these,” Byrd says, holding out the paper bag. “Fresh from the bakery. He hasn’t seen you in a while, thought you might need some food.” “Kind of late at night,” says Dean. “For a care package.” “Is that Jim Bowie in your towel?” says Byrd. “Or are you just pleased to see me?” Dean tries not to giggle as a gun shoves into his churning abdomen. “Drop it,” says Byrd. Dean lets go of the knife. His sphincter spasms and contracts unsuccessfully. A determined dribble of shit squirts down the back of his leg. The big man closes the door behind them and locks it with one hand. “Let's watch a movie,” he says, turning Dean around and pushing him into the bedroom. He wrinkles his nose. “Smells like teen spirit in here, or maybe not.” At the door to the bedroom, he pushes Dean onto the bed. Dean’s towel drops to the floor. Dean lies there not wanting to make any sudden moves. Byrd stands at the door. He takes off his deli apron, then his clothes. Dean starts to dive off the bed. Byrd’s 45s in his 226 face. Byrd steps back and pulls a fat suit down over a lean muscular frame. Dean stares from between matted blond strands, sticky with human waste. With the fat suit off, Byrd displays quite the martial arts-toned frame. Twitching pecs beneath a loose expensive shirt and tensed gluteals in Levis worn over Mexican gunslinger boots. He tosses Dean a business card. Dean picks it up. Bryan Black, Access Certified. “Nice to meet you,” says Black slash Byrd. “That Gemma babe of yours is one twisted sister, Emergency Room.” “She’s not my babe, Pedro,” says Dean, starting to drool a little. The Black man laughs and slaps Dean across the face. Hard enough to make Dean gasp, but not hard enough to draw blood. “I was going to call you, dude,” Dean says, wiping his mouth. “Seriously.” “I am all ears,” begins Jay Slash Black. “Seriously. You were going to tell me about that deal you made with the junkie, the one that gave my partner Kevin just enough time to get killed? I’m seriously listening, little brother.” “You’re a narc.” It was the practiced slap that gave it away.”A fed?” But Slash is distracted by the flickering footage beaming out from every freakin monitor in the bat cave. He lights up a cigarette and watches her move. “Kind of sad, isn’t it?” he says. “What you’ve done to her.” Then he stops the loop, ejects the discs and tapes and puts them it in his pocket. Then picks up all Kim’s beloved 70s tapes and puts them in his bag. Then he takes care of the computer. Dean watches the sensitive fingers fly over the keyboard. The guy who is neither Byrd nor Black then infects the hard drive with a virulent nightmare from which it will never wake up and which will terminally blow the binary brain out of anything it connects to. “Better safe than sorry,” says Slash to himself. Dean watches him move through the world Dean made to rule. Search and destroy. Slash and burn. He hears him in Kim’s secret space moving through the spilt and shattered memorabilia. In Kim's closet Slash finds a small silver case like photographers use Dive, dive. 227

Dean dives off the bed and starts crawling for the door. The man puts a firm Cuban heel down on Dean’s already broken fingers. Hard enough to make him scream, and be still. “You’re one scared little brother,” he says. “There is no teen spirit here. This place just smells like scared shitless.” Slash opens the case. He takes out a pair of high-heeled boots and a blonde wig. He takes out a blue velvet dress. Shakes out the folds. …

“Obviously,” said Prasad. “Avi took your money and used it to escape You did him a favour.” “He showed me to myself.” “What did you see?’ “Nothing.” Chilling the evil demon of images never had the boy but his cell phone caper reeled me in: hook, line and blinkered. Avi had already split when Chilling’s men got there to steal the Diana footage, which I had. No joy for Chilling, in his fury forgetting to look elsewhere for the tape. But someone remembered: Krishnan’s double agent, stubbing out his American smoke and breaking in to Laxmi’s flat to airlift the Princess out of there. To rescue her from a fate worse than death—Chilling’s private dick in her mouth for all time. Avinash the river-prince, took the money as camouflaged against the coloured tangle of the jungle in preparation for future re-entry on a new footing. He would gain a strategic advantage by masking his life force. “Camouflage is a form of war-cry,” said Prasad. He eats in the cave by the fire. He has a new gold tooth. The bats are sleeping now. They trust me. They don’t fly out of the cave in a great swooping rush any more, beating their tongue-like wings against my face, my arms and in my brain as they race to get out and leave me alone in the room with the woman who spoons the tea in. She sticks her tongue in, an it slithers 228 down my throat, and it snakes all the way down to my stomach where it licks the blood dripping thickly on the walls, finding its own hungry rhythm. Sundar dukhi. The bats sleep. A distant punkah flap breaks the silence as one stirs in a bat dream of love-blinded death, or death-driven love. Vina she ek: neither nor. The harsh flea-bitten wings of their living maut brush past my face. I gave Prasad took the laptop along with the Iridium. He needs it more than I do now. Rangeela Pradesh needs it: Rang-Rangeela. He left Dipak to write for me. This new boy is hunky dorey. Dipak takes his wires out and writes words for me on a cheap lined pad. He doesn’t need his goggles to write. He is long- sighted, not myopic like me. He asks for more words in English. Yahi shabad to mera hai? He writes them down hungrily. He doesn’t look up to write these words that are doomed never to meet their objects unless you know where to look. There is no down, down there. Hope doesn't float his boat, but neither does hate. Pyari? After his family was murdered, Dipak could have merged with the next best thing: terminal indifference, a final closing down of what it was possible to think. Prasad intervened in the total shut-down. What do you want your computer to do? The doors jammed halfway, like closing time in Lucky Bazaar. Or opening time: a time of possibility. Yhi sam bhau ta nhi. He sits besides me day-and-night to write, sometimes for me. Often for himself. “There is no final destination,” he writes. “No there, there.” I gave him the story in my words. He sends it out into the world in his. …

Turns out Slash the Mex isn’t a Black Byrd at all. “I am a friend of your step-sister’s,” he says. The last thing Dean sees is Slash coming at him with a hypodermic needle that he injects into Dean’s groin. The last thing Dean can smell is his own overwhelming nakedness. After that he is no more than partially cognisant of the now familiar feel of the skirt’s lining on his thighs, and the cool grab of leather zipped up his calves—the 229 hairy clamp of the wig on his scalp. Dean drops away from anything more than an approximation of consciousness as Slash pours liquid around on the rug, the curtains, the bed and the sad couch in the corner that smells like mean spirits. The blond layers are falling over the white slits of Dean eyes, as Slash hoists him over a contoured shoulder. The lorazepam washes away memory as fast as it is made. The drug drowns images in watery night. Images remember. Images remember for us a down down-there, so we surrender to them. Going down with eyes wide open past shadowy trout and giant screens and waving forests and men in floating machines and jewelled Queens whose wavy tentacled reach exceeds the pale boy-grasp. The last thing Dean sees with his broken eye is flames from a lethal-fingered hand that lights fires across the walls of Apartment 4737, Sector 8. The other last thing he sees is Pete the Meat upside down watching him sadly from the end of a long tunnel, Ray behind him. Lastly Dean sees Walter Budge lifting two fingers at his eyes, then pointing one at Dean. Walter is walking on the ceiling. Dean dreams of a long looping submarine ride through the neon depths before Slash sells him for three hundred dollars to a nine-fingered truck driver waiting outside Blue Moves. …

All is silent. The pain is all there is. Endless pain. Taklif. Taklif. Stay strong until it ends. That’s the challenge. Shake your booty. Follow your breath. Give it a colour. If the red air goes in, then let the blue breath out. In out, in out. Feel the breath. See the many colours. Rang-Rangeela. I am conscious of a slowing down: a distant trickle. The fox skull over the shed, the spring that empties sluggishly into the pond leaving a pink stain on wet rock. Pale yellow lotus flowers float on leaves half-submerged. Ghumna ghamna. The boy was gun, gun. An exile in my own world: I made a false one to rule. Textual practices—the only game in town. If you leave me, can I come too? You sent me away. But I kept coming back. It’s slowing down. Will she 230 come? Web programming, specializing in security, where was I? When you get back I will be. Take the money and run. So much baksheesh. She said, I have a story to tell. Achchha beti. I come back to the pain and shut my eyes against it, burha admi, beating out its rhythms on the mattress. Gone fishing. Fishing for your conscience … that’s what you’re fishing for, Deano. But it was gone-boy. Gun gun. To look down is to fall and gravity wins in the end. Toot slash toot. Trulli made her his human shield but that makes me a party to the crime. My guilt got you into this. Your innocence will get me out. Come quickly if you want the last word. Dipak comes in from outside and squints at me from behind his goggles. He needs a new prescription. And some deodorant. I give him my wallet. He could use money but he doesn’t take it. He puts the wallet respectfully back in my pocket, after removing only the various forms of identification: passport, drivers license, social security card. Even if he can’t use these marks of identity himself, he knows they will have considerable value for distant comrades: banished but not for long. He’s my son two or three or four. This one is different. Or is that me? A bird out of hand and its wings beating urgently beyond your blind grasp. Let it go. It has a story to tell. 231

PART II

THE DISSERTATION

HEROICS OF THE FALSE IN NOIR 232

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation investigates what is at stake in noir subjectivity and considers the degree to which the noir protagonist can be described as heroic. I use the term noir to mean an approach to story telling in novels and films that typically features a morally ambiguous protagonist who is usually involved in the investigation or perpetration of a crime or conspiracy. In addition, he or she is often caught up in a labyrinth of sexual dominance and duplicity. Noir often although not always affects a critique of “the corrosive effects of a society based on the pursuit of money,” yet the mode belies its realism-inspired subject matter through a hallucinatory styling that relies in part on chiaroscuro or expressionist lighting effects in film and, in literature, mannered dialogue and an investigative narrative liberally strewn with coincidence and implausibility.1 The nature of noir subjectivity is problematic because the noir hero, as the principle sympathetic character, is riven and reconstituted in ways that defy entrenched expectations of either a unitary or fragmented psyche, in favour of an endless metamorphosis. This subject both exceeds and remains inseparable from the shifting aesthetic of this enduring mode. Further, such a subjectivity signifies, regardless of where it is located in the noir cycle, a coalescence of both modernist (fragmented, relativist, oppositional), and postmodern (transformative, simulative, interstitial) concerns. My thesis investigates how noir might be considered in relation to the limits of representation, limits that it simultaneously critiques and exemplifies. I approach this investigation through a fusion of two crucial concepts: Gilles Deleuze’s concept of

1 Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia, Conspiratorial Visions in American Film (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001) 48. As I will show, nineteenth century tales of horror and the imagination can be noirish, as can twenty-first century fables, satire and comedy. For detailed discussions of film noir and hard boiled fiction, see Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 116-130; Ray Pratt, “The Dark Vision of Film Noir,”in Projecting Paranoia, Conspiratorial Visions in American Film, 48-86; Alain Silver, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd ed., ed Elizabeth Ward. (New York: Overlook, 1993); and Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir, “ in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 169-182. 233 difference and repetition in the cinematic image that he describes as the powers of the false, and Marie-Hélène Huet’s discussion of the monstrous imagination.2 The powers of the false is a term deployed by Deleuze to mean the form-defying affliction of the fictional character and the cinematic image.3 The monstrous imagination, in Huet’s formulation, denotes a disorder that generates art, not from life, but from art itself, resulting in art that is not a sign of nature, but an uncanny sign of lifelikeness.4These concepts overlap and coalesce in ways suggestive of noir’s contradictory energies and together support my claim for a new look at the noir subject. I identify the hero or primary sympathetic character as follows. Firstly, the noir subject is typically denoted by his or her melancholy insight into the deceptive nature of the text itself. The cynical world-weary protagonist’s ghost-like haunting of a hostile, duplicitous milieu (such as the mean streets of Los Angeles) is as much a socio-moral stance in the context of the tumultuous decades that tend to renew the noir cycles, as it is a meta-fictional one. A central paradox in noir fiction is that the protagonist, in spite of his or her hardboiled machismo or damaged allure, is in fact overtly manipulated by authorial forces as deceptively absent as they are anxiously ubiquitous. I stress that this subjective insight, however, does not entitle or burden the protagonist with a stabilising moral authority. Crucially, the lack of faith in a moral high- ground is what characterises the noir subject. He or she is identifiable by both a relentless cynicism and an attendant, if paradoxical idealism. Thus a further paradox of noir fiction is that the worldly insight brought to bear on events presented in realistic mode often belongs to other-worldly characters: exiles, outcasts, counterfeits, neurotics, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or ciphers, misfits, and hybrids as in my novel, Viper; and automatons or even a technological artefact itself as in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Paradoxes like these underscore the fact that, in the deceptively modern world of noir, the duped are complicit in a hoax so vertiginous that the only thing that is certain is that nothing is

2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Marie-Hélène Huet, The Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126-155. 4 Huet, 242. 234 certain. If the noir ethos is characterised here in terms of an aesthetic and poetics of deception, its heroics are driven by an anxiety on the part of the protagonist over the deceptive nature of the text, the locus of which, she or he fatally and fatefully suspects, might very well be himself or herself. Finally, then, accompanying this Promethean anxiety is a suspicion—one not just attendant on various noir cycles but of unique importance in American writing generally—that any representative body whether textual or political, is less a representation of that system, than its mere simulation. Although I emphasise the literary influences on and forbears of film noir, any discussion of the genre, both in its “classical” forms and its many reincarnations, must consider the historical contingencies of its creation. This took place in Paris around 1946 when, after the lifting of wartime trade restrictions, critics such as Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton among others were inundated with a slew of darkly themed American films produced during the war. The term film noir was reportedly first used by Nino Frank in Ecran Francais 61 in response to such films as Billy Wilder’s Double indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1945, Lang) and Laura (1944, Preminger).5 It provided the cornerstone for the first book on the genre, Borde and Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953 (1955). While a full rehearsal of these datable interventions is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it is important to note that, like the expressionistic and hard-boiled literature that preceded it, film noir grew out of a unique set of historical contingencies. These included 1) geopolitical conditions; 2) unprecedented conditions of reception outside of its place of production, but largely directed by European expatriates; 3) a revitalised critical milieu galvanised by the re-emergence of cine-clubs in Paris; 4) a retroactive and deterritorialised nomenclature of films not labelled noir at the time of production. Thus the invention of the genre in all its historical contingencies can be seen very much in keeping with Deleuze’s powers of the false. These powers are above all about a flagrant eponymony that contributes to the invention of a people and connected to this, the suppression of all “reverences” for pre-established models of truth.6

5 Pratt, 48,49. Hayward, 116-117. 6 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150. 235

Vertigo was released in 1958. The late noir cycle was initially driven by post-war disillusionment and horror after Hiroshima—American soldiers, factory workers and housewives returning to an America standing alone in a ruined world. A decade later personal and public disintegration had taken its toll. Eisenhower was in power; Nixon was waiting in the wings. The Korean War had ended; the Cold War had begun, creating “unprecedented new interests essentially conservative in nature and militaristic in outlook.”7 A fragile détente with the Soviets paralleled a fragile peace in the middle-east; McCarthy’s damage was done; the interstate highway act was about to launch an unprecedented era of American prosperity in spite of global poverty and civil disturbance at home; the Soviets had beaten the US into space deeply dividing both parties. California, site of both films, emerged as a leader in the new military technologies. It’s economy, rich in oil, land and minerals, was booming. The “prosperous clients of the Warfare state would develop a certain indifference to the distresses of other parts of the country.”8 The America at the bottom end of the ‘50s was a world where nostalgia for a non-existent past and enthusiasm for modern marvels stood in uneasy juxtaposition. Coppola wrote The Conversation in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive and My Lai. Walter Cronkite had publicly denounced the war; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would be assassinated. 1968 was the year of the Chicago demonstrations and the nation’s youth inadvertently paved the way for Nixon by turning away from the Democrats in droves. It was, famously, the year of protest—of blacks against the whites, the South against blacks, young against the war, the northern workers against the young, and Democrats against Nixon. By the time Coppola’s film went into production, the bloodletting of Indochina, Kent State and Charles Manson had seeped into popular consciousness, creating a mood of, if not the classic noir despair, than one of profound insecurity. The oil crisis forced a nation weaned on a belief that its resources were limitless to put its trust instead in foreign powers, while the phrase, “sound as a dollar” when applied to American currency was rapidly losing meaning. Trust, that iconic American dreaming without which the confidence to proceed with the founding experiment could not have created the new, had evaporated under the influence of a

7 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, (London: Penguin, 1999), 558. 8 Ibid. 236 global dread that the deeply implicated US representative system could no longer control.9 The preceding historical contingencies have cataclysmic implications for the type of neo-noir subject examined in my dissertation. This is a subject who characteristically equates being a citizen with being an inhuman functionary or automaton. Such an assumption is based on the counterfeit belief that a representative political system, by definition, should be morally correct, and thus alleviate the citizen of moral responsibility. This counterfeit belief in the higher truth of systems is an example of the bad faith integral to noir. It is bad faith because it reflects a misguided desire for an ideal form that finds its final expression in resemblance making. It stands in contrast to good faith, which is the sign of the transformative noir hero. The central story in noir is that of the hero realigning his faiths, after discovering the counterfeit nature of representative systems. These, by definition, include his or own character. In other words, noir enacts a particularly modern anxiety and exemplifies this concern in order to critique it. This double-movement of performance and critique is one that we may, in keeping with its traditional and central role in the modern novel, attribute to the hero of the work. My final point is connected to the dissembling attendant on representative systems. The conflict that draws the protagonist away from his or her determined abdication of moral responsibility toward an involvement with human concerns is always cataclysmic and often fatal. Thus there lurks in the dehumanised noir hero an anxious humanity, cut out of the world and stitched onto his soul. Like hardboiled author Dashiell Hammett’s characters, he or she may move grimly through the “nightmare towns” and Poisonvilles10 of America as an expert at beating the system at its own game. Yet amidst all this repetition there lurks a difference, a life form that once encountered, will renew the hero’s faith. It is such an incapacity or unwillingness to withstand the “human hook,” that characterises the noir drifter; because paradoxically it is what this homeless automaton eternally seeks.

9 Ibid., 667. 10 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (London: Orion, 2003) and Nightmare Town, (New York: Vintage, 2000). Along with Raymond Chandler, James M.Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Hammett can be considered one of the literary founding fathers of film noir. 237

Noir’s salient quality is the deceptively seamless welding of contradictory elements into a unique style.11 It is my argument that such a welding is expressed in the riven character and bifurcated trajectory of the noir hero. Thus the “uneasy, exhilarating combination of expressionism and realism” endemic to noir has ensured the mode’s longevity even after bypassing its post-war context, hardboiled literary traditions and Romanticist ethos. 12 While I focus on Vertigo and The Conversation, this dissertation uses a cross-section of literary and cinematic examples to show that noir’s ethos of deception is unleashed stylistically. By style I refer to an aesthetic that is overtly synthetic, and to a form inseparable from heroic destiny. The influential noir filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville sums up his engagement with noir in terms of dissembling and deception, thus: “…what I do is false. Always.”13 So the self-cancelling sense of artificiality that pervades the realism-inspired noir mode is inseparable from its riven heroic. If the central conflict is that between involvement and detachment, then the often nameless, modishly anonymous hero is driven to assemble an identity from the anguish of choice. It is the primary concern of this dissertation to explore a subjectivity tainted by artifice, an identity dispersed through technology, and an ego aligned with the monstrous. This PhD has two components. The first is a novel, Viper, which conceptualises in a practical sense the contrivances of deception in noir. The second part is a dissertation in which I investigate the nature of heroics in two film noirs, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Frances Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

The Novel

11 Schrader, 173; Stephen Schiff, “Bob le Flambeur (1955),” in Foreign Affairs: the National Society of Film Critics’ Video Guide to Foreign Films, ed. Kathy Schulz Huffhines (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991). 12 Schrader, 174. 13 David L. Overby, “Dirty Money,” Sight and Sound 43.4 (Autumn 1974): 246. 238

Viper is my neo-noir story of characters caught up in a global search for secret footage of Princess Diana hidden in the cave of a possibly dead transvestite. Thus Viper plays out familial disconnect against the backdrop of a falsifying serial power and its nameless, innumerable exponents. My purpose here is to identify those noir aspects of Viper that my dissertation will go on to theorise. If the salient feature of noir is, following Belton, a “subversive strain of behavioural deviance…dominated by crime, corruption, cruelty, and an apparently unhealthy interest in the erotic”14 then Viper is most certainly fed by these bleak energies. Similarly, both Viper and the dissertation are constellated around the paranoia films that revived the noir cycle in the 1970s. Thus, although in many ways Viper, as fiction, exceeds the analytical framework of the dissertation, in many other ways it speaks to the problems my analysis raises. Viper features a self-exiled academic, Chalmers Grant, whose suspicions about his daughter’s paternity mirror his own melancholy loss of self-image as a father. This paranoia leads to an obsessive fixation on his son Dean, who is the damaged child of one of Chalmers’s many toxic divorces. Dean is a soulless simulation of causeless rebellion. He manifests his profound indifference through petty crime. Through Chalmers’s connection to his daughter’s scurrilous mentor, he finds himself acting as a courier for an operation that procures erotic oddities for far-flung collectors. In this case, the oddity is a film supposedly made by Lady Diana Spencer before her death. This falls into the wrong hands and leads Chalmers into the jungles of India where he falls prey to his own kind of psychic vertigo. In terms of a rearticulation of the noir subject, I note that in Viper, noir heroics do not originate in the individual or in the collective but rather they crystallise in the text across description, narration and story, severing subjectivity from traditional modernist formations. Following Deleuze, I will examine Viper’s claim to a monstrously noir heroics of deception, in terms of an infinite exchange across these three aspects. 15 The serial relation of description, narration and story is opposed to previous relations in which each mode was the expression of an invariant outside the

14 John Belton, American Cinema, American Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), 184. 15 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126-155. 239 representational frame. Thus description is, in conventional story-telling, an expression of action. Narration is an expression of time. The story is an expression of movement in that it affirms or expresses the trajectory of separation and resolution of the subject-object identity. In contrast, in the Deleuzian schema, descriptions are first: not necessarily connected to or verified in action, but can become pure in terms of optical and sound situations through an insertion of the cut into the frame. Second: narration is undermined by a series of forgeries or lies that cut an irrational interval into time by being the only factor in their own reproduction. Finally, stories become simulations of stories—rather than fictions—by contaminating what would otherwise be understood as clearly either the subjective or objective focus of the image. In what follows, I discuss Viper as a means of introducing the serial operation of these textual modes in noir.

Description

The opening scene of Viper describes a rave set in a cavern-like dance club, one of many cave motifs throughout the novel. This non-space is a new realm generated in a process of identity cancellation endemic to noir. Evoking the opening long take in Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958), it is both a teeming multiplicity and a description seamed and riven by cuts into rather than between scenes. With no establishing shot to set up a specific time and place, the geographically floating dance club sets up the formal limits of the story to come. Traversed by an anonymous, trans-gendered viewpoint tellingly addressed in the second person, the description nevertheless inserts a world in an interval between narrative and non-narrative time. The text describes an interstitial locale, a borderlands territory populated by clustered boys in elaborate footwear doing clandestine deals that are as timeless as they are chronic: symptomatic of the characters’ apparent compulsion to repeat an affliction. One of the signifiers of this excessively contemporary terrain is a kind of global TV-language spoken by the characters. Their worlds delineate a symbolic frontier constantly modified by liminal creatures draped in “wordless glitter.” Symbolically, in Viper, “there is nothing on the outside of the building to tell you where you are,” just as later, Chalmers’s son Dean will be unable to read his father’s 240 faxes or the hieroglyphics projected onto the dead man’s apartment complex, or the Diana footage itself. Further, the second-person viewpoint in this scene is as barbaric in fiction as it is deeply implicative and contaminating. The use of the second person is a device that comes into its own in literature of the 1970s, a decade that sought through a message-saturated medium to exclude no one from global dread. Like the footage of Diana, the motif of the cave will repeatedly, and perhaps monstrously cut into the narrative. Indeed, as we enter narrative time, we are introduced to sixteen year-old Dean, a teenage cave dweller, suburban criminal, and closet sociopath. Even adolescence, it is suggested, is self-consciously monstrous in appearance. With a broad nose “scheduled for surgery” and a Nike-shaped scar on his forehead, Dean is a self-branded subject of the post-global age. Yet Dean’s media-mediated American adolescence is not the only game in town. It stands in stark contrast to that of a series of surrogate sons that will cross Chalmers’s path. In addition to Dean, we meet Mackenzie, his mad mother, and the rest of Dean’s monstrously attenuated family that includes his globetrotting, uninvolved father, Chalmers, and step-sister Lena, a disgraced and exiled hack writer. In terms of contemporary monstrosities, Dean’s family is cut and pasted together beyond recognition. It is a bad copy of a bad family—less representative than a bizarre simulation. The Grant clan remain severed from any point of reference to the traditional family values that kinship might bestow. It is also precluded from a legitimating patriarchy. Its far-flung members are bound instead by new ties: cash not blood, death and not life, absence in the place of presence, hate and not love, and words with no things to describe—whatever, nevermind, don’t look down. Proper names like Eric Roberts refer to no one. Chalmers sends words into the world that no one reads. Chalmers discovers that language, like women, children and other liminal subjectivities, can be subject to fatal errors. Symbols are less clues to character than decoys to self-annihilation. Similarly, signs in noir are typically unreliable and easily misread, veering between abstract and concrete relations in a perpetual interchange that cuts into scenes almost cinematically, and raises them to a level of incoherence as monstrous as it is undecidably true or false. One thinks of the motif of planted evidence in A Touch of Evil, or the strewn garbage of the past that consumes the bloated counterfeit detective in a chaotic border 241 town that may or may not be a drug-induced hallucination. In the literature of noir, Dashiell Hammett’s seminal character, the Continental Operative can be read as both apparition and automaton. Nightmare Town’s saviour wields a black cane that is a prosthetic, a weapon, or a striking viper: a touch of evil. Chalmers’s sadly, sadistically circuitous communication system—the faxing of letters to his son through his daughter as a tripled consciousness—is the inhuman tie that binds them. To escape their loathed filiation, Dean and Lena are left with no other option than to take the money and run. Dean fast-forwards to the scene of the crime, Lena back- tracks in her Dodge Viper to the blood under the bridge. She returns to the original diddler and incestuous father-figure, Wilson Trulli, a celebrity academic lately turned to art-theft for niche collectors. Incest, it may be noted is another monster kept hidden in horror-movie style. Its power, like that of the global conglomerate spear-headed by Trulli’s weird science, is both multiplying and degenerative. Thus Wilson Trulli’s gravity-shielding hanky-panky is a mask for even stranger lusts. He is described as misshapen as Chalmers was once handsome, and paradoxically as paternal as Chalmers is neglectful. As mirror-versions of each other, both are faithless fathers to Lena, and each has spent a lifetime seeking both the erasure of and union with their own mothers. The ironically named Trulli is also a mirror of another character: B.S. Chilling. Chilling is Trulli’s client. He is a bizarre Indian boutique farmer and virtual necrophiliac, whose lust for Princess Diana’s image is facilitated by Trulli’s anti-gravity imaging technology. Trulli is sexually aroused by Diana’s death. He sees it as his own self- appointed task to bring her back so that she can die/Di again, but on his terms: as a moving cog in the machinery of representation. Viper is, in the tradition of noir, a descriptive hall of mirrors, a vertiginous chasm. The novel is demarcated by the refrain, “Don’t look down.” Chalmers’s satellite phone communications, Trulli’s fear of heights, and Chilling’s voyeurism exist on a symbolic series of hungers that slide into each other in an incessant stream of mutual falsification. It becomes increasingly impossible to designate motivation, or to distinguish between characters, relationships, and locales. I have structured the text like a dream, or like one of the seventies films that hide the Diana footage. I have set up a filmic framing that is slightly off-kilter through which characters seemingly collide, fall or die at random. 242

Diana-as-art is the difference-engine driving Viper. Her bizarre performance is the product of an adulterous, incestuous union of inhuman design and human desire, not revealed until the final chapters, and then fleetingly through Dean’s addled narration. Yet the message she carries bears witness to the very erotics of knowledge that bring celebrity into being. Following Michel de Certeau, her anti-climactic performance prompts us to ask, “what is the source of this pleasure of “seeing the whole?”16 For my purposes, and following de Certeau and Deleuze, the “whole” can be understood to be a counterfeit perception of a unified central consciousness that tethers the world of ideas to the world of things. Gravity both symbolises the power that holds the image captive to illegitimate pleasures and jumps out of the void when the Garage-Diana makes her posthumous guerrilla bid for liberation. Her performance prompts one character—Chilling—to shoot her in the head and another—Dean— to force the footage to submit to representation by cutting and pasting her back onto the whole world of Total Diana. I show later how these characters contrast with the real heroes of the work. Thus the motif of gravity-shielding also cuts into Viper’s collective refrain to look down and not to fall. Viper’s global lusts for the moving image speak to de Certeau’s critique of modernity as the most immoderate of human texts. The gravity-shielding power of language is what deserts Chalmers as he embarks on his jungle quest for the falsely lost son, plunging, like any noir protagonist, between the descriptive black and the white.

Narration

In an extension of these interchangeable descriptions, the narration in Viper takes its place on the Deleuzian chain of difference and repetition.17 This means that at any point, the source of the narrative voice is undecidable. It is refracted onto the next narrator, who

16 Michel De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 152. 17 “We produce something new only on the condition that we repeat—once in the mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis.” Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90-91. 243 can only declare that everything the other guy says is false. Thus refracted and deferred, the narration evades a conventional economy of structure that is a means to an end. Through a poetics of insecurity, the text generates a kind of vertigo, where there no legitimate end in sight. In addition, the narrative is bifurcated and redirected both by liminal characters in inhuman locales and by a monstrous plotting that repeatedly cuts into the narrative, not only in terms of flashbacks, interstitial locales, unexplained motives, unread writing, wandering lusts, dialogue severed from motive, and motion severed from intention, but also in series of forgers that degrades and contaminates the whole. As understood by Deleuze, the series is a sequence of images tending toward the direction of a limit.18 The formulation is fundamental to a realignment of noir. It is a broken chain or shock of forces that I claim can be described in terms of the series of author, narrator, interval, and protagonist. The characters exchange parts as they negotiate a role for themselves in the excesses of their act. I model the series thus: (Author<……>Narrator<……>Protagonist<…….>Character). Each element enables the other in the serial and the virtual sense of not creating, but of apprehending it, thinking its becoming into alignment.19 Such an act of projection involves the virtual act of retracing one’s steps in such a way as to erase the footprints or signature of the other, and is a false or virtual movement consistent with “the sequence of irrational points, according to non-chronological time relationships.”20 It is in such a way that we can describe the new hero, following Deleuze, as less an agent of action than a seer of what is too much in the image.21 The noir narrator is the bad form of the sign. If meaning is the natural intention of a sign, the bad copy refuses such a natured designation, deferring the transmission of meaning in favour of a recomposition of identity through aberrations in movement, projected in the text as plot. Hence the aimless wandering in Viper, sidetracked through narrative detours and slivers of time. Chalmers’s false sons endlessly multiply, leaving no end in sight, or no bird in the hand, as he puts it. Diana’s footage has no beginning and no legitimate end that Dean can see. Her evasion of his truth-quest is the story that Lena

18 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 19 D.N Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (London: Duke University Press, 1997), 141. 20 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 181. 21 Ibid., 126-127. 244 must tell in order to make it her own. Enter the character of the double agent, Jay Diaz: hardboiled, blood simple, and like a textbook noir hero, everywhere and nowhere at once. If resemblance is actualised in movement across space, then repetition is a product of movement across time. The latter is virtual movement and locates us in the realm of the novel. The novel is a typically modern expression of irredeemable exile. It departs from the classic trajectory of quest and return to take the form of what George Lukacs describes as “transcendental homelessness.”22 The exiled protagonist is faced with suddenly failing to resemble himself or herself, and in the wake of such loss, must resort to self-creation: repetition of the same, but in a different space. Exile is the difference that irrevocably bifurcates identity. Exiled from the everyday world and faced with an overwhelming sense of their own difference, the noir protagonist bears all the scars of the political exile as formulated by Edward Said: “The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction.”23 The characters in Viper are bound within the limits of their own metamorphosis. They are always already contaminated by how they are self-generated by their own fictions. Thus noir enacts the suspicion that identity may be the biggest hoax of all. What Huet terms the monstrous imagination is the imagination that confuses art with life. It is such an imagination that diverts memory and drives heroism in noir. Edgar Allen Poe describes the imagination of Nathaniel Hawthorne in noir mode as “giving its own hue, its own character to everything it touches, and especially, self-impelled to touch everything.”24 Chalmers’s imagination is monstrously self-impelled to touch and cut into everything, especially the memory of origins: his, Lena’s and Dean’s. His self-delusion affirms that the flip side to “textual practices” is indeed sexual practices, as Viper’s running gag suggests. The novel explores both the investigative and deconstructive aspects to this riven drive. In the end these “textual practices” exhaust Chalmers and leave him alone in a cave, back where the narrative began, and where, like his son Dean, he is finally lost to language. For it is precisely such boundaries of narrative that the

22 Georg Lukacs, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: Massachusetts Intitute of Technology Press, 1974), 41, 61, 61, 121. 23 Edwar d Said, Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24. 24 Edgar Allen Poe, “Tale-writing—Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Hanover, 1959) 6. Original emphasis. 245 excesses of language push against. Such a power is that of a critical, chronic performance that affirms, to borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin, the word as the true hero of the work because of its doomed compulsion to find human form.25

Story

Central to Viper is the story of a monstrous birth from the point of view of the monster, Lena. Such a subjective tale is never resolved with an objective reality, and thus, by definition, is less truly representative than a mere simulation of a story. How is the simulated story noir? Viper is infused with a level of anxiety about what Deleuze refers to as the “veracity of the story” that permeates character and plot to the point where there is no end, origins or truth-effect in sight. 26 Through descriptive devices such as canted angles, invented spaces and a cluttered mise en abyme, the simplest object—a masked rat, a silver suitcase, a floating dinner-plate, a clock in the form of the Emperor with no clothes—takes on a life of its own in order to distract representation and proliferate in a space severed from intention, and mutated by invention. There is a permanent darkness or gloom to the scenes in the novel, an artificiality of lighting that is projected in similarly artificial relationships and language. A crystalline noir structure emerges, through strategies such as the literal arresting of narrative by cutting Chalmers’s hungry voice-over into Dean’s criminal skirmishes and vice versa, with Lena as go between who talks back through the forbidden act of reading. A pervading paranoia renews the conspiracy around Diana. Such a conspiracy is symptomatic of a futile search for meaning: an uphill, doomed battle for consolation in a post-global world that is resolutely, monstrously human. Viper’s relation to the cinematic emergence of noir is finally mediated through the device of hiding the Diana footage in 1970s neo-noirs such as The Conversation.

25 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,”in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Micheal Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hoquist (Austin: Texas University Press, 1981) 42. 26 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150. 246

Thus noir maintains its relevance to a global culture through descriptive, narrative and story-telling tactics that can be described as serial..27 It is particularly in the story that noir undertakes the journey from the conventional realm of fiction to what Deleuze describes as the “even more alarming realm of the true and the false.”28 It is the story that raises a contamination of viewpoints—object and subject, character and author, monster and maker—to the level of the series. In other words, in conventional stories the tension between the objective point of view—what the creator sees—and the subjective—what the characters see—is resolved, however provisionally. This resolution is what generates the legitimate end of narrative time. But story telling in the poetics of the false keeps this tension coalescing in a never-ending contamination of viewpoint, such that, as Deleuze suggests, “I is another.”29 While I discuss the meaning and implications of both the series and this crucial phrase in the chapters to follow, I note here that these speak to a frightening, liberating realm of noir where identity has irretrievably lost its invariants outside fiction. The alarming styling of noir fiction, whether classical, late-cycle, revival or neo-noir, is an expression of this serial deferral of character.

The Dissertation

The second component of the PhD is a theoretical investigation of the characteristics and textual function of the noir hero in two films: Vertigo and The Conversation. Just as Viper is not a classic noir in terms of time-period or style, the films I discuss in this dissertation enact an uneasy relation to noir and highlight its complexities. I have chosen to examine these two films from the many film noirs partly because they renew the cycle at disparate socio-political crossroads: Cold War demonising and Vietnam-era paranoia. More importantly, they each provide an extreme example of the powers of the bad copy—the false image that reinscribes the irretrievable loss of the model into a hard-won gain through difference and repetition.

27 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) is a noirish return to the themes explored in Coppola’s The Conversation. 28 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 104. 29 Ibid., 153. 247

Like Welles’s A Touch of Evil, discussed at length by Deleuze in terms of the new cinema, Vertigo was released in 1958 at the outer limits of the first film noir cycle.30 It tells the story of a neurotic detective in search of a woman from his past. The woman pretends to be the psychologically impaired wife of a wealthy businessman, but is in fact a murderer’s accomplice—albeit conflicted—who inadvertently returns the detective’s deluded affections. In the case of Vertigo, heroism is split between these two characters, whose roles not only reverse halfway through the film but also exemplify the limits and artifice of the hard-boiled performance. The Conversation (1974) is a product of the important revival of noir at the height of Vietnam dread and the violations of Watergate. It is the story of a misanthropic surveillance expert hired to bug a cuckold’s wife and her lover until he discovers that he is a pawn in a murderous conspiracy that is an uncanny repetition of past events. The alignment of hidden personal secrets with diabolical corporate forces is underscored by what Poe terms a “mournful and neverending remembrance.”31As with all noir fiction, nostalgia for an irretrievable past frames every shot in The Conversation and imbues David Shire’s score with the same unresolved longing as Bernard Herman’s open arpeggios in Vertigo. It is universally understood that in fiction generally, and in noir specifically, a critique of both the social and aesthetic conditions of representation are inextricably linked. I emphasise that for this dissertation, the salient feature of noir is an obsession with style, the welding of seemingly contradictory elements into a stylised critique of political and aesthetic representation. Through artifice and style, noir paradoxically makes visible the reality of worlds: strange, false, cut-up worlds with which, to borrow from Herman Melville, humanity must nevertheless not give up the tie.32 The noir mode recreates a monstrous world that turns against representation. This is a world of aberration and artifice, a dystopic realm in which the hero-as-inhuman-functionary performs a serial collision of mechanistic design and human desire.

30 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 139-40. 31 Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed., ed. Nina Baym, Vol 1 (New York: Norton, 1998), 1580. 32 Herman Melville, The Confidence Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 244. 248

In this regard, in chapter II of the dissertation, I re-examine the textual and sociological problems raised by noir, and the aesthetic alternatives it brings to the fore. I take Melville’s The Confidence Man to be an inaugural noir novel in the American context because of the powers unleashed by the loss of identity in favour of a multiple, proliferating subjectivity that infects the text. This subjectivity exemplifies Melville’s critique of bad faith. By way of my examination of The Confidence Man, I set up several terms that are taken up throughout the dissertation and are crucial to an understanding of Deleuze’s cinematic formulations. These are indiscernibility as the property of difference between two identical objects, assemblage insofar as it can be understood as the coalescence of the real and the virtual in the image, and becoming, which is the dangerous assimilation of (and in) an image to what it is cannot be. I addition, I also refer to the bad copy as that which heroically turns away from the mastery of the model toward an evaluative system as inescapably human as it is non-humanist. In chapter III, I take up Huet’s cultural critique of the modern ideology of resemblance as a way of reading not only the films and fiction in question, but also as a way of reading Deleuze. In The Monstrous Imagination, Huet investigates the perceived powers of the usual feminised imagination to unleash a transgressive reversal of the so- called natural order. Such an imagination is monstrous because it produces life not from life, but from art. It is adulterous because it enters into a union with memory, already betrothed to truth. It is doomed because it produces that which is incompatible with the existing order: the monster. Thus the work of art, like the monster or bad copy, is inimitable not because it is living, but because it is not. The work of art, by definition, can only fail to resemble, and therein lies its power. It is my contention that the overlooked connection between Plato’s theory of art and Deleuze’s philosophy of time is worthy of further scrutiny. To set this up I argue in chapter III for an interchangeability between Plato’s concept of metexein, or mimetic contagion, and Deleuze’s becoming, which is key to what Deleuze terms the time- image.33 The time-image, is accessed in the chronic, or crystalline regime of the cinematic image. The crystalline regime is that in which:

33 Plato, The Republic, trans., and ed., Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), 266. 249

the actual is cut off from its motor linkages, or the real from its legal connections, and the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualisations, starts to be valid for itself.34

This regime is thus one in which the real and the virtual coalesce in an undecidable unresolved relation. It follows from this that the time-image presents a direct image of time—non-chronological, in which time “has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.”35 The time-image is accessed through that proliferation of interstices in the image. An interaction or collision is thus set up between and within the image that generates a separate realm. 36 This new realm is that of the interval, which is the focus of chapter IV. My central argument here concerns the intrusion, through this interval, of the cut into, rather than between the framed image. Regarding the powers of the false, Deleuze’s analysis of the image in his second cinema book, The Time-Image, investigates a composite narrator manifested in a series of forgers that cut the image into to pure time. Whether evidenced in cutting, undecidable movements severed from action, or sounds cut off from a localisable referent, the powers of the false are unleashed by a coalescence of the real and the imaginary in the cinematic image. I argue that this cutting draws from the most inspirational and critical moments of the novel in general. In short, my dissertation argues for a fusion of Huet’s critique, which is a theory of art, with Deleuze’s powers of the false, which belong to a philosophy of time. In terms of Huet, I show how the monstrous imagination plays into the stylistic innovations of noir. In terms of Deleuze, I delineate how the powers of the false, generally, and the time- image specifically, enables the intrusion of the cut into the images of fiction. Throughout the dissertation I show how the cinematic embodiment of deceiving and deceptive subjectivity can be traced back to the riven psyche of the romantic hero exemplified in Poe, Hawthorne and Herman Melville. I argue that the noir heroic, while cinematically novel at the time of its inception in the 1940s, draws upon a subjectivity elaborated in

34 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127. 35 Ibid., 81 36 Ibid., 181 250

Romantic literature but is emergent even earlier: in Miguel Cervantes’s sixteenth century black comedy, Don Quijote. The analyses that follow suggest that while noir fiction abides through technical innovation and stylistic authority, the monstrous aesthetic serves simultaneously to challenge such notions of originality and self-mastery through an alternative trajectory of repetition and self-creation. This challenge can be thought of as heroic to the extent that it creates a crystal-text through a drama of metamorphosis that is indefinitely self-critical. Edward Said refers to a specifically modern compulsion to “reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile.”37 The overriding story in noir belongs to the modern exile and the eternally homeless. The works discussed in this dissertation exemplify both an ethos and an aesthetic that paints this drama of identity assemblage with a transformative human stain.

37 Said, 179. 251

CHAPTER TWO

A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

“The model … must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be treated as though it had life; — who knows? Possibly it had!” Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.

Introduction

How do aesthetics of deception and poetics of the false unleash monstrous heroics in noir? The question sets the course of my dissertation. Answering it initially demands a realignment of noir, both in terms of a re-examination of the aesthetic or sociological problems that it raises, and in terms of the textual problems that the noir style brings to the fore. To do this, I briefly reprise Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605) as the seminal black comedy that sets in motion many figures of noir that abide today. I then discuss Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857) as a proto-typical noir whose powers lie firstly in its characters’ critically impaired capacity to differentiate between what is and what is not. In addition, the work mounts a powerful critique of a culture of confidence driven by a suspect commerce in identity. Not only is Melville duly recognised by filmmakers for his contributions to the noir project, but Deleuze and others also continue to refer to him as the master of falsifying narrative.38 After establishing the importance of Melville’s work for my own project, I take up Deleuze’s conception of the powers of the false and connect these to noir heroics. I follow this with a brief discussion of the coalescence of the real and the virtual in the image. My argument is that an understanding of the powers of the false provides new tools with which to understand Vertigo, The Conversation, and Viper as noir. In addition to the powers of the false, the

38 Colin McArthur, “Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967),” in French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2000), 189-20, and Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133-135. 252 present chapter sets in play a number of concepts—the indiscernible, the assemblage, becoming and the bad copy—that I will continue to utilise and develop in the course of the dissertation.

A Postmodern Look at Noir

A heroic of imitation is driven by a serial deferral of character as a result of the coalescence of the real and the virtual within the image. As Rodowick explains, “At the level of descriptions, the actual refers to the states of the things—the physical and the real—as described in space through perception. The virtual is subjective, that is, mental and imaginary, sought out in time through memory.”39 Thus, the real in the fictional image involves what is seen through the imagination, while the virtual involves what is thought through the processes of memory. I show in chapter III how these poles of imagination and memory enter into a reversible exchange through the monstrous processes of indiscernibility. The primary object of this chapter is to rethink a heroic of imitation that mounts a critique of culture of confidence driven by a suspect commerce in identity. I argue for a rearticulation of identity in terms of such a reversible exchange between the contradictory elements in noir. Such a rethinking may not only empower the noir subjectivity beyond conventional individualist analyses, but also throw the central idea of fiction—and therefore its structural opposite, the truth of all fictions—into doubt. I argue that this is not a new feature of noir, but one emergent in its earliest forms. It is worth keeping in mind that the words novel and innovate share the same etymological root. Film noir is arguably both the most innovative, and novelistic of film genres. By this I don’t simply mean that film noir is literary, but that the conventions of noir mimic many of the descriptive, narrative and story-telling conventions of the modern European novel, inaugurated in 1605 by Cervantes.40

39 Rodowick, 42. 40 Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Burton Raffel, 2 vols (New York: Norton, 1995). See also Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: California University Press, 1978); Walter L Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981); and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). While Ian Watt’s influential 1957 history traces the rise of the novel to a need for a truthful 253

Georg Lukacs argues that the birth of the novel was a crucible for a modern heroic of difference. 41 Thus classical epics such as those that Don Quijote obsessively reads, spring from stable cultures in which values are entrenched and identities are established. The new form of the novel grew from the very different experience of a rapidly changing society in which a disenfranchised middle-class protagonist seeks to reassemble a new world out of the ruins of the old—left behind, destroyed, transformed. As Said suggests:

In the epic there is no other world, only the finality of this one. Odysseus returns to Ithaca after years of wandering; Achilles will die because he cannot escape his fate. The novel, however, exists because other worlds may exist, alternative for bourgeois speculators, wanderers, exiles.42

Don Quijote raises issues that remain unresolved in fiction, just as the debate over exactly what noir is—a cycle or a style, for instance—continues to engage the critics.43 The protagonist in Cervantes’s novel is an ailing, aging farmer, obsessed with chivalric tales of knights and castles. His good faith—good because it is real, albeit deluded, and not counterfeit—in “bad” fiction—bad because it pretends to represent the truth—is so unbalanced that he loses himself in it. He reads himself into a kind of meta-fictional schizophrenia before throwing himself into a demented quest for ogres with which to battle, lords to serve, and ladies to love. In becoming Don Quijote, the protagonist known previously as Alonso Quijada, Quesada or Quejano enters into an altered, fictional state incompatible with the modern age. 44 He becomes monstrous. It is tempting to see Don Quijote, the character, merely as a blundering ghost whose comic quest serves as an enduringly savage critique of modernity. It is equally important for my argument,

reflection on individualist experience first articulated by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Alter’s and Reeds works are among those that turned the tide of critical thinking toward Don Quijote as the first modern novel. It should also be noted that seven years previous to Watt’s publication, Lionel Trilling described all prose fiction as a “variation on the theme of Don Quixote” in Manners, Morals, and the Novel: The Liberal Imagination. (New York: Viking, 1950), 203. 41 Lukacs, 41. 42 Said, 28. 43 Belton,184-205. 44 Cervantes, I.1: 9, 11 and II.74: 730. 254 however, to see him as an abiding example of the Deleuzian concept of difference in repetition: “the historical condition under which something new is produced.”45 To an ailing, aging world suddenly galvanised by its encounters with Mayan and Aztec treasure, the over-riding anxieties of an emergent modernity became easily—and fatefully—projected onto a desire for human flesh to be transformed into the Golden Fleece. Don Quijote’s delusions remind us that such counterfeit faith in fictional futures can both erase the past and legitimise an immoderate commodification of the present. As Lukacs observes, this is why “only the novel is the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea and must therefore include real time—Bergson’s durations–among its constitutive principles.”46 Thus Cervantes’s tragi-comic satire targets a Promethean confidence in self-transformation through chronic repetition, and therefore includes not only its delusional protagonist but also his financially struggling creator, whose hopes to finance his own passage to the New World with royalties, were never realised.47 Don Quijote's eventual, exhausted return to narrative time from the irrational interval of his delusions pre-empts his death, and paradoxically—heroically—the birth of the novel itself. It is no coincidence that Deleuze discusses Don Quijote in terms of metamorphosing nobility that sets him apart from the base desires of modernity.

“According to physics, noble energy is the kind which is capable of transforming itself, while the base kind can no longer do so… The so- called higher men are base or bad. But the good has only one name; it is 'generosity' …; it is also the trait which we suppose is dominant in Don Quixote's eternal project.” 48

If Don Quijote's eternal project is fiction, then it is because, like the other protagonists that I will discuss, Don Quijote not only sees what isn’t there, and doesn’t see what is, but stitches these images together to create a new form of life-imitating art. In addition to its legacy of metamorphosis through art, Cervantes’s work left a legacy of

45 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90. As Don Quijote’s creator and alter-ego reminds us, “All you have done is write about what you see: the better you copy, the better the book.” Cervantes, 1: 6. 46 Lukacs, 121. 47 Diana de Armas Wilson, “Introduction, “ in Don Quixote, viii. 48 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 141 255 tilting, or reversibility in fiction—tilting between the real and the artificial, past and present, comedy and tragedy, deception and suspicion—that continues to drive the most innovative writing in our own age. It is how this transformative potential works in noir fiction that is my primary concern. I argue in this dissertation that these issues, while more or less present in fiction generally, are uniquely addressed in the dispersed character of the noir hero, and crucial to the mode’s ethos of deception. I claim that noir can be most fruitfully approached through connecting it to the most critical and inspirational moments in the novel itself. In order to discuss noir as empowered by a heroic of the false, a brief review of its historical periods and central qualities is in order. In Deleuzian terms, a line of flight is a meandering, bifurcating trajectory whose initial conditions are lost to the multiplicities it encounters and engenders—lost, that is to time. 49 Such a connection can be drawn back to the hard-boiled and Black Mask-era thrillers of the thirties—specifically those of Dashiell Hammett. Red Harvest served in the 1930s as the inspirations for a new generation of self-styled hacks. 50 Further back, influences include the earliest manifestations of German Romanticism, (specifically E.T.A Hoffman), in Poe, Melville and Hawthorn. 51 Each of these earlier writers, especially Hawthorn, restages vestigial responses in their works to, among other things, a Puritan social contract based on discerning the Church Visible from the Invisible Church, and thus the regenerate from the damned. The anxiety over discerning the latter lives in the modern hardboiled hero. In the modernist era, German Expressionism, naturalist and hard-boiled literature, French Existentialism and Freudian psychology, were among the immediate influences on American noir. These influence were made manifest through a transplanted gestalt, a

49 Gilles Deleuze and Felix A. Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 8. 50 Red Harvest is the first known source of the term “hardboiled “(83, 114). John Huston adapted Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon (1941) into the film that was among those that prompted the French critics to give the style its name. Other literary sources of film noir include Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane, whose novels inspired signature film noirs such as Murder My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944), Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), and Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1957) respectively. 51 E. T. A’s Hoffman’s “invention” of the modern detective in “Mademoiselle de Scudery” (1819) would be reworked by Poe two decades later in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Poe’s restructuring of the investigative narrative structure in the American context would “become virtually paradigmatic in crime novels and films noirs of the 1940s and ‘50s.” Pratt, 55. 256 brace of émigrés and a post-depression, wartime society as anxious over events in the past that had to be brought to account as it was about a future over which it had no control.52 Classic film noir in the post-war period prefigured a postmodern theory of simulation that “social life is the reproduction of models, not the spontaneous origination or recovery of forms.”53 This catastrophic obsession with the past and the concomitant development of a fatalistic world view marked all of the cynical crime thrillers that gave the film cycle/style its name in the forties and fifties. Yet film noir’s longevity and powers of reinvention can, to a large degree, be attributed to this welding of seemingly contradictory elements into a unique style.54 The late post-war cycle of the 1950s and the 1970s Vietnam era noir revival serve as nodal points in the style’s most extreme and troubling manifestations. Film noir’s signature anxiety is often but not always aesthetically expressed through the tonal qualities of black and white. A preoccupation with the secret life and hidden meaning of the cheapest artefact and most insignificant object is a direct projection of the paranoia endemic to this investigative mode. Stylistically, film noir relies on slow forward pans, deep focus, canted angels, high crane shots, low key interiors as well as a decomposing frame fractured by screens, walls, mirrors, and other dividing and/or multiplying compositions. Narration in noir is structured loosely around the doom-laden literature of alcohol, drugs or dementia, and the darkest highways of the human unconscious. It is ideologically driven by an outwardly dehumanised protagonist who is inwardly—and fatally—riven between melancholy and suspicion, crime and detection, and crucially, the abdication and assumption of moral responsibility. It is in this fatal conflict that individuality in noir sustains its fateful wound, one that opens identity out to metamorphosis across the text. In terms of the conflicted noir hero, no better example serves than Dashiell Hammett’s nameless detective, The Continental Operative, introduced in novel form in Red Harvest (1929). The Op. arrives in the nightmarish town of Personville, but can only

52 Dolan, Allegories of America, 62-90. 53 Dolan, “Fear of Simulation: Life, Death, and Democracy in Postwar America,”The Massachusetts Review 32 (Spring 1991): 61. 54 Schrader, 174. 257 find two actual persons, one of whom is already dead, the other whose death is both imminent and caused indirectly by the Op’s own actions. The remainder of Personville’s citizens are murderous thugs and monstrous bosses struggling for dominance. The town's AKA is Poisonville, and although the Op is hired to save the town, he decides to destroy it instead, stand back, and watch the fun. But, as in all noir fiction there is nowhere to go besides the scene of the crime. The Continental Op takes such pleasure in watching the bloodbath that he caused that before he knows it, he has lost a piece of his soul in Poisonville and the woman he cares about is dead. The story of soul-destroying detachment as the flip side to humanising involvement is central to noir. It is no coincidence that this central conflict is negotiated by a protagonist whose most monumental delusions have always concerned the nature of his own humanity.55 As Schrader points out, classic film noir’s stylistic obsessions were at odds with an American cinematic tradition that emphasized theme (the frontier, class/race, individualism) over style. Film noir was considered, at least at the beginning and at the end of the classic era, as bad form—and certainly much of the late cycle noir had a distinctly un-American message. 56 As Ray Pratt comments, “At its peak classic film noir mirrored the fear and paranoia of the Hollywood res scare era, first created as a result of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings on the film industry in 1947 and 1951.”57 By the time of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1957), Welles’s subversive A Touch of Evil and Vertigo, both made in 1958, nuclear fears had added to the mix..58 So, for the self-styled noirist whose heroes, like their creators, stand on the brink of society’s chasms—corruption, violence, secrecy—faith in style was all they had left. Thus this bad form of fiction was better than no form at all, or worse, bad faith. As a response to the contradictory pressures played out noir, characters must find faith in a kind of monstrous multiplicity. This has been the central concern and activating

55 This concern is overtly investigated in the futuristic noirs of Philip K. Dick, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (London: Gollancz, 1968) adapted for the screen by Ridley Scott in the film noir, Bladerunner (1982). 56 Hammet, for example, was a member of the U.S Communist Party for two decades and was jailed and blacklisted subsequent to refusing to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). 57 Pratt, 49. 58 Mark Osteen, “The Big Secret: Film Noir and Nuclear Fear,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22.2 (Summer 1994): 79-91; and J.P. Telotte, “Fatal capers: Strategy and Enigma in Film Noir,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23.4 (Winter 1996): 163-171. 258 reality of noir in the American context. Style is fate, and in what follows I show how Herman Melville, whose critique of bad faith draws on Don Quijote, and whose protagonist, as a “transient holder[s] of multiple identities and conflicting desires, free of any form of stable filiation, “ serves as a model for a modern and postmodern noir heroic.

59

The Confidence Man

The Confidence Man, published in 1857, features a particularly prescient serial formation of protagonists. Their powers lie, not in a stable identity but in a subjectivity as secondary as it is reproducible.”60 Appropriately, the titular character is one in an endless series, modelled on a real-life con man of 1849.61 Earlier, in 1843, Poe discusses a similar character in his extraordinary essay, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.”62 Similarly Melville’s vertiginous “diddler” is split and multiplied over several con artists who make their appearance over the course of the novel. The character is exemplified in a bizarre artefact that is introduced at midnight in the final pages. This artefact is a real-life nineteenth century periodical known as the Counterfeit Detector that provided a list of false bills in circulation and signs by which they could be identified.63 The word counterfeit derives from the Medieval French, countrefet—false or forged. Its common application in terms of false currency is emphasised less by Melville—and in this dissertation—than its dictionary definition, which is “fraudulent … forged, to simulate … or feign.” Ultimately all definitions come

59 Melville, The Confidence Man, 318. In addition to Don Quijote, Melville draws on Hamlet as that figure who “served to lay bare the problems and ambiguities in the relations between doing, acting, performing and ‘playing.’” Tony Tanner, “Melville’s Counterfeit Detector,” in The American Mystery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 102, 259. 60 Tanner, 89. 61 Ibid., 84 62 Edgar Allen Poe, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” in The Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, 4 vols (London: John C. Nimmo, 1884), II. 345-358. 63 Tanner, 98. 259 down to the simple word “fake,” used as a noun, adjective or verb. 64 For Melville and for the confidence man, The Counterfeit Detector, like so many symbols in noir, is an emblematic device of modern bad faith. In this artefact is distilled a modern anxiety over a commerce in fakes that arguably grew out of an earlier unease surrounding “passing”—black passing as white and ultimately the damned passing as regenerate.65 Melville’s era was characterised by ante-bellum chaos, rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, commercialisation, American expansionism, scientific breakthrough and buffoonery, and above all a growing crisis of religious faith. Out of such historical contingencies, such a periodical was a response to a growing anxiety with the commerce in fakes, including but not restricted to false currency passed off as real.66 The Counterfeit Detector spoke purely to a modern middle-class character who had lost his faith while seeking to reassemble a new world to rule out of the ruins of the old. It is such a character upon which the con-artist preys. Yet in The Confidence Man, the con- artist preys upon these characters in order to reveal the extent of their bad faith to themselves and to the reader. The trickster in The Confidence Man speaks to the enduring paranoia of the modern age. He is a man of a thousand faces. He is a serial creation of Deleuzian proportions: a crippled ex slave called Black Guinea, a herb-doctor, a gentleman in mourning, a man in a grey coat, a man with a big book, a man with a brass plaque, a fake soldier, a man in violet called Charlie Noble, a boy in yellow in possession of the Counterfeit Detector, and the gaudily dressed Cosmopolitan. We are reminded of Deleuze’s definition of a series as “a sequence of images, which tend in themselves in the direction of a limit, which orients and inspires the first sequence (the before) and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn towards another limit.”67

64 counterfeit. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/counterfeit (accessed: November 27, 2007).); Oxford Paperback Dictionary, 182. 65 Melville, The Confidence Man, 329, 360; Frederick M. Dolan, Allegories of America. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1994). 62-90. 66 Tanner, 86. 67 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 260

As in a series, it is impossible to tell in The Confidence Man, where the diddler ends and the diddled begin. The most troubling and comic manifestations of this character are those in which he appears literally beside himself. He has essentially the same conversation over one April Fools Day with several confused, suspicious, duplicitous passengers aboard the ironically named steamship Fidele (faith). Apart from his sporadic attempts to con the passengers into investing in various fraudulent schemes there is no plot, no hero in a conventional sense. The reader’s sympathies are as dispersed, diluted and disorientated as those of the diddler himself. Several of Melville's colleagues, notably Edgar Allen Poe, have cameos.68 Melville himself has three walk-ons.69 The multiplicity is dizzying, vertiginous. The conversation has no beginning or end. Though some of the discrepancies and inconsistencies in these versions of the confidence man may be due to Melville's physical and financial decline—he did not see the book through to press—it is more likely, as Tony Tanner suggests, that, “Melville is indeed providing a model for the difficulties of reading the signs of character, or of the presence of the Devil or the Redeemer.”70 What is the connection between this slippery character and my modern noir hero? Melville’s serial characters are uniquely able to draw on identity at will, and in doing so, radically redirect subjectivity away from conventional representations. In its “new kind of fidelity to the actual radical discontinuity and plurality of the self,” The Confidence Man harks back to Cervantes, and further back to Plato, Socrates and even Homer.71 Melville’s protagonist looks forward to noir subjects such as Hitchcock’s deluded detective in Vertigo, and Coppola’s postmodern automaton in The Conversation. In short, The Confidence Man, both the novel and the protagonist, is, to quote from Herman Melville himself, “quite an original.”72 In the closing pages of the novel, the diddler reappears in one of his many permutations as the Cosmopolitan. The Cosmopolitan chastises a deluded old man for

68 Ibid., 258, 262. Poe is represented as an empathetic figure of formidable insanity. Later Thoreau and Emerson appear as snake-like avatars of the modern rationale. 69 Ibid., 89-92; 243-244; 317-319. 70 Tanner, Appendix A. 71 Tanner, 101. 72 Ibid., 316-319. 261 allowing one of his other permutations, the boy in yellow, to give him the Counterfeit Detector.

What a peck of trouble that Detector makes for you now; believe me, the bill is good; don’t be so distrustful. Proves what I’ve always thought, that much of the want of confidence, in these days, is owing to those Counterfeit Detectors…don’t you see what a wild goose chase it has led you… Throw the Detector away.73

The idea of the detector or detective as dispensable at best and destructive at worst is one to which I will return in my discussions of the noir fictions to follow. It is here in its self-cancelling nomenclature, symbolic embodiment in the character of the Cosmopolitan and the men of bad faith that the diddler attempts to con/vert that the Counterfeit Detector reminds us of the Nietzchean maxim that “‘even the truthful man ends up realizing that he has never stopped lying.’”74 I argue that a connection can be made between The Confidence Man and noir in terms of the issue of “confidence,” a word that appears on every page of Melville’s novel, almost as often, ironically, as the words “original” and “trust.” The novel’s radical project is to question how the characters must negotiate confidence’s double meaning as good faith in bad form, where good faith is a kind of quixotic incredulity and bad form is that which appears to be what it is not. An example of this is in the closing scene when the diddler offers the bewildered passenger a toilet seat instead of a life preserver. “I think, in case of a wreck, you can have confidence in that stool for a special providence.”75 Heroics, like salvation, may be the greatest hoax of all. In short, Melville’s novel asks not so much how to have the confidence to discern between the real and the fake, but how to have faith or confidence in a lack of discernment. The novel suggests a reality as unreliable as it is irretrievable. As Ian Bell suggests, “[s]ince trust in all its forms (financial, social, aesthetic) is so deeply embedded within the whole notion of representation, its fragility makes special demands upon the

73 Ibid., 332. 74 Quoted in Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133. 75 Melville, The Confidence Man, 336 262 writer.”76 Such are the demands echoed in the confidence man exhortations to his fellow passengers:

“That you have confidence? Prove it. Let me have twenty dollars.” ‘Twenty dollars!” “There, I told you, madam, you had no confidence.”77

Melville’s over-arching question, like that of Cervantes, is whether the novel itself is one Counterfeit Detector that warrants the special confidence not only of the reader but also of the characters. As the diddler puts it, “For how can that be trustworthy, that teaches distrust?”78 By extension, we might ask, how can a critique of representation embodied in the form of representation be taken seriously? While the question is central to fiction generally, I argue that it is brought to the fore in noir. Noir fiction is marked by a crisis in textual confidence that is symptomatic of a crisis in socio-political confidence. I referred earlier to Herman Melville's walk-ons. In this way, like Cervantes, he writes himself into and out of the text in an uneasy authorial vanishing act. This act has driven the novel since the protagonist Don Quijote first locked horns with the author Cervantes in an inaugural meta-textual performance. As mentioned earlier, The Confidence Man is a response to alienating conditions in a culture straddling two eras and two worlds. Under these conditions, space and time lose their old reference points and generate a new way of moving through the world. It is crucially a world demanding a renewal of confidence in what seems unnatural or uncanny. This would suggest that more than anything, it is a deluded desire to discern with confidence between what is from what is not, that is the subject of Melville’s critique. As the other Melville—Jean-Pierre—puts it, the “natural authority of the creator” leaves its most indelible trace on the hero.79 Yet this bid for mastery is also a ruse because, paradoxically, it is such a serial characterisation as we find in The Confidence

76 Ian Bell, “Introduction: Tony Tanner on American Means of Writing and Means of Writing America,” in The American Mystery, Tony Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xix. 77 Melville, The Confidence Man, 58. 78 Ibid., 326. 79 Quoted in Adrian Danks, “Together Alone: The Outsider Cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville,” in www.sensesofcinema.com.au http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/melville.html. (September 2002) accessed May 6, 2005 263

Man that serves to challenge any notions of originality and self-mastery. Indeed, Herman Melville himself questions authorial originality in the final interruption to the novel, which addresses the contested phrase, “quite an original.”80

“As for original characters in fiction, a grateful reader will, on meeting with one, keep the anniversary of that day … In the endeavour to show, if possible, the impropriety of the phrase, Quite an Original … we have, at unawares, been led into a dissertation bordering upon the prosy, perhaps upon the smoky. If so, the best use the smoke can be turned to, will be, by retiring under cover of it, in good trim as may be, to the story.”81

Film noir’s smoke and mirrors are navigated by deception. Deception and falsification in fiction are not only a principle for the production of images. They are not just a vehicle for self-reflexivity or self-cancellation. Crucially the lie is a factor in criticism and inspiration.82 In order to determine the impact of nineteenth century literature on noir fiction, I introduce the idea of confidence in a sliding indiscernibility to furnish us with the concepts for rearticulating the noir subjectivity. As Tony Tanner suggests, the role of Herman Melville’s character is to question “whether there is any consistency of continuity-through-change of character, or whether man is indeed serial and partial, a plurality of fragmentary and momentary roles.”83 The protagonist in Melville’s novel is an unlimited figure. He is a seer and an agent of indefinite repetition as opposed to an action figure circumscribed by conventional representation. This sets up the radical premise of the work, which is that of the protagonist as morally tainted seer and palimpsest abolisher of truth. It is no wonder that Melville’s influence extends to noirists like his namesake, Jean-Pierre Melville for whom the “fate of the … hero is inseparable from his style or his morality; it’s part of the form he occupies.”84 Unfortunately such

80 Melville, The Confidence Man,317-319 81 Ibid., 317, 319 82 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131. 83 Tanner, 90. 84 Stephen Schiff, “Bob le Flambeur (1955),” in Foreign Affairs: the National Society of Film Critics’ 264 prescience counts for little in the world of letters. The Confidence Man didn’t sell and confounded the critics. The revered author of Moby Dick would die in obscurity and poverty. Deleuze's powers of the false furnish us with the tools to determine how the role of confidence as delineated in Melville’s work radically impacts on noir subjectivity. Deleuze's work on cinema has a tendency to make use of literary concepts. By extension, many of the concepts he develops in relation to cinema have an impact on an understanding of literature. The one that I am interested in here is the powers of the false. While Deleuze leads up to this concept in his earlier work, and mentions it specifically in Cinema 1, it is in the second cinema book that it becomes a focus and enabling power for the time-image, which is the crucial device in film noir.85

The Powers of the False

The powers of the false are loosely defined as that function of an image to reproduce itself by referring only to the images that have gone before and will come after, thus enabling the image to be the only factor in its own production.

The powers of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible multiplicity … The powers of the false exists only from the perspective of a series of powers, always referring to each other and passing into one another.86

Such a serial structure is unleashed when the image refuses, as in noir, a conventional relationship with an objective reality outside the frame, the truth-expressing invariants that I discuss earlier. In contrast the image insists on being, as in The Confidence Man, the only factor in its production. This is fiction not as truth-reflector but

Video Guide to Foreign Films, ed Kathy Schulz Huffhines, (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), 186; see also David Sanjek, “Fate Wears a Fedora,” www.popmatters.com (6 December, 2002), http://www.popmatters.com/film/features/021206-melville.shtml (accessed June 2004). 85 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 213-214; Cinema 2, 126-155. 86 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133. 265 as counterfeit detector: as investigative as it is deconstructive.87 The powers of the false are what make the story into a “memory, a legend, a monster.”88 By becoming a memory, the story reproduces virtual action. By becoming a legend, it presents all times as present. By transforming into a monster, the story stitches the subject and the object together in a serial but contained metamorphosis. As I suggest earlier, the powers of the false belongs to a philosophy not only of film, but also of time. With its all pervading sense of temps perdu, or time passing, noir is the fictional mode most engaged with issues of time. Deleuze's concept of the powers of the false, and by extension the time image, is therefore germane to my rearticulation of noir.

Continually passing the frontier between the real and the fictional (the power of the false, the story-telling function), the filmmaker has to reach what the character was ‘before’ and will be ‘after’; he has to bring together the before and the after in the incessant passage from one state to the other (the direct time-image)89

Deleuze's formulation of the time-image is the cornerstone of the powers of the false, and is therefore central to analysing the works in question. The time-image is a direct presentation of time rather than an indirect representation of chronology tied to movement.90 The real and the virtual chase each other in this new image that severs itself from its sensory-motor connection in a falsely reverenced reality. It is now the image alone from which all movements derive. In the time-image, the independence or pre- existence of movement can no longer be assumed. When the image is all that stands for itself, creates itself and replaces itself, it becomes the time-image. My discussion of the Deleuzian interval in chapter IV will more clearly elucidate the time-image. Here it is important to understand that the powers of the false form the time-image from a stitching

87 Pratt, 55-58. 88 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150. I am using Deleuze's specific articulation of the powers of the false in relation to cinema verite to furnish me with the concepts for analysing the works in question. Deleuze claims that the powers of the false transform cinema verite into the fiction of a truth that always belongs to the oppressors and the colonisers. Thus I argue that it can also transform fiction into the simulation of the real. 89 Ibid., 153, emphasis added. 90 Ibid., 68-78; and 98-116. 266 together of irreducible difference, not between the frames (as in montage) but within the frame. The time-image bears witness to an excessive falsification irreducible to its galactic distance from the true, which it has, in its pure crystalline optical and sound descriptions, abolished. One thinks of every image in The Conversation, which tells two stories within the one frame: the framing of humanity by technology, and humanity exceeding the technological frame. It is the time-image that unleashes the powers of the false, a power that can no longer be grounded in the principle underlying action. This principle is the teleological passage or movement from intention toward the expression of this intent, or what Tom Cohen describes as the “interpretive formulation of a truth.”91 We might call this teleological passage, the right track (piste), from which it is possible to backtrack (in the dream-sequence, the flashback and so on) or track forward (in the flash-forward, the fantasy) without every deviating from a submission to the mastery of interpretive truth. The direct time-image abolishes this principle by being valid only for and in its own unlimited but contained metamorphoses. It is in this way that Deleuze likens the time-image to a crystal, each facet of which reflects the whole from an infinite variety of angles, distances, and distortions.92 This crystalline structure of the image is what aligns it with the monster who, like the character in The Confidence Man, cannot find its whole reflection outside the limits of the story. The resolutely non-chronological yet chronic basis of the powers of the false provides the rationale for its connection to noir. The power of the time-image no longer lies in time’s subordination to movement, as when a character is on the right track, moving toward or away from the truth over time, but always tethered to it. This tracking movement would establish continuity with subjective identity. However, the noir hero must refuse this continuity in order to reattach him or herself to another. As Deleuze says:

We no longer have an indirect image of time which derives from movement, but a direct time-image from which movement derives. We no longer have a chronological time which can be overturned by movements which are contingently abnormal; we have a chronic non-

91 Tom Cohen, Anti-mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75. 92 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68-83. 267

chronological time which produced movements necessarily abnormal, essentially false.93

Like noir, the powers of the false clearly belong to a philosophy of time. In the stitching together of disparate elements, time becomes more than a means to an end, and produces its own means of multiplying endings. Thus, where I part company with conventional existentialist interpretations of noir is in terms of a heroic that is generative of either a critique of the truth effect or inspiration toward the creation of what Deleuze identifies as “the New.”94 Invoking Herman Melville, by the new, Deleuze refers not to new forms but to a mutation of shape. This is “the only chance for art or life.”95 In an effort to extend Deleuze toward my own rearticulation of noir, I show how the works discussed in this dissertation are a form-defying mutation of shape so that—

[t]here is no longer either truth or appearance. There is no longer either invariable form or variable point of view onto a form. There is a point of view which belongs so much to the thing that the thing is constantly being transformed in a becoming identical to a point of view. Metamorphosis of the true. What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New.96

In order to determine how the powers of the false impact on the chronic mutations of noir, we need to briefly come to terms with the concepts of sheets of past and peaks of present borrowed by Deleuze from Liebnitz.97 The act of recreation through repeat performance of archetypal roles—the detective, the functionary, the father—moves through what Deleuze calls sheets of past. These sheets cover all-possible time in order to randomly repeat an unknown peak of present, or that moment of multiple singularity.

93 Ibid., 129. 94 Ibid., 146-147. 95 Ibid., 147. 96 Ibid., 147. 97 G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. L Loemker, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969). 268

This is the error in perspective to which the protagonist is prone.98 It is upon this singularity that the conditions of creation depend. Deleuze’s related conceptualisations of sheets and peaks maps usefully onto a deconstructive schematic. This schematic can be summarised as the intersection of the singularity of the event with the repetition of the sign. The critical powers of the false manifest in the repeatability of the sign, are measured across time in “sheets of past” or presence passing (chronos). The singularity of the event—the representation of meaning—is measured across space in “peaks of present’—a past chronically re-presented. This past chronically cuts into the present, and this serves as the rationale for my reading of noir through Deleuze’s powers of the false. Deleuze's explication of sheets and peaks can also be mapped onto Marie Hélène Huet's discussion of the event and the sign. In Huet’s terms, the event requires movement from signified to signifier actualised in the image while the sign repeats itself in a series of previous acts or a prior instance.99 The sign signals an error that is paradoxically only retrievable through memory when the ritual gesture of remembering is arrested through imitation in the imaginative act.100 The mutation of memory toward some new shape is what makes the imagination monstrous. Merlin the wizard takes on the mask of death in Don Quijote to assert the powers of the false: “I am … a lie,” says Don Quijote’s Merlin, “But a lie grown healthy and hoary with much retelling.”101 In other words, in these related deconstructive concepts of peaks and sheets, the event is subject to a serialisation, a repetition from which singularity is nevertheless emergent as a differentiating sign. Through the powers of the false, repetition does not just include difference as a variant, something that can be taken from it. In contrast, the series of repetition is that which thinks difference and brings it into itself, “so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself.”102 The powers of the false are unleashed when the image is the only factor along its own productive series, and from this series an element in the repetition leaps out and introduces an error into the system. This is crucial to my discussion of the films. For example Harry Caul in The Conversation repeats, not

98 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 98-126. 99 Huet, 262. 100 Ibid. 101 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 2:35, 536. 102 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 94. 269 the conversation, but a recording, in order to hear what he needs to hear: a false emphasis. In Vertigo, Scotty recreates a woman from his past and he sees what he needs to see: a crime. The paradox is that in reproducing the false, the world is made different from itself. In repetition, the new is created. To paraphrase Salmon Rushdie, it is in this way that fiction adds to the sum total of worlds at our disposal.103 Thus, the series is no longer, as in representation, the movement from idea (eidos), or original intention, to expression (mimesis). The product is not reducible to the false—either the crime of nostalgia, or the hoax of murder—which would in the end, be perfectly consistent with the ideals of the true. Like many of Deleuze’s concepts, the powers of the false are taken from mathematics. The power in the mathematical series exists only in the form of a series of powers that are its exponents: a, b, c, d… . . It is the mathematic exponent that indicates how many times the base figure—in this case, the false, f—is multiplied by itself to become another figure in the series, f a, f b, f c, f d. In short, the end game of noir is a critical indiscernibility, where the hoax and the crime are subject to a fatal confusion that interminably deferring resolution. Thus, I part company with conventional interpretations of noir in terms of a heroic that not only does not originate in the individual or the social, but also abolishes these invariants in order to project a story that bleeds into memory, into legend. This is because, in noir, as I show, the essential story is that of identity raised to the level of an apparition or a monster. Identity becomes monstrous because of a supernatural ability to see and make visible the world as it is—a counterfeit. The mutation of shape occurs as the act of seeing is turned back on the hero himself or herself in order to be exposed as a counterfeit detector.

The Hero

Earlier, I suggest that the locus of the noir split consciousness is the hero, the primary sympathetic or antithetic character and site of the creator’s anxious authority. This authorial anxiety is mirrored by the character’s suspicion of identity and explains why this figure in noir is always in the throes of a double-movement: a self-cancelling act

103 Salmon Rushdie, “Light on Coetzee,” Sydney Morning Herald (June 10, 2000): 7s 270 of self-creation that paradoxically wills the demise of a system that it must reproduce. The hero then, for the purposes of this study is the protagonist—the central character with which we identify or empathise. To borrow from Jean-Pierre Melville, he or she is a monstrous embodiment of representation’s “uphill road to failure.”104 The uneasy juxtaposition of contradictory elements in noir is driven by the hero who embodies, exemplifies and performs a modern crisis of confidence. The split role of the hero is to both trust and con the future in the invented space of modernity. The hero in the bad form of the counterfeit detector must not only embody this split subjectivity but also must do so in good faith. It is this confusion or undecidability between anxiety and suspicion and a shift from counterfeiting to confidence and back again that unleashes a serial metamorphosis that I locate in the noir figures of Deleuze. They are namely the assemblage, becoming, and the indiscernible. An understanding of Deleuze's specific articulations of these concepts is necessary in order to apply them to the works in question.

Indiscernibility, the Assemblage, and Becoming

Liebniz’s Principle of Indiscernibility asserts that no two objects, even those that are qualitatively identical, have the same exact properties.105 In Deleuze’s formulation, indiscernibility raises questions about discerning the difference between two objects that appear identical but are not, because of their distinct properties, the same object. Indiscernibility is important to Deleuze’s project of re-thinking cinema’s relation to duration because it relates directly to the time-image in which a coalescence of the actual and its identical object, the virtual, occurs.

104 “I like the futility of effort; the uphill road to failure is a very human thing,”quoted in Sanjek, 1. 105 “If for every property F, object x has F if and only if object y has F, then x is identical to y.”The Principle is often used in conjunction with its converse: the Indiscernibility of Identicals. In order for The Principle to hold for all objects, even for example, clones, recourse can be taken to spacial relations in an asymmetical universe, or resorting to haeccity (thisness) in extreme cases: there are properties such as being that very object A, A’s thisness, that makes it discernible from its identical.” Leibniz, 308; see also Peter Forrest, “The Identity of Indiscernibles,” in Standord Encyclopedia of Philosophy (July 31, 1996) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-indiscernible/. (accessed 3 September 2002). 271

For my purposes, this coalescence severs the not true from its ties to the true and allows the image to enter into different circuits.106 The characteristic of indiscernibility that pertains to my argument is the difficulty in distinguishing between what is virtual or subjective, and what is actual or objective in the cinematic image, even when the two poles of description remain distinct. Indiscernibility is such in the time-image that the present is distinct from its image in memory or imagination. But we cannot attribute this distinction—the distance between real time and not-real time—to either object because two indiscernible objects, say a model and the original, by definition share the properties of being both model and original—false and true. An example is the split, doubled character of Madeleine in Vertigo. Indiscernibility, in Deleuze’s terms “does not suppress the distinction between the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other’s role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility.”107 This indiscernible reversibility is the objective characteristic of images that are by nature double: Madeleine, the conversation, and the counterfeit detector. Of these Socrates could very well have asked the same question that he put to Cratylus in a conversation that, for my purposes can be read as inaugural:

Socrates: An image cannot remain an image if it presents all the details of what it represents … [S]uppose [some god] made a duplicate of everything you have and put it beside you. Would there then be two Cratyluses or Cratylus and an image of Cratylus? Cratylus: I should say that there were two Cratyluses.108

Thus indiscernibility illustrates a purely Cratylist notion of the image that depends on an exchange between the virtual, the trace it leaves on the actual, and vice versa. In

106 Brian Massumi, “Realer than Real, the Simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari, “ Copyright 1 (1987): 2.As Rodowick also explains, “Discernment in Bergson’s sense implies a movement between the virtual and the actual, the world of memory and the objective world. At the level of descriptions, the actual refers to the states of the things—the physical and the real—as described in space through perception. The virtual is subjective, that is mental and imaginary, sought out in time through memory.” D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (London: Duke University Press, 1997), 92. 107 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 7. 108 Plato, Cratylus, trans. C.D.C Reeve (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1998), 432b, c. 82. 272

Vertigo and The Conversation, the images that depend on an exchange between what the character is seeing—the subjective—and what the viewer sees—the objective—illustrate this indiscernibility. The two poles of perception cut into each other and thus defer any possibility of resolution. Two other key terms in Deleuze's schema of the powers of the false are assemblage and becoming. Indiscernibility takes place in a coalescence of the real and the imaginary between images and in the image that can be described as an assemblage of the machinic and the human, the past and the present, or the living and the dead. Assemblage is the coalescence of two opposing forces—a “shock of forces” as Deleuze describes it—in the one effect. An assemblage is “an increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.”109 Indiscernibility becomes an essential tool for Deleuze’s philosophy of difference generally and his powers of the false specifically. Indiscernibility unleashes a kind of becoming.110 Becoming describes a co-contamination of attributes that in Deleuze’s schema is “generative of a new way of being that is a function of influences rather that resemblances.”111 The distinction between influences and resemblances is an important one in the Deleuzian conceptualisation of powers of the false. In this concept, influences enable a never-ending metamorphosis or a will to power. That will is diametrically opposed to an intentional distribution structured with the ideal (eidos), or ends on one side, and representation (mimeses), or means on the other. Therefore, “[b]ecoming can be defined as that which transforms an empirical sequence into a series; a burst of series.” 112 Influences, or powers of the false, enable a becoming that is not necessarily becoming like something else. This entrenched relation is one of power-differential, or metaphor. To refer to the famous example of Nagel’s bat, we cannot say what it is like to be a bat without resorting to metaphor. Thus, we can only attempt to compare the bat’s consciousness to something that it is not, because outside of its own sphere of influence, the bat’s consciousness takes on different qualities.113 Becoming, in these terms, is a way

109 Gilles Deleuze and Felix A. Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus, “ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell, 1988), 518. 110 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 29. 111 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 112 Ibid. 113 Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” in The Philosophical Review. LXXXIII (4 October, 1974): 273 of catching an ontological infection in a series of egalitarian co-contaminations that generate a never-ending metamorphoses: I is another has replaced Ego = Ego.114 This is the series of becoming. A series, as Deleuze reminds us, is that sequence of images tending in the direction of a limit, which is repeatedly bifurcated towards another limit, towards difference.115 The time-image is the cinematic equivalent of the series. A final term concerns the perpetual interchange of two models of becoming in the actor—the real and the virtual—that takes place in the noir hero. As I demonstrate in relation to The Confidence Man the protagonist exemplifies the text itself, and in so doing, in refusing any pretence to an originary identity outside of the text, he or she is a bad copy. He or she is an image of a model that is already an imitation. We also understand this to be the simulacrum. This final term along with the preceding three forms the fundamentals of Deleuze’s powers of the false. I elucidate this key terminology to set up a more detailed analysis of the relevance of these terms to noir in chapters to follow. Here, by locating the bad copy in Vertigo, and then The Conversation I demonstrate the structural, ethical, and aesthetic relevance of indiscernibility to noir.

Vertigo

Vertigo is the story of a disgraced detective’s search for a woman from his past. The opening credit sequence focuses on a woman’s face, from whose anxious eye the camera “falls,” symbolised by art director Saul Bass’s spiralling graphics and accompanied by Bernard Hermann’s reverse arpeggios. From here, a figure literally climbs into the narrative over the rungs of a steel ladder. A policeman chases a criminal across a horizontal plane of rooftops with the nocturnal sweep of San Francisco in blinking rear projection (red, green, yellow lights). A plainclothes man (James Stewart) follows, but slips on a tile and clings to the guttering while a series of close-ups reveals his stricken downward glances (an echo of the woman in the credits) followed by the

435-50. 114 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133. 115 Ibid., 275. 274 famous zoom-in, track-out vertigo shot of the alleyway far below. 116 The uniformed policeman offers assistance, but the detective freezes and as a result, the policeman slips to his death on the street in a narrow alleyway several stories below. The process shot of the distant crumpled figure lying between painted skyscrapers is the first indication not only of the interstitial realm that the film’s characters inhabit, but also in its blatant artificiality. The hero and text will compulsively return to and thus modify such liminal domains in an effort to find and tell their stories: stories that do not so much represent as simulate in order to out-perform modernity’s terminal narrative. Following the prologue, the narrative reopens in a similarly, if more subtly surreal scene establishing a tensely platonic relationship between the now retired detective, Scotty, and his one-time fiancé: frumpy female graphic artist, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). Although the scene is outwardly almost aggressively normal, the underlying tension is made manifest in a surreal mis en scene. The detective is corseted and in a cast. There is a bra strung up on a stand—Midge is a graphic artist specialising in ladies underwear. The bra is modelled on the modernist principles of the cantilever bridge. Against the saturated yellow background of Midge’s creatively cluttered loft, an artificial view of San Francisco can be seen through a large “picture” window. This false view is, amidst the colour, a jarringly black and white projection: another of Hitchcock's audaciously artificial augmentations. We learn through the couple’s cagey repartee that Scotty is still riven with guilt over his role in the death of his colleague. He describes his special disorder as acrophobia (fear of falling), and it soon becomes apparent that it is far from cured. Scotty seems to have forgotten many events in his life to the point where he is, like many noir heroes, without origin or history. For example, he seems to have forgotten that he and Midge were recently engaged, a lapse she chides him for. Yet, Scotty bears the memory of the tragic accident on the roof like a psychic scar. In spite of his glib attempt to cure himself by standing on a stool, he faints and falls into Midge's motherly embrace.117

116 For technical details about the making of Vertigo see Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (London: St. Martins Press, 1998); and Vertigo, DVD Commentary. 117 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), 87-100. Vertigo’s Midge, a creation of screenwriter Sam Taylor, who adapted Vertigo from the original novel by French literary thriller team Boileau and Narcejac, exists, like Nathaniel’s Clara in Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” as an unwanted rational counterpart to the hero’s delusions. See also 275

Thus, crowded into a narrative gap, two separates scenes collide in a kind of obsessive repetition or restaging of climbing and falling. Further, the lack of mobility associated with the disorder is crucial to my argument for a rearticulation of noir. Through his impairment the actor has become seer, rather than agent of action. This is crucial, for it is how the subject sees through his impaired vision that is constitutive of the (love) object, and forces the two into indiscernibility.118 Edward Said has commented that the exile wields difference in the form of social and psychic distance like a weapon. “Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong.”119 The bifurcation of this immoderately modernist stance into a different kind of heroics is the preoccupation of this dissertation. Scotty’s self-exile from police work, his determination never to return to it, is an affectation. This is a false attitude that he wields to protect himself against his own incapacity to remain in the present. Such incapacity is precisely that exploited by a diabolical character who cons Scotty back to the mean streets of San Francisco. While not a major character, this all- knowing invisible manipulator mirrors the directorial impulse, the creative authority that Hitchcock simultaneously investigates and deconstructs throughout his films. This character, Elster (Tom Helmore) wants Scotty to investigate Elster’s wife (Kim Novak). Her name is Madeleine and she seems to have lost her mind. She lives in the past. She may be a danger to herself. The husband wants her followed. He wants Scotty to act as both bodyguard and detective. Scotty is unable to resist the human hook that the mysterious figure offers to him. In spite of Scotty’s desire to remain uninvolved and in spite of or because of his guilty conscience, Scotty is no match for these diabolical directorial designs on him. The mysterious man from Scotty’s past sets up a stakeout at an old world San Francisco landmark, Ernie's Restaurant. The detective waits and watches and is undone. He surrenders to an encounter that he has been waiting for all his life—the presence of the past in the present. Novak’s platinum hair and pale skin cut into the real world like a wound. Her gown is desire-green. She seems to float: on but not of this world.

Vertigo, DVD Commentary. 118 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126. 119 Said, 42. 276

This scene is a striking example of the operation of both indiscernibility and the assemblage in the image. We recall how indiscernibility takes place in a coalescence of the real and the imaginary between images. In other words, the fundamental role of the cinematic image is to remember. When indiscernibility is unleashed within the image it can be described as an assemblage of the machinic and the human, the past and the present or the living and the dead. The time-image does not so much remember itself, as engender itself from a gap in its memory. The deep red of the windowless walls of Ernie’s restaurant, red for warning, stand in stark contrast to the sunlit yellow of the Midge’s apartment in the previous scene. The image remembers. The image of Madeleine is also an assemblage because it is the coalescence of these two opposing forces—a “shock of forces” as Deleuze describes it—in the one effect. All Scotty can see is her difference from herself: she is presence but not of the present. The detective in noir is, at the narrowest point of his quest, unbalanced, blinded, and deeply irrational. This is when he is at his most human, and the greatest danger to himself. Noir is an emblematically tragic mode in that the “error or frailty” endemic to heroic reversal is that which is incurable: his own humanity.120 Scotty’s subsequent surveillance confirms the theory that Madeleine is neurotically obsessed with her past to the point of believing herself possessed by it. She believes herself to be the spirit of a suicidal ancestor, who wandered the streets a century ago, driven insane by the loss of her child. Madeleine wanders the same streets in the same way. She carries a bouquet of flowers that is identical to the woman from her past. She styles her hair in the same coiled chignon. She takes rooms at the hotel in which her predecessor was kept by a married businessman. According to Madeleine’s husband, who like Scotty, seems to have more knowledge of women than they have of themselves, Madeleine has no knowledge of this history, yet her relentless pursuit of it amounts almost to a re-enactment.121 How can she perform or simulate a story the words of which she doesn’t know? Scotty is drawn to this mystery, this discrepancy or excess in her image that leads him spiralling into the past, looking for clues down modernity’s blind alleys and dead ends.

120 Aristotle, Poetics (London: Penguin, 1997), 53a. 121 Modleski, 98, 102. 277

As in other noirs, the men accumulate more information—true or false—than the woman appears to know about herself.122 Madeleine becomes a kind of monster, stitched together from a patriarchal mix of conflicting information, and crucially from a portrait of the dead ancestor, Carlotta upon which she gazes fixedly for hours. Scotty in turn gazes upon the gazer in a tripling consciousness that mutates image and reconstitutes it simultaneously. The reliability of the second-hand information that constitutes the subject, and the readability of the subject itself are open to question. Scotty becomes literally blinded by his over-exposure to it. He becomes deluded. His proximity to Madeleine infects him with her incapacity, already dormant within him, of being unable to discern between the real and the false. He crucially confuses truth-retrieving memory and falsifying imagination, as the diabolical Elster knew he would. Scotty throws away his mental counterfeit detector, and armed with nothing but good faith, he plunges into the past. Thus, when Madeleine attempts suicide by throwing herself into the bay, the detective too, falls over the edge of representation. As he plunges into the freezing San Francisco bay to rescue her, he is like noir characters everywhere in that, “it is the past that he plunges himself into.”123 Vertigo's triptych structure consists of three acts punctuated by three falls. The fall in the first act leaves the detective haunted by a sense of his own impairment. In the shot that marks the beginning of the second act, Scotty emerges from the bay with the unconscious Madeleine in his arms. He is a changed man. Over the course of their adulterous affair, he is led further and further down the labyrinths of her apparent psychosis. Hitchcock uses street signs to symbolically mark the one-way relationship of their affair. Scotty attempts to rationalise Madeleine’s delusions. He takes her to where she only imagined she has been—the Mission, the Stables, the Sequoia forest. She insists on not only “remembering” a past life, but on being able to “foretell” her own death, not as Madeleine but as the already deceased Carlotta—in a future that is past in the present. I note my earlier discussion of Don Quijote’s heroic incompatibility with the modern age in Don Quijote. In Vertigo, the protagonist is similarly out of (his) time. As

122 Ibid., 61, 66. 123 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 106. Deleuze is referring specifically to the deep focus images of Orson Welles as Kane in Citizen Kane (1941) in which the images in depth “mark critical moments in Kane’s will to power” and Kane’s virtual movement through them in the form of memory. 278 with Don Quijote and The Confidence Man, the therapeutic, corrective rationale supporting modern discourse is shown as deeply flawed. The increasingly demented trajectory of Scotty in Vertigo maps out the blind alleys of modernity's transformational strategies. The incompatibility of the characters with their world is based on a theory of the subjective viewpoint seen objectively as an error, in contrast to the objective vantage point from which the truth can be seen. Madeleine mistakes the past for the present, and becomes possessed by the former in order to critique the latter. In spite of Scotty’s attempts to show her that the past is not real, he will in turn fall prey to the same fatal mistake. Rational discourse is shown to be the real con, as the counterfeit detector—Scotty—attempts to con Madeleine out of a faulty imagination in favour of a self-correcting memory. “Try and remember,” he implores her repeatedly, yet it is Scotty who will soon become the subject of a terminal forgetfulness. Scotty can neither cure nor save the woman from her own imagination. Madeleine throws herself off the bell tower of the Mission San Batista. Scotty’s vertigo once again renders him immobile. In a stunningly high angle shot, Scotty is seen helpless and stricken (like the policeman) at the bottom of his own psychosomatic well. He is unmanned as it were, by Madeleine’s feminine imagination that has so tragically replaced memory by confusing past, present and future. In the third act, the twice-fallen detective Scotty’s guilt leads to a deep psychosis and he is institutionalised. Midge attempts to cure him through music therapy, but the rational movements of Bach and Mozart are no match for Vertigo’s composer Bernard Hermann’s unresolved chords. Aged and haunted, Scotty returns to the winding streets of San Francisco to search for the dead woman from his past. He becomes a bad copy of Madeleine copying Carlotta. In spite of his fear of falling, the detective has plunged into an obsession of noir proportions. Additionally, there is something noir about the preternatural nature of the detective's quest. He haunts the streets like a ghost looking for a ghost, possessed by a hunch that glints like mica through the chiaroscuro of his obsession. It is this crystalline hunch—fragments of suspicion filtered through distorted, conflicting viewpoints with no beginning or end—that locates the detective in the noir chasm, a temporal tear in the narrative that allows for the impossible, the monstrous: the world. 279

Scotty finds Madeleine, or a bad copy of Madeleine. Her name is Judy (Kim Novak in a double role), a cheap brunette working in a cheap department store and living in a cheap hotel. In one of the most jarring shifts in cinema, Judy becomes Madeleine in a shocking revelation to no one but the viewer. Alone and in private, she takes Madeleine’s grey suit out of the closet, and the audience understands that she was never Madeleine, but only an accomplice to the mysterious Elster who killed his actual wife Madeleine and ran off with her money. In a staging of the perfect crime, Elster set up Madeleine’s suicide for the benefit of the irrational Scotty, using Judy as a body double. It is the woman’s role of body double that Hitchcock most chillingly investigates in Vertigo, and one to which Brian De Palma returns in his stunning remake, Body Double (1984). The closet here can be likened to a temporal interval, a tear in narrative time, and Madeleine’s suit a relic from a past that never was. This is a moment in which both cinema and narrative time are literally arrested, a point I will return to in chapter III. The audience experiences a vertiginous moment when everything in the first half of the film loses its point of reference. The powers of the false open up a crack in the image through which we plunge, like Scotty, into the interstice between the true and the false, the actor and her role. Like Judy, Scotty has also switched sides from the actor to the seer. The action-man of the opening scenes has both literally and figuratively fallen off the track. In the interval between the same of the past and present difference, Scotty tries to see what there is in the excess of the image. He sees an out-of-field that has intruded into the shattered frame. “There is no more out-of-field. The outside of the image has been replaced by the interstice between the two frames in the image.”124 Scotty has become a monster, a figure incompatible with the present order whose search—blind yet all-seeing— in the interval for the dead leads to a mutation of self. Scotty fatally and fatefully confuses the ego with the object in a turning away from life that both characterises a novelistic melancholy and, as I show below, unleashes the monstrous imagination. At the heart of noir this is the challenge—how to re-present a model that has been lost to memory. Judy keeps her identity a secret from Scotty, who repays her duplicity by remaking her as a body double. The poetics of noir make the model a pipe dream, both in terms of

124 Ibid., 181. 280 the mode’s cruel sexual politics and a crisis of confidence in identity. In a tortuous sequence of uncreation, Scotty undoes Judy and brings Madeleine back from the dead in her place. He rebuilds Madeleine from memory—hair, make-up, shoes, walk, even re- sourcing the grey suit in an amazing scene with live manikins. Finally the metamorphosis is complete, or not quite. Judy tries to get away with retaining her own hairstyle, but Scotty forces her into a humiliating acquiescence. Finally, and tragically, it is Madeleine who steps out from the ashes of this Judy’s dreams of self-actualisation. In a love scene saturated with sinful green, the adulterous couple—artist and model brought to life—enter into a forbidden union. The split set for this shot is emblematic of the artificiality of modern desire in noir. Without fades, dissolves or any other special effects aside from Hitchcock’s signature 360 degree pan, Scotty and Madeleine are transported back in time, out of the seedy Empire hotel room to the San Juan Batista stables, all contained on the same set. In the face of his loss, Scotty has found a new world to rule, and it is a world that more closely resembles fiction than reality. The perverse, surreal courtship of Scotty and Judy, with make-believe Madeleine inserted as a third consciousness, is short-lived. It is undone by the paranoia and duplicity that birthed it. Judy becomes careless and reveals her true identity by standing before a mirror wearing a “prop” from her days as a murderer’s accomplice. Scotty’s ever- watchful suspicions are confirmed. The throwing away of the counterfeit detector was a ruse. Like the human conscience, this is one psychic device impossible to remove. He forces her to come clean, to confess, and to re-enact her fake suicide at the mission tower—thus setting in motion his own horrific “cure. “ Suddenly, the detective’s fear of falling vanishes and it is he who leads Judy all the way to the top of the spiralling mission staircase. There in a bizarre re-enactment, Judy falls to her third and final death.

Demark and Symbol 281

How does Deleuze's specific formulation of the powers of the false in relation to the time-image furnish us with the concepts for analysing the works in question? In order to determine this, we need to look at two concepts: the demark and symbol. Deleuze discusses these, not in the context of the time-image, but regarding its precursor, the Hitchcockian relation image.125 In contrast I am going to extend Deleuze's discussion, because I see in Hitchcock’s relation-image specifically and in earlier noir generally, elements of the time-image. According to Deleuze, “demarks are clashes of natural relations (series) and symbols are nodes of abstract relations (set).”126 A demark differs from a mark in that it leaps out of the series, or the interval, or emerges in contradiction to it. Deleuze mentions this difference regarding the first bird in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), or the angelic Stranger in Melville’s Confidence Man.127 The demark is a singularity emergent in the series. Its immanence is a product of and contained by its own metamorphosis, whereby any truth-effect (the effect of representing the Ideal) is left literally out of the picture. The powers of the false are unleashed when the image reproduces its elements based on its own exponential serialisation. I note that the series is a sequence of images tending toward the direction of a limit. From this series, the singularity leaps out as demark, introducing an error into the bifurcating sequential system. A symbol, on the other hand, is “a concrete object which is a bearer of various relations, or of variations of a single relation.” Thus the detective is a symbol of modernity and Madeleine’s coiled hair functions as a symbol of vertigo. Her grey suit is a symbol of her unattainability. But as we see, there are literally two grey suits in Vertigo, as there are two vertigos, and one in each coupling is the duplicitous demark. Similarly there are two detectives, the real and the counterfeit, so designated when it leaps out of the series and reveals itself to be a false claimant to representation, a counterfeit detective. Like Judy, and as in The Confidence Man, the demarcating detective literally leaps out of the series in order to be valid for itself on a footing severed from its invariants.

125 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 197-215. 126 Ibid., 204. 127 Ibid., 282

Like Melville’s con man, Hitchcock’s Madeleine is both symbol in that she bears the various relations between herself and the same, and a demark in that she jumps out of the void in a criminal act of dark becoming. In so doing, she cuts into the image in contradiction to a conventional understanding of woman-as-object, raising her own power to that of the undecidable. A demark is the symbol’s duplicitous twin. We recall the image of the replicant jumping out of the jumble of automata in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982). Imagine one of the Cratyluses breaking away and jumping into another series where it becomes valid for itself: no longer a false claimant of Cratylin sameness, but as a valid claimant to Melvillian originality. The goal of the demark, like that of fiction itself, is self-differentiation. This eternal quest can be defined as that which looks for the point of entry into new worlds; or as Thomas Pynchon describes it, a miracle.128 Thus both Madeleine and Melville’s diddler are one in the series, yet by leaping out of their symbolic role, they attain the status of what Herman Melville insistently and problematically describes as an original. This is problematic because in all cases the demark is pretending to be what it is not. That is, it is a false counterfeit detective. It is therefore a false claimant faking its claim. In demarcating the issues at stake in representation, Madeleine-Judy is both an embodiment of indiscernibility and an error of Cratylin dimensions. Toward the end, Scotty cries, “You were the counterfeit! Why did you pick me, why me?” The answer, the truth, is as irretrievable and as unreliable as authorial intention. Vertigo is about many things—love and loss, obsession and cruelty, memory and fetishisation, fear and longing. The film was a kind of experimental, personal and thematic aberration for Hitchcock, an event that was in itself perversely Hitchcockian.129While it schematises a pervasive and fetishist melancholy out of sync

128 Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (London: Vintage, 1984), 83. 129 For an account of Hitchcock’s personal investment in his art, see Jay Carr, “Hitchcock’s Personal Spin on Vertigo,” Boston Globe, Oct 25, 1996, C10; Wesley Morris, “The Phoenix,”in Film Comment, March/April 2002. http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/3-4-2002/coppola2.htm; Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 108- 115; John Locke, “The Last Laugh: Was Hitchcock’s Masterpiece a Private Joke?” Copyright 18 (March 1997); Dennis R Perry, “Imps of the Perverse: Discovering the Poe/Hitchcock Connection”Film Literature Quarterly 24. 4 (1996): 393-399; and Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 283 with the late 1950s, it also restages an anxiety about duplicity and deception and a culture of secrecy attendant on events of this decade.130 Vertigo showcases a range of technical innovations that foreground the theme of repetition, mimicry and modelling associated with noir. The film delves into sexual politics, the chasms of modernity and explores the noir ethos of paranoia and suspicion. It is a tour de force of technical stunts. These include the famous track-out, zoom-in shot of Scotty’s impaired vision, and the novel stitching together of process and production shot. I note the daring lighting experiments, particularly the famous Argosy bookshop scene in which the interior darkens as the street exterior becomes lighter. Hitchcock also deployed a striking use of mattes, notably the Mission San Juan Batista tower, and camera tricks—spiralling, unexpected reversal of axes— and others that I will discuss during the course of the following chapters.131 But my primary concern here is with the role of the bad copy in unleashing the powers of the false and how this feeds into and is fed by the noir imagination. Having set out in some detail the story elements in Vertigo, I now take up a conception of the bad copy as the pervading means of metamorphosis in noir.

The Bad Copy, the Powers of the False and the Noir Imagination

The bad copy is another word for the simulacrum. It is kin to the counterfeit detector, as that which indefinitely eludes representation by being a copy of a copy “whose relationship to the model has become so attenuated it can no longer properly be said to be a copy.”132 The bad copy is “bad” because it refuses subordination to the original, thereby falsifying its claim to representation. In the Platonic sense, and the Cratylin, the good copy is a stand-in for the model whose absence it submits to through the differentiating act of representation. In contrast,

130 Thomas M. Leitch, “It’s the Cold War, Stupid: An Obvious History of the Political Hitchcock,”Film Literature Quarterly 27. 1 (1999): 3-15. 131 Of these stunts one that has taken on a life of its own is the restoration by Katz and Harris. See Coppola and Murch, “Commentary,” DVD, The Conversation; Royal S. Brown,”Back From the Dead: the Restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,”Cineaste 23. 1 (1997): 4-10 132 Brian Massumi, “Realer than Real, the Simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari,” Copyright 1 (1987): 91. 284 the bad copy refuses to be defined by its relation to a model in terms of absence or presence. It coalesces instead with the model in terms of indiscernibility through the act of taking-after the model, in a replication that snatches the model away from ideal resemblance. The model becomes distant from and resembles an ideal forever out of the reach of representation. Madeleine-1 and Madeleine-2 are identical in that their thisness—Madeleine 1 is identical to Madeleine 2—makes them indistinguishable. Madeleine. It is only possible to decide which is Madeleine and which is the image of Madeleine in the revelatory mirror-scene. There they are the same but different because of the separate albeit coalescing spheres of virtual and real spaces they occupy. Crucially, then, the central paradox at the heart of the bad copy is this: the only way the copy and the original can ever be the same is by eliminating the distance and erasing the difference between them so that they are no longer two distinct entities, and therefore no longer plural. They are I, yet I is another. Does one remain in the place of two? Have they both been eliminated, leaving in their place an element produced by entirely different rules? This elimination is not only crucial to deciding if Liebniz’s Principle is correct, but more importantly here, it is at the heart of the debate over a Promethean self- destruction that drives the act of representation. Does the act of artistic creation signify the execution of the original, or is the idea of an original the greatest artifice of all? I state below that indiscernibility and the assemblage describe the objective severing of two related elements in representation. Thus the bad copy (like the Counterfeit Detector) is a double deception because it resembles a model only in appearance while differing from it entirely in its mode of re-production. In other words, like the simulacrum it refuses to yield to mastery of the model. Therefore the best weapon in the battle of ruse as Scotty discovers, is “not to unmask it as a false copy, but to force it to be a true copy.” 133 The worst crime against the bad copy is to reconnect it to its mirror image, thereby forcing it to submit to the rules of representation. Thus there are two crimes in Vertigo, but the latter belongs to Scotty as monstrous artist. The monster has no reflection. When Judy looks into the mirror, her presence in the glass conjures up a lack, or absent presence that cannot be but is: like Midge’s monstrous self-portrait, the discrepancies in Vertigo’s imagery as a result of the contradictory mis en

133 Ibid., 92. 285 scene, are multiple and serial. The images in mirrors and windows in Vertigo lead to the far limits of representation where the real and the image cohabit in the assemblage. This coalescence is unendurable to Scotty whose need for self-mastery is tied to his affliction. His paranoid suspicions are confirmed: the present exists only to obliterate the past, which paradoxically must be found and represented in order to ensure a future. How is this dynamic between the good and the bad copy a mirror image of indiscernibility between that of the past and the present and how does this serial coalescence work in Vertigo? Vertigo is a deeply human story of obsession. Its humanity abides and multiplies in spite of the noir themes that I indicate below: switching, stand-ins, substitution, duplicity, mirroring, replication, repetition and returning. Every character, every action, every sign in the film is virtually interchangeable with one that comes before or after it. Scotty and Midge reverse roles. Scotty becomes a bad copy of the diabolical maastermind. Restaurants, hotels, hairstyles, costumes, and courtships repeat and unwind into a spiral of noir perversity. Nowhere is this subversion of traditional heroic values more alarming than in the relationship between Madeleine and Scotty. This affair is revealed as counterfeit primarily because of a reversibility or contagion whereby Judy the producer becomes the reproduced. Along the series, Scotty the man-made witness becomes the monster-maker. Madeleine the victim takes on a second life as victimiser. Scotty the exorciser of demons becomes possessed by them. In terms of a kind of serial possession, Madeleine is possessed by Carlotta, Scotty becomes possessed by Madeleine, Judy is possessed by her murderous lover and possesses Scotty who repossesses her in the name of Madeleine ... and so on. The progress or series of possession goes right back to Scotty’s immobilising manipulation by the murderous, money-hungry mastermind as a kind of virtual stand-in for Hitchcock himself. Scotty’s tragic vertigo is of course a symptom of his affliction—inaction. This affliction is arbitrarily assigned by an anxiously self-cancelling authorial presence. Scotty’s affliction is the demark because it jumps out of a series of traits imposed upon him. It is a monstrous birthright, a secularised stigmata, and reminder of a loathed filiation that he must repeatedly resignify while refusing to represent. He begins and ends his story clinging to the edge of narrative and looking into its chasms. So as a result of 286 the rational man’s indiscernibility with the hysterical woman, and the murderer coalescing with the director, the criminal’s activities become indistinguishable from an actor’s hoax: the woman is a two headed monster of the real. Like Vertigo’s Scotty Ferguson, the viewer no longer knows what is the act and what is the crime or hoax. This is why the “actor is a monster, or rather monsters are born actors—Siamese twin, limbless man…”134 And Scotty’s monstrosity is a result, like Don Quijote's, of a tragic loss of self, the realisation that he is only one in a series of false projections, a counterfeit detector. This stylistic indiscernibility in the face of such entrenched humanism makes the film one of the most subversive and troubling of the late noir cycle. And at the height of cold-war anxieties, it also provides a prescient rehearsal of the relentlessly cynical neo noir of the seventies.

The Conversation

Coppola’s The Conversation is one of many neo-noirs produced as a response to the political unease of the 1970s. Upon the film's release in 1974, the agonies of Watergate had gripped the United States. Watergate affirmed the long-standing suspicion over an institution—the Presidency—the representative status of which appeared to be both a monumental fiction and a troubling sign of the body politic’s bad faith. FBI meddling, the dissembling of Vietnam, CIA assassination plots, abortive reform committees and the widespread private use of surveillance technology were all symptomatic of what Libra author Don DeLillo has described as The Age of Conspiracy.135 The 1970s produced an abundance of political thrillers in novel and movie form that transformed earlier noir conventions into a new poetics of deception.136 Films such as Taxi Driver (1976) and

134 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 71-72. For Deleuze, Tod Browning’s Freaks(1932) describes the innate monstrosity of the actor, who hides like a criminal in the shadows of his or her role, waiting for the chance to enter into its dark excesses. 135 Delillo, Don, Running Dog, (New York: Vintage, 1978); and Libra, (London: Penguin, 1988). See also Brogan, 662-690. Notably during the 70s, The New York Times ran Seymour Hersh’s reports on illegal FBI surveillance of anti-Vietnam dissidents. Congressional investigations into CIA-plotted foreign assassinations and abuse of FBI power got underway, yet both the Church Committee and the Pike Committee buckled under Intelligence agency pressure. 136 Alain Silver, “Fragments of the Mirror: Hitchcock’s Noir Landscape, “ in Film Noir Reader 2, eds. 287

Delillo’s Running Dog (1978) are two notable examples.137 Running Dog, like Viper, narrates a conspiracy surrounding mythical celebrity footage that leads all the way to the White House. Although Running Dog is overtly a Vietnam-era novel, in its references to surveillance and technology, high-level duplicity, corporate conspiracies and the anguish of choice that confronts its damaged, dispersed hero, it has much in common with both The Conversation and Viper. Above all, it shares with these works a kind of strange heroic in a deceptively inanimate artefact: a multiplying, transformative recording. The Conversation is the story of the dispersal of identity through technology. It is such a dispersal that blurs the difference between organic and non-organic augmentations. Like the footage in Viper, the audio recording at the heart of The Conversation is an extension of a protagonist memically infected with the powers of the false.138 This protagonist is a self-made automaton. This is not only because he has abdicated moral responsibility in favour of being an inhuman functionary of a system he trusts to be inherently moral, (or representative), but also because he is a Deleuzian “man-machine assemblage” whose sole intention is to pose the “question of the future.”139 Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a misanthropic surveillance expert, a man on top of his game, who both affects and masks his eccentricities behind a modish façade of exaggerated anonymity. Like Vertigo’s Scotty and many other noir heroes, Harry is haunted by the past, specifically his role in a crime that caused the death of three innocent people. This event has cost him his soul. Soulless since then, he survives by refusing to be burdened by human concerns. Through technological augmentation, he strips his subjects of their humanity in order to unpeel the layers of the world away from their words. Information is all that remains, information he is paid to provide. Harry does not judge his clients, whether mob boss, union goon or corporate criminal. A job is a job and

Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), 107. 137 Films such as Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men, (1976) and novels like William Gaddis’s JR (1975) and DeLillo’s Americana and Great Jones Street (1973), Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Didion’s The White Album (1979), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) are just some of the many examples of the cynical, paranoia driven fiction produced in the 1970s. 138 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 18. Memes are the neurological equivalent of simulacra— ideas or language tropes that travel infectiously, or exactly the way genes travel—by inexorable replication. 139 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 263. 288

Harry is his work. His single-minded goal, when producing a recording, is to make it better than life, to peel away the layers of static and interference so that all that remains is the truth: the word. This necessitates getting as virtually close to the source as is technologically possible, and Harry is a master technician, almost to the point of being a machine himself. No conversation is too distant. No code is too complex. No recording is too scrambled. You can run from Harry but you cannot hide. Harry has nothing more to lose. Like all noir man-machine assemblances, Harry can barely live with himself. Harry’s job is to trail and bug the adulterous wife (Cindy Williams) of a mysterious company Director (Robert Duvall, unbilled). Harry and the Director communicate through an Assistant (Harrison Ford). Harry launches a complex, expensive surveillance operation only to break his own code of non-involvement in the affairs of humans. He does this when it becomes apparent, through the lovers’ recorded conversation that someone is going to die. The film opens with an extended crane shot over Union Square, San Francisco, where a surveillance crew—nesting in skyscraper windows, milling around the crowd, huddled in a van—are eavesdropping on the conversation of the couple who are unsuccessfully attempting to move inconspicuously through the throng. A famously complex scene, it involved six cameras trained on moving human targets who did not know if or when they were actually being filmed. 140 An unseen jazz band has attracted the noonday crowd. It is playing Harry M. Woods’s “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bobbin' Along.” Harry hovers inconspicuously at the edge of the frame, paradoxically dressed incongruously in a transparent plastic raincoat. The camera follows him climbing into a parked van painted with a sign saying “Security World.” The van is studded with one-way mirrors and bristling antennae. Inside, a crew of rumpled buggers are hunched over elaborate equipment. Harry’s status as their boss, and as an outsider, is suggested initially in his location on the edge of things, in his fastidious anonymity, and his alienation from the wolfish camaraderie in the van. Alone later in his Spartan flat, Harry plays the saxophone accompanied by a sound recording.

140 Coppola and Murch, “Commentary,” DVD, The Conversation. The making of the film has generated its own back-story. The police, for example, were called to the scene after a report, based on the shotgun cameramen perched in windows above the Square, that snipers were trying to assassinate Coppola. 289

As a further description of the conflict between the inner and the outer that the film explores, Harry’s apartment shows almost no sign of human habitation, much less any personal mark of its resident, except a statue of the Madonna as a symbol of his and Coppola's faith, a faith that will be irreparable and symbolically damaged in a later scene. The Madonna, like Harry’s visit to the confessional, is one of the oldest forms of surveillance. It becomes after he destroys it a symbol of the hardest of all bugs to remove, and the most noir—the human conscience. To return briefly to my discussion of the demark and symbol, the Madonna is both. It is a symbol of Harry’s damaged faith in a higher truth, and a demark in that it jumps out of the series to be valid for itself as a deterritorialised faith in the human conscience. In The Conversation, as in the socially conscious mode of noir generally, there are two Madonnas—a higher one that symbolises bad faith and a lower one that demarcates good faith—from which the hero must choose. Regarding privacy, Harry's apartment serves merely to refute such an idea. It is his front, a mask. His true lair is a warehouse at the edge of town near the railway tracks where he is at home amongst his artefacts—thousands of recordings of the human voice in conversation. After chastising his own assistant (John Cazale) for wanting to know more about the human aspects of the case, the two go to work on the tapes for their mysterious client, the Director. He is a figure whose appearance, as Ratner points out, is consistent with the horror film, to which The Conversation is self-consciously aligned. The Director (Robert Duvall, unbilled) is off-screen. His partial appearance is postponed for as long as possible and in such a way as to align film direction, or authorship with an undefined and insidious monstrosity. 141 In spite of affiliations with both the horror film and the political thriller, The Conversation is exemplary noir in that its critique is as much textual as sociological. Thus, it is not only the unnamed horror of the “corporation as grand manipulator” that is played out in The Conversation. 142 As with Vertigo, The Conversation sets up an alignment of the director with the terror of gratuitous meddling and murderous modelling in art. The hidden monster assumes a serial structure—Coppola as film director, Duval as company Director, The Assistant, Harry, Harry’s Assistant, the lovers, Harry’s lover—all

141 Megan Ratner, “Notes on The Conversation, “ Senses of Cinema (March 2001). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/conversation.html. (accessed May 2002). 142 Ibid. 290 revolving around the murky phrase at the centre of the recording: “he'd kill us if he got the chance.” Thus the frequent close-ups of Harry himself capture the expressions of a self-made monster and provide glimpses into an eternal outsider. As Coppola suggests, this is a subject deeply anxious about the barren world to which he has condemned himself, because in the end, it gives him no more confidence than any other. 143While we may agree that The Conversation is a story of a man undone by the very technology he uses to spy on others—the bugger becomes the bugged, much as the detective in Vertigo becomes the detected—it is Coppola himself who best describes Harry’s growing crisis of confidence:

He’s a man who has dedicated his existence to a certain kind of activity, to technology, and who in a part of his life experiences regrets and realises that the weapon he uses for others in a certain fashion is destroying the man himself…the single reason for which he is destroyed is that he has started to question all that.144 What makes Harry begin to question his existence? What encounter generates his desire for difference, even if that means self-execution? As I argue, in spite of Harry’s self-created indifference or detachment from human concerns, there is something wrong in this system—the demark—that introduces an error into identity by an encounter with difference. It is this encounter with an element along another series that bifurcates subjectivity and causes it to head off in an entirely different direction. In noir, it is this demarcation of difference in the protagonist-as-assemblage that opens identity up to the new. I note that the noir critique is directed, not toward bad form but toward bad faith. Harry is a bad form of the detective, acting up until now in bad faith. The conversation and the cry for help at its centre force him toward a realignment of faith toward humanity, redemptive if tragically misplaced. The dialogue initially represents nothing more to Harry than a “nice fat recording.” It is an aural corporeality, sacrament, blood and body, to offer to The Director/auteur in exchange for more of the same. It is only

143 Corrigan, 111. 144 Ibid. 291 when Harry, trawling through layers of the recording in the same symbolic way that he crosses the train tracks toward the true self that awaits him in his lair, that he hears the truth. It is the truth about himself: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” As inhuman functionary Harry’s bottom-line rationale has made him a killer. Harry’s subjectivity gives a new meaning to that of the “self-made man,” a phrase that reportedly dates from 1832.145 He is a construct, an assemblage of machine and human. Yet between the two poles is a space formed by their coalescence. This is the subjective wound and the chronic space of difference that enables the conversation, in all of its human fears and mnemonic encoding, to be the encounter that changes Harry. He hears in it exactly what he wants to hear, and the demarcation of difference in him allows him to makes of it what he will in the will to power on a whole new footing that characterises the heroic of the false. Walter Murch, editor and sound engineer on the film, has commented on the oddly digitised nature of the voices. The inhuman fragments of the conversation are revealed in a kind of “digital subtraction,” according to Murch.146 This is a simulation of Harry’s peeling away the layers of the recorded conversation to get at the phrase that he believes will tell him how to act. Harry works on the tapes feverishly. They contain secrets that may endanger the lovers, such as the location for their trysts. He refuses, for the first time in his career to hand them over to his client. He determines to prevent another killing. He goes into hiding. He rewinds the tapes, plays them again and hears the emptiness inside himself. He stares at still photos of the couple and especially of the woman, taken with a hidden camera. He becomes vulnerable to old, repressed human yearnings, to need people around him—someone to tell his secrets to. As a professional violator of privacy, Harry is profoundly aware of the blurring of the inner and outer, and the violation of the private by the public as a result of the human misuse of technology. There is no better example of this than the bugger's convention that Harry attends as somewhat of a celebrity, during the depths of his involvement in the project. Out of paranoia, Harry has sacked his assistant, yet his paranoia intensifies when at the convention he sees the assistant working for a jealous rival, Moran (Allen Garfield). Moran gives a sleazy demonstration of the new surveillance technology's

145 Tanner, 89. 146 Michael Jarrett, “Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch, “Film Quarterly 53.3 (Spring 2000): 9. 292 potential as a counterfeit detective in divorce work, assisted by a coquettish model dressed in green (Elizabeth MacRae). Later, the lady in green seduces Harry, and while he sleeps he dreams of his childhood paralysis and nearly drowning in the bath. In his dream he warns the girl in the conversation that he’d kill her if he got the chance. While Harry dreams, the lady in green steals the tapes revealing the hotel where the lovers tryst, and takes them to the Director. Harry wakes up and the realisation of the betrayal unhinges him even further. Like Vertigo, The Conversation is structured in three acts. In the final act, Harry books an adjoining room in the hotel next to that of the lovers in order to save them from the murderous Director. But how? Harry’s first instinct is to bug the lover's room. The result is that when the actual killing begins, it is amplified either in Harry’s room or his head, to the point where his childhood paralysis returns and he can do nothing to stop it. Stricken, he listens to death mediated through a technology that cannot in truth, bestow life. Harry passes out and wakes up yet again, in different psychic terrain. He walks next door and in another bizarre crossing of the imaginary tracks, the camera films him walking toward himself. In a nod to both Hitchcock’s fictions and the hard facts of Watergate, the room is immaculate. Impossibly, there is no evidence of any crime. Did he imagine it from beginning to end? As with other noir heroes, Harry’s cannot see the truth for looking: he grows deeply suspicion of this semiotics of the same. In a shot, remarkable as much for its homage to Psycho as its appropriation of elements of horror and abjection, Harry flushes the toilet only to conjure up the hitherto hidden horror—the abjected Director, authorial evil suppressed and recovered in the most banal way.147The pristine toilet overflows in a cataclysmic projection of fear and loathing spewing out blood and tissue in a red tide, a “miscarriage of cinema” that freezes Harry to the spot, arresting the film and stopping time. 148 As in Vertigo, the subject has been duped. The object was a decoy. It is not the lovers who have been killed but the Director: horrifically slashed before being wound in the plastic shroud of the shower curtain. Harry sees this in a flashback impossible enough to throw these events into undecidability. But the fact remains that the Director is dead

147 We are reminded of the ending of The Confidence Man with its almost nihilistic play on the word stool. 148 Ratner. “Notes on The Conversation,” 293 under mysterious circumstances and the conspirators—the lovers and the Assistant—have assumed control of the Company. This revelatory scene takes place in the split set of the company foyer that is an overtly artificial, modernist interior. According to Coppola, this was in fact an exterior set which explains the anomalous, menacing lighting that, in addition to the sound, is one of the most chilling effects in The Conversation.149 In this scene Harry finally understands that humans are like any signs. They are subject to multiple readings. Harry got it wrong. You cannot separate the artefact from its human source. He read the lovers wrong, especially the woman. He made the wrong recording. He’d kill us if he got the chance, was in fact, he’d kill us if he got the chance. Emphasis is in the ears of the eavesdropper. The targets are the killers. The detective is duped. Back at his apartment, Harry picks up the phone and a disembodied voice turns the tables on him. “We’ll be watching you,” it says. Now it is Harry who can neither run nor hide. The watcher is the watched. The wireman is wired. Indiscernibility, in noir, is the only game in town. If incoherence in the image is unleashed by these serial indiscernibilities, Harry, like the conversation, finds himself subjected to multiple readings. Is he romantic hero in search of salvation? Or is he an automaton, the inhuman functionary of the filmmaker, of the Director? He is less a human representative than an inhuman replicant substituting technology for reality and deathly privacy for life? Is Harry’s monstrosity in turning away from life toward art a simulacrum of the filmmaking process or is it a critique? As with Vertigo, in the end it is difficult to read a critique of a form made in a shape that merely simulates it. This difficulty might make us question whether the form and the shape are in conspiracy together? In The Conversation, how far back does the conspiracy go? Were the lovers in on it? Was the lady in green really a plant? Was Harry’s bugger rival Moran in on it too, seeing the caper as a chance to put Harry out of the game? Had the Assistant and the Director switched sides? Who was the Assistant speaking for when he told Harry that “you really don’t want to get involved in this”? Harry heard the Director’s voice behind this very noirish warning, but was it really the lovers who were directing Harry, setting up the plot against them as a decoy? Or was plot real, and were they simply using Harry

149 Coppola and Murch, “DVD Commentary.” 294 to save them by turning the tables against the Director? Was the conversation, like Madeleine in Vertigo, just a decoy that took on a life of its own? Like Coppola himself, who is both a product and producer of the very corporate interests he can critique but cannot escape, Harry has painstakingly produced the wrong meaning. If filmmakers attempt to critique a culture based on the pursuit of profit in the very form that sustains this culture, the result is palimpsest text that carries the seeds of its own destruction in the very words that cancel out those very words. The self-made man is a tautology, a fiction that denies the very fictional principle it represents. These counter-energies are tightly intertwined in the noir ethos, inasmuch as it must exemplify that which it attempts to change. Noir fiction is a self-creating system characterised by a double- agent who, like Harry, suspects that he may be the biggest fake of all. In the end, the noir protagonist is driven by a monstrous suspicion about his or her own role in representation. In the futility of their involvement, that “uphill road to failure,” as Jean-Pierre Melville describes it, the character is a mirror of his or her creator. After a lifetime erecting a fortress of privacy around him, Harry is left to unpeel it, the way he unpeeled the recording, to find the bug, the code at its centre. We are reminded of Scotty unpeeling Judy's layers to get at the fake Madeleine in Vertigo. As a vertiginous camera encircles him in paranoia, Harry turns his apartment into a demolition zone, prefigured by the building seen through the window in the opening scene. He methodically peels away all four walls, the floor and ceiling to get at a bug he'll never find. Perhaps there really isn’t a bug. Maybe he is just paranoid. Maybe the bug is inside him—a dormant human conscience that is impossible to remove. Will he find it? Alone amongst the literal ruins of privacy and of individuality, this postmodern protagonist may never know.

Heroics of Deception in the Conversation

In The Conversation, the heroics of deception are unleashed in the conversation itself. As Coppola comments, Harry’s painstaking rewinding, recording, dubbing, sweetening and remixing of the conversation, seeps in all its repetition, into “his 295 inhuman, barren soul.”150 The conversation in all its metamorphoses, from digital overlay to buried human origin, targets the Cyborg soul and empowers it to emerge on a whole new footing. As I suggested above, Harry is literally “bugged” by a lurking conscience. The conversation has little to do with detection, and everything—in imitation of the filmmaking process itself—to do with an impossible projection of a time-stopping series of author, protagonist, representation and bad copy. Harry’s quest betrays the hope that one element—which one? —will leap out of the series in a demarcating act. For, more than anything, The Conversation is about the negotiation of authorial presence within and against the text, about how the text deceives itself and the crisis of confidence of character, actor and filmmaker in roles that cannot by definition exist outside their own metamorphoses. Thus the search of the disconnected, alienated protagonist is, in the end not for the same, but for the new. The new must nevertheless be, as Herman Melville puts it, something “to which we feel a tie.”151. In the context of The Conversation, this means that in spite of Harry’s armour of alienation, he is searching for a new world at his disposal, a world that he can enter on a his own terms, not as functionary and not as superman but as something in between: human. In chapter IV I show that this point of entry is the Deleuzian interval. In The Conversation, this space is negotiated by the new automaton. In Deleuze's terms, we are in the regime of the cinematic or psychological automaton:

“[W]hen the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in an incessant stream of messages…”152

This incessant stream of images is very much in evidence in The Conversation. Harry glues sounds that he doesn’t hear to images that he can’t possibly see. He cuts

150 Coppola in Coppola and Murch, “Commentary,” DVD, The Conversation. 151 Melville, The Confidence Man, 244. 152 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 267. 296 recorded dialogue with black and white still photos taken from a hidden camera. The whole takes shape in his head and on the screen, literally re-membered and re-presented. Harry tells himself that he is looking for truth. But in truth, it is the truth he must create. He is an automaton, but cinematic in that he is looking for a shape. He falls prey to a kind of acrophenia, or pattern recognition. Without knowing what he wants, he sees the pattern of one’s life emergent in a random static, in the bounded chaos of the assemblage. The handicap of fiction designates Harry not only as fragile, unviable Romantic hero, but ontologically aberrant in his flawed feminised vision. He is a monstrosity emergent from the random static of a human pattern he can’t escape. Like Coppola, Harry is burdened with the task of making the real world visible through the lens of the artificial. In Vertigo and The Conversation, the protagonists re-enact the multiple powers of the text. These are the powers to be deceived and to lie, to be the agent of the truth—fiction—and see into its falsification in the real. The central incoherence of these texts lies in their powers to establish an ambiguity in terms of the protagonist. We see them both in terms of detective stories and horror. In the former the protagonist is the detective whose transgressive function has been to track down and project the truth. In terms of the latter he is a monster produced by an indefensible society. This latter option coexists in uneasy juxtaposition with the forms that it never can totally eclipse. The text can no longer bear witness to the traditional figure of the charismatic individualist hero, but cannot turn its eyes away from what is emergent in that image, always threatening, but never fully succeeding in over-writing it.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter I argue that a heroic of deception unleashes the powers of noir through a coalescence of the object and the subject in Vertigo, and through an indiscernibility of the human and the inhuman in The Conversation. This heroic is that of the stitching together of incompatible parts in monstrous interchange. The noir assemblage is therefore a two-headed monster, or automaton. It affects perpetual metamorphosis in which the real and the virtual coalesce. The false continuity of their 297 movements is criminal in Vertigo, machinic in The Conversation and, like The Confidence Man, serial in both. This false continuity of movement actualised on screen but rendered virtual by the time-image raises the whole to the power of the false. In order to create the new in the chasm between art and life, the two poles take after each other in a crisis of confidence that severs the tie between opposing modes of production in representation. 298

CHAPTER THREE

“IF THIS BE ART’S LIE”

“You played your part better than I did mine; you played it, Charlie, to the life.”

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man (1857)

Introduction

Marie Hélène Huet’s concept of the monstrous imagination provides us with a model of subjectivity that intersects in fruitful ways with Deleuze’s powers of the false. If Deleuze’s approach to cinema belongs to a philosophy of time, Huet argues that a theory of monstrosity has always been, in a sense, a theory of art. The role of art in connection to time is that of putting, as Deleuze says, the notion of truth in crisis.153 Huet’s reprisal of a heroically monstrous imagination furnishes us with the tools to demonstrate this connection. I intend to show how a reading of Vertigo, The Conversation and my novel Viper, through the monstrous imagination paves the way for a rearticulation of the noir heroic as empowered by the false. Thus, to delineate how a series of monstrous imaginings plays into the innovative energies of noir, I supplement Huet’s readings with my own and with an analysis of The Conversation and Vertigo. I conclude with a discussion of Viper as a locus of a critical indiscernibility between the monstrous imagination and the heroics of the false. In Marie Hélène Huet’s terms, the monstrous imagination is that which produces life not from life but from art. Her trajectory of the monstrous imagination moves from Renaissance bad faith to the demise of the imagination in favour of memory in the Enlightenment. She traces the resurrection of representational anxieties to the Romantics and a redirection of these toward a postmodern theory of simulation in the modern era.

153 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 130. 299

Throughout this trajectory, the historically imagined monster clearly serves as a useful analogy of the noir hero. To better understand Huet’s critique of a modern ideology of representation, I take a brief detour through an inaugural, if not originary assemblage: Plato representing Socrates theorising about representation. I do this to better elucidate what a coalescence of Huet’s and Deleuze’s approaches can do for an understanding of noir heroics. I discuss Plato’s representation of Socrates concept as a means of connecting it to the coalescing impulses that drive the time-image.

Becoming as a Power of Metexein.

My central argument is that an anxiety about representation, or about art, is what drives the Promethean performance at the dark heart of noir. As I show above, the power of the noir hero lies in his or her misguided intervention in an elusive, deferred identity. The conflicted protagonist finds himself or herself attempting to reproduce a past that he or she cannot know, in order to change a future he or she cannot foresee. This reproductive and retroactive impulse is the point of entry into the new. The question then is: how to create the new by reproducing an identity over which one has only a false power? Answering the question demands a return to the concept of becoming emergent in Deleuze’s series of time: a series that attempts to both track down and erase its Platonic origins. I note again that although a rehearsal of the instructive dialogue between Plato and the deconstructionists in general and Deleuze in particular, is beyond the scope of this dissertation, my concern is to briefly investigate an overlooked connection between Deleuze’s concept of becoming and Plato’s terminology regarding representation.154 Plato’s formulation of representation (mimesis) is that of a participation in or taking-after the attributes of the model, but not the model-in-itself. Plato uses the term

154 For an overview of Platonism and anti-Platonism in deconstructive criticism, see Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 236-237; Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology. eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell, 1988), 429-450; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 138-143, 262-394 and passim; and Arne Melberg,Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10- 50. 300 metechein, or metexein155, for which, I argue, Deleuze’s concept of becoming serves as a kind of unruly offspring. Again, in Deleuze’s terms, if the series is a sequence of images, which tends in the direction of a limit, then becoming is that “which transforms an empirical sequence into a series, a burst of series.” 156 Becoming, through the operation of metexein, or taking-after, severs the cinematic sequence or scene from its centre. I note again the opening shots of both Vertigo and The Conversation that “throw up a jumble of vanishing centres.”157 Crucially, both becoming and metexein refer to a process of bad copying at the heart of an anxiety over representation. In chapter I, I discuss Lukac’s description of the novel as an expression of the transcendental homelessness of modernity. For Lukacs, the novel was a response to a paradigm shift in which “the old parallelism of the transcendental nature of the form-giving subject and the world of creative forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of creation has become homeless.”158 This is what Deleuze means when he states that in the process of becoming the world has lost its centre: not only the centre of itself, but as a moving body it has lost the centre around which it turns. There is only a shock of forces remaining in series: each only referring to each other. In the action of becoming, as Deleuze explains it, forces lose their centres and refer only to other forces along the chain of metamorphosis.159 Plato's role as the so-called “father of metaphysics,” and by extension, Socrates’s performance as inaugural subject take place in the paternal series which might also include Cervantes as the father of the European novel, Hitchcock as the master of suspense, and Hammett as the father of hard-boiled fiction. Paternity as I suggest in Viper, thus presents itself as an appropriate fiction in which to frame a comparison of the monstrous maternal imagination with the unmanned powers of the false in noir. How do the author and the monster co-operate through representation to provide for the fictional eradication of authority, an erasure as deceptive as it is prophetic? Plato was forced to rely on the powers of the false in order to outdo fiction, to represent Socrates representing

155 Plato, The Republic, 266. 156 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 157 Ibid., 142. 158 Lukacs, 40. 159 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 142. 301 in order to demon-strate160 the limits of the system. In Plato’s theory of representation, or mimesis, the limits of representation, by definition, cannot be known without dangerously mutating the shape of subjectivity. Clearly, in delineating the limits of representation, the subject necessarily enters into a modification of these limits, a modification by which a Deleuzian formulation of becoming may be approached. A brief summary of the divided Platonic schema reminds us that the general form is the attribute or general idea of being something “in itself.” The relation of the general form to the particular is that of presence in it (parousia) without being replicable in itself. The replication of forms is a theoretical impossibility in the Platonic schema. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates arguing that:

we go on to speak of beauty-in-itself, and goodness-in-itself, and so on for all the sets of particular things which we have regarded as many; and we proceed to posit by contrast a single form, which is unique, in each case, and call it “what really is” each thing. 161

A beautiful flower is not perfectly beautiful, even though it has the presence (parousia) of ideal (eidos) beauty in it, a beauty which it unattainable in-itself. This sharing in, or partaking, of the general form by the particular, is what the term metexein, or metechein refers to. I argue that Deleuze’s becoming as a model of “alliance contagion” serves as metexein’s unruly supplement. 162 Metexein is the relation of the particular to the form in terms of a contagion of attributes, or taking-after. Just acts are just because they are infected by or partake in the form of justice. This contamination gives them both their sameness and their difference. The claim of these acts to partake in the Idea (eidos) of justice is based or grounded on their internal resemblance to an ideal from which they fundamentally differ. The multiple acts of justice are the Ideal’s legitimate representative of the indivisible, immutable, non-

160 Demonstrate and monster share etymological roots with the word monere: to show. 161 Plato, The Republic, 507b. 162 Andrew Gibson, Toward a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 240-241. 302 replicable singular form of justice, and “it is in this sense that Ideas inaugurate or ground the world of representation.”163 In the Platonic understanding of representation, things as legitimate agents differ from what he understands as representation’s false claimants in the visual, literary or dramatic arts. The latter fail to represent, and according to Plato, monstrously defer identity. A tree’s claim to treeness is well grounded. A painting of a tree, or an actor in the role of a tree has no such claim. Such false claimants are counterfeits that must be detected. In the classical epic, they must also be punished.164 Thus the relation, however attenuated, between the artistic representation and the model remains the same. The relationship is one of metexein or a desire to occupy the same ground of resemblance in the counterfeit act of “taking-after.” We have seen how becoming is the means of this deferral of identity. I is another when Ego is no longer equal to Ego in terms of point of view. Subjective and objective viewpoint are eternally resolved in a model of truth, yet indefinitely coalesce in the powers of the false. As Deleuze says, I becomes another only when fiction is affirmed as a power and not a model.165 I is another when both subject and object lose their invariants and take their place along the series, each partaking in attributes of the other. Becoming is the literal taking-after of another by I (ego), in terms of a tracking down (piste) or repetition when repetition is essentially, the “retroactive movement between these two limits.” 166, Deleuze defines these limits as the subject (I) and the object (another), even when memory and imagination, or intention and expression, are transposed respectively upon these designations.167 The dehumanised noir hero slips on the worldly stain in his attempt to retroactively move toward the future by eternally repeating the past. He or she thus becomes infected by the human attributes he has attempted to take over. This is what Hammett’s Continental Op means when he admits to turning “blood simple” and it is both the disease and its cure.168

163 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 272. 164 Ibid., 60, 62. 165 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 152. 166 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 71 167 Ibid. 168 Jarrett, 3.This retroactive movement is also enacted in the cinematic universe; as Murch comments, the 303

For Plato, the limits of representation lay in his one-way tracking between ideal intention and expression of the form. Yet his theory, by its very nature, delineated a seeming multiplicity that rumbled beneath the surface of this track, always threatening to disrupt its teleological traffic:

The same is true of justice and injustice, good and evil, and all qualities [eidos] each of them is in itself single, but they seem to be a multiplicity because they appear everywhere in combination with actions and material bodies and with each other. 169

Representation must therefore reject the multiple in favour of the singular in order to maintain its own false logic. This logic is as riven as that of the noir hero and as contaminated by its own self-generating errors. Earlier I refer to the chronic condition of the noir character as that which compels them to repeat the past with no end in sight. The chronic subtext in the idea of catching an infection through copying should be noted. Metexein is both the disease and the cure. As Plato suggests, it is “impossible to play many roles well, whether in real life or in representations of it on the stage.” 170 This is the dilemma that goes to the heart of noir. According to Plato, the conflict directly leads to playing the roles badly, that is, to “catching the infection [metexein] in real life,” thus leading to the production of a “second nature.”171 This second nature functions as a supplement to an original human nature. As Hammett’s hardboiled heroes discover, it assumes non-human, or monstrous control in order to coalesce with the other conflicting aspects of the heroic performance. This is particularly clear in cinema when the actual image of the actor coalesces with the virtual image of the character, not around a centre but around the vanishing points of indiscernibility. It is a seeming multiplicity beneath the surface of the representational track that has no place, yet is everywhere at once in the new realm of noir. It is its irreducible first film audiences paid to see was Lumiere’s The Arrival of a Train, and locomotive motifs—tracks, switching, cars, ties—continue to serve as a metaphor for film, video, and sound recording. 169 Plato, The Republic, 476. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., 395d. 304 difference, a difference memorably restaged in David Cronenberg’s 1979 film, The Brood. As with horror generally, this film noir launches an attack on entrenched family values. A troubled mother eludes the sinister mastery of enlightened therapy in order to unleash serially mutant offspring from an external womb. Thus there is room to move in this Platonic schematic because difference and repetition are its combined objects. Following Plato, Deleuze locates a monstrosity in the idea of a total but not totalising multiplicity rumbling beneath representation.172 What of these false claimants to representation, these simulacra? Again, I locate the simulacrum in Herman Melville’s Counterfeit Detector, in Vertigo’s detective and his Madeleine-Judy and in The Conversation’s automaton. These are all false claimants to the original that they claim in good faith to represent. The point is that they are key to the chasms in representation, which comes with its own warning or promise, depending on which way Plato had Socrates put it. This warning or promise concerns the partial assimilation, metexein, of the actor, painter or poet to the object of his or representation. The irony of Don Quijote is that the character become infected by the knighthood he insanely imitates. It was the role he was born and would die to play. It is the same with Vertigo’s Judy. She finds her second and her real nature in the false Madeleine, with which she becomes infected. Scotty finds his in the criminal act. The Conversation’s Harry catches the human disease lurking in a recorded conversation. Yet, it is not as simple as that, because as Deleuze reminds us, the “new automata did not invade content without a new automatism bringing about a mutation of form.” 173 Thus the interchange between content and form, like that between subject and object is one of becoming, or likeness-catching or metexein. It is through this operation of taking-after that we fully come to understand the relationship between form and destiny in noir as that of shape- creation. When it mutates into this kind of likeness-catching, mimesis or representation facilitates metamorphosis through a kind of anti-metexein. This is a murky mechanism of knowledge and reality. To return to an abiding metaphor for representation, and one investigated in Cervantes’s novel, one can theoretically transform base metal into gold by

172 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 274. 173 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 265. 305 isolating an intrinsic, non-relational property of the one with which to infect the other. One can persuade readers or viewers, that is, mimetically infect them, with representation’s indiscernibility from reality, through the reproduction not of an original but of a copy that has a “superficial likeness” to the subject.174 The powers of the false come down to a functional indiscernibility that echoes in Plato’s conflicted refrain: “Is [the painter’s] representation one of apparition or of the truth?”175 Plato’s conflicted formulation has ensured the longevity of its impact on the debate over representation (mimesis). As we understand it, the reader as well as the writer gets caught up (metexein) in the story and loses track of a putative self. As if to demonstrate this, Plato, like others, feigned his own contagion by the very form that he ostensibly sought to outdo: poetry. Rather than sustaining a critique of mimesis, what Plato achieved was a powerful demonstration of the viability of false copies as a factor in their own metamorphoses. Through the imitation of a false model, representing a representation, identity mutates into a Deleuzian alliance contagion: to becoming another. It is no surprise then that in noir I locate images that bear traces of their Platonic origins and are thus: “somewhere between being and non-being … not so dark as to be less real than what is not, or so luminously clear as to be more real than what is.”176 Through Plato, the noir figure is raised to the level of an apparition. Plato has his “character,” Socrates, represent the concept of mimesis one way. Yet Plato, the author, appears to use mimesis in another way, one that more closely approximates metexein. The Republic produces a kind of noirish vertigo while generating unrelenting suspense. By the book’s end, it is impossible, on reflection, to tell how to take this critique of representation presented as a representation. As I ask above, how is one meant to take a repudiation of any mode made in an imitation of that mode? How, for example can one take a repudiation of the movement-image made as a moving image, as in film noir? The melancholy generated by this poetics of suspense characterizes film noir and is built into its inaugural form, the novel, as a kind of anti-metexein within representation.

174 Plato, The Republic, 599, 600d. 175 Ibid., 598b. 176 Ibid., 479d. 306

The Renaissanc Imagination: “if this be art’s lie”

The monstrous imagination challenges the entrenched schema of resemblance through a radical model of difference and repetition that overlaps in many ways with that of Deleuze in his seminal work.177 Monstrosity looms large in contemporary theories of literature and film.178 The monster can mean many things, but Huet’s study is unique in that it addresses monstrosity not in the wider sense of “that species of the non-species” or even in the Deleuzian sense of a multiplicity. 179 Huet goes behind these formulations through a historic model that shows how the monstrous imagination subverts the Aristotelian formulation of resemblance that states that progeny is monstrous when it does not resemble its legitimate genitor while bearing a deceptive resemblance to an image outside its conception.180 While Huet's approach to the monstrous imagination is largely in terms of literature, I see it also as an allegory of the Deleuzian time-image. From its earliest manifestations, the monster bore a paradoxical resemblance to that which did not engender it, or did so as a result of an unnatural, forbidden conception. According to Renaissance physicians and philosophers, monsters were born as a result of pregnant woman's fevered and passionate contemplation of images. Such a deviant contemplation of art had the power to override natural forms of conception. The enigma of resemblance was thus solved during the Renaissance by the role of the imagination in a culturally inflected revival of Aristotle. An epistemology of the female as an accident of nature, albeit a necessary one, makes a clear demarcation between the norm on one side—the side where like produces like—and the aberrant female on the other side, the side of the monstrosity. Resemblance testified to nature’s order. In Generation of Animals, Aristotle writes:

177 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 178 For an overview see Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. (London: Routledge, 1993), 108-123; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 233-242; Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Modern Criticism and Theory, edited by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), 108-123; Andrew Gibson, “Narrative and Monstrosity, “in Toward a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 237-274; and Donna Harraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate(d) Others,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Gary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295-337. 179 Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play, 122. 180 Huet, 22. 307

Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity … the first beginning of this deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male. 181

In an attempt to establish that the male’s power of passing on his essential attributes was continuous with God’s power of conferring meaning on all things, Renaissance scholars of medicine and embryology conversely ascribed the maternal imagination with the power to literally imprint an image of misdirected desires onto the foetus.182 Yet this deviant female power comes at a price—death, insanity, stillbirth, or a monstrous deformity. Thus the mother who saw too much would be burdened with misshapen offspring widely discussed in the literature of the day as the direct result of her distracted imagination. As an example, the widely publicised case of the Hairy Virgin, discussed by Montaigne, Boaistuau and others, involved a female child:

completely covered with hair like a bear; she was born thus deformed and hideous because her mother had gazed too intensely upon an effigy of St John dressed in animal skins which hung at the foot of the bed when she conceived.183

In his influential 1674 treatise, The Search After Truth, the Cartesian priest Nicholas Malebranche provides a number of examples of the terrible powers of the maternal imagination. A particularly chilling case is the pregnant woman who witnesses an execution. The child is born, “insane and broken.” 184 Its limbs are deformed in places that correspond to those of the victim who was broken on the rack. Malebranche

181 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 401- 403. 182 It would be two hundred years before such an abolition of all signs of legitimate paternity would take on the Promethean connotations we associate with noir. 183 Pierre Boaistuau, “Histoires Prodigieuses, “quoted in Huet, 24. 184 Nicholas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 115. As Huet argues, this particular child who grew to adulthood and was put on display, was rendered insane because he was at once error and truth, which is a living impossibility. He was insane and broken because he was literally modelled on the irrational cut of physical torture. Like the monster who looked like the representation of St Pius, the broken child bore the literal imprint of torture, which is not so much a representation but a duplicitous simulation an ideal of Justice. 308 summarises the hold of the deviant maternal imagination on the cultural consciousness thus:

Pregnant women are urged to rub some hidden part of their body when they see something that surprises them, or when they are excited by some violent passion, for that can make the marks appear on these hidden parts rather than on the face of their child … For it can be said that nearly all infants who die in the womb without being ill have no other cause of their misfortune than the terror, or some ardent desire, or some other violent passion of their mothers.185

A modernist anxiety about the image can be traced directly to this prescriptive ideology in which the imagination has the perceived power to override and overwrite the more reliable passages of memory. The etymological kinship between demonstrate, monere (to warn), monster, and demon connects abnormal birth with the prophetic image of impending doom. The medical scholar Pare discusses the child born looking like a frog, and another born with a foreshortened forehead because his mother had gazed upon a painting of St Pius looking to heaven during conception.186 The prodigal birth spoke to the end of time itself because, as I discuss regarding The Conversation, the insertion of art into life has a time-arresting function.187 Similarly, in Vertigo, the literal execution of art is the punishment for confusing past, present and future.188 The tragic offspring described by Malebranche and his colleagues embodied such temporal confusion: their pasts were literally stitched onto their presents in the form of a disfigurement. Further, like many cross-species hybrids,

185 Ibid., 116. 186 The child “looked exactly like the representation of the saint. He had the face of an old man, as far as it is possible for a beardless child; his arms were crossed upon his chest, with his eyes turned toward the heavens; and he had very little forehead, because the image of the saint being raised toward the vault of the church, gazing toward heaven, had almost no forehead.” Malebranche, 116, emphasis added. 187 The metaphoric device of the catastrophically still photograph or painting inserted into the frame would be incorporated into the lexicon of cinema, and especially noir to indicate the end or suspension of time, and the moving image—cinema—itself. 188 Huet, 6. 309 their perceived sterility deprived them of the future or any transmission of meaning beyond their own contained yet unbounded monstrosity. 189 In connection with the above-mentioned intersection of a Platonic taking-after to a Deleuzian theory of becoming, I note that, in these cases of monstrous offspring supposedly produced by the confusion of reality and life, the mother was likened to Plato’s blind artist in that:

[t] he desiring imagination that leads her to usurp the father’s formative role in procreation drives her to a series of fateful confusions: confusions between art and nature, between physis and techne and between imagination and reproduction. Whereas the artist imitates with discernment, the mother’s imagination artlessly reproduces a model that is already an imitation of art.190

Through her deviant contemplation of and desire for the image of man instead of man as he is, the mother literally executes art—murders her offspring at the moment of their conception.191 In a prescient gesture toward modern theories of art, the mother was an artist or murderer of life, and her offspring or living dead were her portraits. Unlike her male antecedents, the Renaissance mother supposedly produced this deviant art by accident. It was not a result of ignoble intention, but rather produced from a chronic affliction or ignorance that rendered her unable to discern an image from reality. In Renaissance ideology monstrous progeny imitates or takes after a model that belongs to art rather than nature. Monstrous progeny—the Girl with Hair like a Bear, or the Child with the Face of a Frog—can be seen as the ultimate illegitimate offspring. These offspring called into question in the most troubling ways the hierarchy of nature and the role of the legitimate father, artist or author. In a prescient gesture toward and

189 The authorities denied baptism to deformed children, who by definition, could be disavowed by their genitor. Horrifyingly, a 1826 French law stated that “there can be no homicide committed against a monster.” Ibid., 122. 190 Ibid., 24. Emphasis added. 191 Additionally, these monstrous births are not only engendered by powers of the imagination, but take place in an interval out of time: the conjugal embrace, the fleeting moment of conception, or gestation. All of these times are unique to a female temporal experience defined as I show, in terms of the perpetual presents and presence of the interval. 310 back to the Platonic/Deleuzian simulacrum, Renaissance thought emphasises the essential paradox in the ideology of the imagination. This is a paradox that stems from the double deception of the monstrous offspring: on the one hand it did not resemble that which engendered it—the father. Yet on the other hand it did: by demonstrating a resemblance, to a category—an image—terrifyingly external to its conception. By extension this monstrous progeny was therefore a living reminder of a principle entirely alien to nature: the transgressive desire to reproduce across the species. In this case the two are the species of the human and that of the image. This deviant feminised desire at the heart of art stands innocently if uneasily in the shadow of the masculine intention, however adulterous, to reproduce an ideal union in imitation of God’s with man. 192 In order to extend Huet beyond the monstrous imagination and toward the powers of the false, I argue for indiscernibility as a crucial figure of noir. Plato’s enduring juxtaposition of eikastaken, or likeness making, and phantastiken, or appearance presenting, furnishes us with another concept for establishing this linkage between Huet and Deleuze.193 The comparison of eikastaken to phantastiken links good faith to representation in the following important sense. Eikastaken is an exact copy, true in all dimensions and proportions to the model. It is Cratylin reproduction without interpretation. But phantastiken is the process by which an artist selects elements of the original—its best proportions for example—to produce a beautiful work of art. In other words, eikastaken is undiscerning simulation, while phantastiken is representation with discernment:

[I]n works either of sculpture or painting, which are of any magnitude, there is a certain degree of deception. [The artists] give up the truth in their images and make only the proportions which appear to be beautiful, disregarding the real ones.194

192 Innocence thus restages the pre-ordination of criminality, a concept dating from antiquity. This was another paradox endemic to imaginationism. By virtue of her sex, the mother was both “unnaturally” innocent, and “naturally” guilty. She re-enacts this paradox in the good faith of her unfaithful artistry. 193 Plato, “The Sophist,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowitt, 2 vol. (New York: Random House, 1937). 194 Ibid., 242. 311

Regarding my earlier discussion of good faith in bad form, or shape, as a sign of the noir heroic, eikastaken is unselective yet faithful. In contrast, phantastiken is interpretive but unfaithful. It reveals a bad faith in higher or good form. The former generates bad art and bad copies, while the latter produces beauty—not as it is, which cannot be retrieved through memory, but as it should be: beauty as it is reproduced through the imagination. If becoming is Deleuze’s unruly supplement to Plato’s metexein, then through the eikastaken-phantastiken schema, the imagination is the unfaithful supplement to memory. Huet’s imaginationism echoes Deleuze’s formulation of difference through repetition because “the active synthesis of memory and understanding are superimposed upon and supported by the passive synthesis of the imagination.”195 Similarly, by linking good faith with likeness-producing and bad faith to resemblance catching, I am superimposing these onto the series of noir protagonist and monstrous artist. Vertigo’s Scotty embodies the monstrous maternal imagination because he fatefully and fatally confuses the past and the present. Such confusion leads him to see actual resemblance in a mere model of an imitation of art: Judy as Madeleine, Madeleine as Judy. Similarly The Conversation’s Harry fatally mistakes the words of the conversation as those of the victims and not the killers. As a result, he produces a soundtrack that takes after a decoy crime, thus paradoxically exposing the real one: the dehumanising misuse of power. The Renaissance mother lives in Viper’s Chalmers who, fearful that Lena’s illegitimacy foretells a world outside his mastery, attempts to re-master her as a go- between. He forces her to submit to representation by dropping her between its crevices, in which paradoxically she finds new room to move. In each case it is a male protagonist who is the locus of a serial restaging of the maternal imagination in his own terms and in a crisis of paternal confidence. The serial operation in noir of these degrees of imitation lends the mode its signature hallucinatory aesthetic. Judy’s art is both eikastaken and phantastiken. Scotty’s monstrous reproduction of a non-original Madeleine—already a work of art created by the murderous mastermind—exposes a monstrous authorial presence even as it erases it through degrees of attenuated remodelling. Hitchcock’s frenzied manipulation of

195 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 175 312 character is deceptive because life in art is literally and paradoxically, a means to an end. As Huet explains:

The Platonic artist both uses nature and corrects it by imposing beautiful proportions on what he perceives. The artist’s work is inexact on several levels, but the liberties he takes in relation to the viewer’s gaze are also proof of his superior talent. His work is made to be seen and admired. If this be art’s lie, then the monster is its terrible truth. The monster is art without interpretation or signature, since the father, the only one who has the right to leave his mark (as he gives his name to the child he engenders) has been supplanted and erased by the image produced by the mother’s imagination.196

I return for a moment to Don Quijote. Cervantes represents himself in order to abdicate literary paternity in one of his walk-ons. He pretends to disavow his book, complaining that it is like a monster, a “puling child, withered, whining.”197 Writers of fiction would agree that the novel is the ultimate sign of disorder in the system, a disorder brought about by the falsifying powers of the imagination. Don Quijote is not Cervantes’s child, but his step-child or his malformed progeny, born of the character's fatal confusion of art and life. The monster is a living paradox, an assemblage of the mother as author faithfully reproducing lies through the bad form of the imagination. In spite of or because of the riven nature of Platonic theories of representation, they continue to haunt and exceed the limits of the form. Huet reminds us that Plato’s idea of phantasia was associated with light—phaos. Yet, in Platonic terms, the imagination—blinded by an image that has turned against or away from its model—is linked to darkness. Fiction can be seen as monstrous progeny, a riven figure split between light and dark that anticipates an abiding noir aesthetic. Further, the monstrous child bears witness, as Malebranche’s schema reminds us, to the guilt of the mother in not turning away from the deceptive image of art. The prodigal child is a living reminder of, and punishment for, a confused and undisciplined gaze designated as female. Such an

196 Huet, 26, emphasis added. 197 Cervantes, 1: prologue, 3. Cervantes apparently read Aristotle, newly translated into Spanish, while in prison. 313 impaired vision is severed from motor capacity and associated with the abyssal gaze into the image. As Chalmers says: don’t look down. To summarise: the transgressive mother’s encounter with the image was confused from the outset. She reproduced the image as she saw it—real—and not as it was—art—in order to imprint its distorted contours on her doomed offspring and misdirect the sign of the legitimate father. Monstrous offspring took after not the original—not St. Pius himself, for instance, a form irretrievable to the mother—but “the tableau after which its mother had formed it by the power of her imagination.”198 The mother as artist could only reproduce indiscriminately what was a mere artistic effect—perspective, foreshortening—as a kind of “counterblow” on her own misshapen offspring. The theory was that the offspring would be “broken in the same places in which those of the criminals are broken.”199 She is therefore a model for our noir protagonist who by indiscriminately producing a visible similarity to a false model, creates a monster broken in the same places as that of the model. We think of the broken Judy and the false conversation with its broken emphasis. The noir subject erases the legitimate father—the film maker, the villain and himself—in order to produce the monstrous result of a “poor artistic imitation of an image already once removed from its original model.”200

The Enlightenment: Yesterday’s Painting

The impact of imaginationism on the works discussed in this dissertation is more fully demonstrated by tracing its shift from Renaissance theories of resemblance to Enlightenment theories of difference. The shift is not as radical as it first appears. Enlightenment engagement with the imagination can be divided into three complex stages:

198 Huet, 26, emphasis added. 199 Malebranche, 115. 200 Huet, 49. 314

First: “There are no clear-cut boundaries in nature”201 The imagination was reduced, like the monstrous offspring itself, from an aberration to a universal force of nature. The imagination was proof of nature’s infinite variety that in fact produced the male and female of the species as monstrous variations of each other.202 How did 18th century thought make such an albeit deceptively tectonic leap across the ancient divide that kept male form and female matter on opposing ideological sides, with the woman sharing the same ontological terrain as the monster? It becomes clear that this conceptual change was symptomatic of a cultural shift in which an entire system of thought was being re-evaluated and invalidated, particularly a hierarchical epistemology based on inherited privilege and religious tyranny. Where did the imagination come into all this? In 1765, L’Encyclopedie, co-authored by Denis Diderot and the mathematician D’Alembert, radically re-defined resemblance as a “relationship between two things, formed by the operation of the mind.” 203 A later article described resemblance as:

conformity between the imitation of the object and the object imitated. One speaks of catching a person’s resemblance. It is a talent that seems to be independent of study; rather mediocre painters may possess it to some degree.204

The definition is as remarkable for its apparent distance from Aristotle’s conception of like produced by like, as it is proximal to a Platonic conception of infection between the model and the mimic, or metexein. Thus resemblances were shifted from the domain of nature to that of art, and not very good art at that. Mediocre art, as the Encyclopedia authors assert, could bear an especially uncanny resemblance to the undiscerning likenesses produced by the maternal imagination. In contrast to art, nature produced nothing but difference. Monstrous offspring were simple evidence of the infinite variety

201 Ibid., 200, emphasis added. 202 Denis Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,”in Selected Writings, ed. Leste G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: MacMillan, 1966), 202. 203 Quoted in Huet, 100. 204 Ibid. 315 of the same “perpetual flux” that produced males and females.205 Yet how far had an epistemology of resemblance really come from a Renaissance definition of monstrosity that defined monsters as the product of the mother’s impassioned fixation on images? Below I discuss how the image of monstrous irreducibility proved resistant even to the most enlightened thinkers. Second: Mistaken memory. The imagination, once the source of monstrous error in procreation, was elevated in this stage to the source of unfaithful resemblance.206 Women, like men, could deploy the imagination during conception in the service of a cold calculation that could over-ride adulterous acts and mask illegitimate offspring in uncanny resemblance to that which did not generate them. One could thus imagine resemblance into being to hide a conceptual culpability. The shift in the Enlightenment from the imagination as producer of error to producer of uncanny resemblance was symptomatic of a shift in the power differential between the sexes. No better example illustrates this than that of the physician Jacques- Andrea Millot whose 1780 essay, “The Art of Procreating the Sexes at Will,” took an opposite position to that of Aristotle. Again, Aristotle’s approach dictates that like produces like and “grounds the identity of beings and things on this resemblance.”207 In contrast, Millot presented a treatise on resemblance that I trace from the monstrous imagination to film noir. Millot was working within a long tradition that invoked works of art as a primary metaphor for the process of generation. He asserts that:

The most skilful sculptor or painter cannot make two statues, two paintings of the same object, without involuntarily introducing some slight dissemblance, for the reasons I have just given, that is because of the interval that exists between the parts.208

The interval is the space in time between producing each representation from a model, that crucially and transgressively refuses to remain the same as dictated by the

205 Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 221-222. 206 Huet, 79-102. 207 Huet, 95. 208 Jacques-Andrea Millot, “The Art of Procreating the Sexes at Will,”(1780), quoted in Huet, 96, emphasis added. 316

Platonic Ideal. Thus time is analogous to the female imagination, which when cut into the reproduction of the image, causes resemblance to be unreliable. Millot describes a portrait painting session where, at the commencement of each new sitting, the model failed to resemble herself as she had been so faithfully painted the previous day. Recall Scotty’s attempts to re-create Judy as Madeleine! The artist, like Scotty, in a reversal of apprehension verging on repulsion, could not, after an interval of time, see perfection in the model, and had instead to turn to his imagination. Millot explains:

I noticed the change that her pretty face had undergone. I drew my friend’s attention to it and told him that soon his model would resemble yesterday’s painting. [T]he cold tended to draw the features closer together … From this fact we concluded that resemblance consists not only in the exact proportion of the features, but especially in the interval that exists between them … Consequently, natural and perfect resemblance is only an accident of nature.209

The interval of time furnishes us with a concept for understanding the role of imagination in resemblance. Nature, like art, is less representative than it is deceptive. It produces dissemblance in time’s intervals. Therefore, in a reversal of Aristotelian- inflected dogma, exact resemblance is not a sign of nature’s order, but a warning of something wrong in the system. The system produces difference. In order to produce resemblance, what is an artist to do but to arrest nature and time itself, through the intervention of his imagination? If sameness in nature is uncanny and a result of pure chance, than the artist must reach outside of his or her “natural jurisdiction” (memory) to reproduce it.210 Thus imaginationism becomes in the Enlightenment both renatured and denatured simultaneously. This was due in part to its perceived location in the “feminine side” of creativity.

209 Ibid., emphasis added. 210 “But let nature, to the perplexity of the naturalists, produce her duck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors, some may hold, have no business to be perplexing readers with duck-billed characters.” Herman Melville, 90. Melville is ironically referring to the Australian Platypus, which when brought stuffed to England, confounded the naturalists, who “appealing to their classification, maintained that there was, in reality, no such creature.” They asserted that the bill must have been artificially attached by some antipodean trickster. 317

Third: Irreducible difference. Difference, reducible to a force of nature, could not accommodate the monstrous singularity of the womb, which continued to assert its externalised role as sign and site of the feminine powers of the false. The question I posed earlier was: how far had Enlightenment thinking travelled, if at all, from the Renaissance formulations of the monster as bad art? In Diderot’s Dream, Bordeu remarks that monstrosity is part of the universal and general order.211 Yet, there remained in nineteenth century revolutionary thought a specificity or an irreducible excess that resurrected the anxiety surrounding the monster, the image and the artist. The locus of this anxiety continues in noir to be centred in the monstrous imagination. It is feminised but not necessarily female, for as Diderot explains, “it is animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man.”212 Because of this excess or irreducible difference, the Enlightenment monster, as both witness and challenge to authorial tyranny, was simultaneously deprived of and reassigned its abiding singularity. In a reversal of Renaissance thinking, the monster bore witness to the absence of any purposive or final cause by virtue of its continuity with nature’s scheme. Its discontinuity with the present temporal order became elevated to Promethean status. The monster continued to assert the irreducible singularity of the womb in a patriarchal culture. Yet, even while seeking to validate difference, the Enlightenment ideology could not fully contain or subsume this sign of woman as just another one of many “variations within the bundle,” as Diderot describes it.213 The womb and the products of the feminine imagination proliferated, like time, both inside and outside the world. I return to the unforgettable image of the monstrously imaginative mother with an external womb in David Cronenberg’s The Brood, a film that re-enacts many of these Enlightenment tropes. Cronenberg’s anti-patriarchal mutant brood is both a Platonic multiplicity and a Deleuzian assemblage and affirms the Enlightenment claim that “monstrosities are both inside the system, as evidence of variations, and outside, as proof that there is no other system to look for, no cause, no final reassurance.”214 Thus although

211 Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 200, 219. 212 Denis Diderot, “On Women, “in Selected Writings, 311. 213 Denis Diderot, “Elements of Physiology,”in Selected Writings, 415. 214 Huet, 96. 318

Huet does not refer to this film, I argue that the character of the mother in The Brood similarly produces her critique in the form of art: a mutant brood unleashed from the darkness of the externalised womb. This is indeed an image that stops time and arrests cinema in its tracks. For the purposes of this dissertation I have termed such a space the matrices noir: dark womb. In Enlightenment terms this was:

capable of the most terrible spasms, one that controls her completely and excites phantoms of every kind in her imagination. In her hysterical frenzy, she can return to the past or leap forward into the future; all times are present to her at such moments. And it is from the organ peculiar to her sex that all her extraordinary ideas arise.215

The womb, then, in Diderot’s demystifying project, was the site of an abiding imaginationism that testified to a difference indiscernible from indefinite repetition. This symbolic feminised space was a locus for the radical energies of the era. The rhetoric of excess that characterised Diderot and his Enlightenment colleagues found its focus on this irreducible site of the maternal imagination. The exclusivity of the womb then both belies and affirms the radically inclusive rhetoric of monstrosity. Denis Diderot, who, in Elements de Physiologie poses the question: “What is a monster?” The revolutionary answer was, “A being whose duration is incompatible with the existing order of things.”216 In terms of the films in question here, Vertigo’s Judy-Madeleine assemblage must negotiate time as a series of perpetual presents. This being monstrously embodies the unruly supplement of the enlightened figure of womanhood, living and dying in a serial self-creation and uncreation. “Here I died,” says Judy-as-Madeleine. “And here I was born.” Judy is aware of the anomalous nature of her impossible being. Thus, Enlightenment simplicity is deceptive. Its stated faith in a universal “conglomeration of monstrous beings” belies an essential resistance to the excesses of the matrices noir. The idea of the exemplary difference of the womb impacts on my argument thus: even for the male Enlightenment thinkers, the excess can only be reduced

215 Diderot, “On Women, “ 312. 216 Diderot. “Elements,” 281. 319 if the womb is removed, which would then prevent the process of life-giving and the normalisation of monstrosity from taking place.217 This anxiety would be appropriated in a Romantic restaging of the monstrous imagination with memory taking over as imagination’s diabolical double. The anxiety also gestures toward a future debate over of time as truth’s unruly double, a debate to which the Deleuzian approach and a rearticulation of noir belongs.

Romantics: “a murderous hand”

In connection with the authorial god-act, Akira Kurosawa produced a series of films that can be located within the noir aesthetic and ethos. One of these is Yojimbo (1961). In this influential film, the nameless ronin’s (Toshiro Mifune) enactment of and unravelling by the god-act can be read as both neo-Romantic and exemplary of noir moral ambiguities. The hero literally drops out of the sky to toy with the warring factions in a remote town, while ensuring that he remains totally outside of the action. The Inn Keeper, one of only two good souls in the town, reproaches the stranger for his cruel manipulation of citizens. “Are we just characters in a play you are writing?” the Innkeeper asks. The amoral ronin nods mischievously. “All except [the gunslinger],” he says. “He has run away with the second act.” The ronin is forced, like Kurosawa himself, to abdicate authorial intention in a taking-after of the runaway processes of fiction.218 As Huet and others show, narratives of portrait painting became the Romantics’ obsessive subject, and a critical intervention into what was seen as the transgressive artistic god-act. A Romantic restaging of lone genitorship in tales of the diabolical artist speaks strongly to Kurosawa’s critique of the directorial god-act, to Hitchcock’s amnesiac protagonists in Vertigo. The Conversation’s automatons, and the Renaissance monstrous mothers who obsessively place art and reality at the same level. Such restaging

217 Huet, 94. 218 Yojimbo, released in the year of Hammett’s death, is reportedly an unacknowledged adaptation of Red Harvest, although this has not been confirmed by Kurosawa himself. In contrast, Sergio Leone who initially “stole back” Yojimbo for his remake, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), has since, like Clint Eastwood, acknowledged his debt to Kurosawa. 320 also invokes an enduring power of the imagination that, as I show above, originated in the irreducible difference of the womb and made “all the times present.”219 The Romantic painter’s misappropriation of a transgressive femininity imbues him with this power to navigate time. In other words, the artist-as-mother maps onto the artist-as-murderer in a conceptual exchange that is embodied in the riven heroic of this strange new protagonist. Nineteenth-century tales of diabolical artistry proliferated and crucially reassigned monstrous progeny to a lone father. Examples are Hawthorne’s “The Prophetic Pictures” and “The Birthmark,” and Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” as well as “Ligeia”..220 In Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” the artist literally steals the life out of his bride by painting her not from life, but from the void of memory. In doing so he resurrects and reverses the fateful and feminised sin of not looking away. For as Poe’s artist comes near to completing his portrait, he “turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife [his model].”221 If he had looked away he would have been both literally and figuratively in time. In not looking away he remained out of time: out of time to save the model and out of time to save himself. We recall Vertigo’s Scotty, whose mnemonic gaze was fixed not on Judy, but on the image of Madeleine virtually beside her. Thus, the point of departure of the compelling Romantic critique was a literal demonising of the Romantic artist. Not only was he demonised because of his diabolical influence on his female subject-matter, and his predilection for forbidden images, but also in his irrational behaviour when confronted with the image itself. As Poe reminds us:

… he was a passionate, and wild and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him.222

219 Diderot,”On Women,” 313. 220 Nathaniel Hawthorn, “The Prophetic Pictures,” in Selected Short Stories, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Fawcett, 1983), 54-66; “The Birthmark,” vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Ed. Nina Baym ( New York: Norton, 1998): 1261-1273; Edgar Allen Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ed. Graham Clarke. (London: Orion, 1993), 202 – 206; “Ligeia,” ibid., 167-183. 221 Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” 205. 222 Ibid., 321

In Hawthorne’s “The Prophetic Pictures”, the likenesses are so complete as rendered by the artist’s “penetrative eye”223 that they resemble their models more accurately than the models resemble themselves. In so doing, the likenesses spell the model’s abolition. Yet, according to Leibniz’s Law of Indiscernbility, such an abolition of the model ensures a similar abolition of the representation. With no object to represent, there can be no representation. It is such a loss of the subject, both liberating and cataclysmic, that is at the heart of noir melancholy. This subject thus must perform what it wishes to change: the idea of nature or authorship as a monster, a monster that must nevertheless be conjured in a terrifying gesture of demarcation. This coalescing consciousness also applies to words—but as neologisms—in the sense of thinking the urgent not yet of the other onto the page in a serial demarcation endemic to the noir aesthetic. In the moment the other is summoned, the one is necessarily no more. Such a mutating performance based on chronic repetition is what empowers the subject with literal time to unleash its own mutations before being thrown back into the void (or the closet) where it waits. This alternative will to power, that of the series, is what is described by the play of light and shadow in noir, which can be traced to the strange sexual politics of the Romantics. But it is a third tale of diabolical artistry that most clearly delineates a genesis of maternal repetition (eikastaken) and paternal interpretation (phantastaken), coalescing in the male artist. Again, memory is to imagination what phantastiken is to eikastiken. “The Birthmark” not only demonstrates the powerful, critical role of portraiture tales in the Romantic ideology, but exemplifies the role of cutting as a critical wound on the face of fiction. It was the incestuous nature of art rather than the reproduction of nature that authors such as Poe and Hawthorne critiqued as the dominant monstrosity in these narratives of portraiture. In “The Birthmark,” this monstrosity was irrevocably linked to time. The protagonist Aylmer is a kind of diabolical plastic surgeon who becomes obsessed with a birthmark on the cheek of his otherwise perfect wife, Georgiana. Aylmer was abstractly cognizant of her beauty yet his “sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birth-

223 Hawthorne, “The Prophetic Pictures,” 93-94, 322 mark a frightful object” that cried out for his surgeon's scalpel. 224 He bullies his wife into corrective surgery because his noble vision cannot bear to look upon error. “Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife…doubt not my power!” he urges. Understandably, his exhortations do not fill Georgiana with confidence. 225 To Aylmer the artist, perfection is attainable only in art, “an image … so much more attractive than the original.”226 The murderous hand as a prosthetic of artistic repulsion is one to which the poor Georgiana has first-hand experience. She refuses the surgery, but after a time, her increasingly unhinged husband can barely look upon her perfectly human face, and when he does, it is with revulsion. “I can never forget that convulsive shudder,” she says. Thus, like Vertigo’s Judy, she allows herself to be to be changed if it will bring back her beloved.227 In preparation for her surgery, Aylmer takes Georgiana’s picture with a prototypical camera. But in a sign of dark things to come, her face appears blurry, showing only a minute hand where the blighted cheek should be. This “fatal Hand” that dares to meddle with the “mystery of life” is no less than the murderous hand of the artist himself. 228 The subsequent cutting out of the birthmark results in Georgiana’s death. The demarcating birthmark was what tethered her to a flawed but accessible human existence. Aylmer belatedly realises his crime because at the time of its execution, he becomes cured of his fatal confusion. Like Vertigo’s Scotty, he is left alone with the contemplation of his loss. He is punished not by death, but by a lifetime staring into the abyss of fatal failure “to look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and … to find the perfect Future in the present.”229 Thus time drives the transgressive series of the false, and the failure of the noir protagonist to track it lends the mode both its tragic ethos and its longevity. Hawthorne’s chilling tale of cutting prefigures much of the noir imagery in Vertigo, in which as Huet describes it in relation to another tale:

224 Hawthorn, “The Birthmark, “ 1263. 225 Ibid., 1264. 226 Ibid., 1266. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid., 1267. 229 Ibid., 1273. 323

the monstrosity of art duplicates the monstrosity of unnatural progeny, replaying the reversal where life imitates art or rather where life is lived as art, already inscribed upon the canvas by a murderous hand.230

“The Birthmark” also also speaks to Harry’s desire to eliminate error or noise from the system and in so doing, cut error into the recording in The Conversation. I note that the artist's unseeing eyes witness what no human should want to see: the necessity for cutting into life as the ultimate affirmation of art. It is such an impulse that the noir protagonist, naturally drawn to art over life, must both guard against and re-enact, but with discernment. The Romantic project, at its most subversive, can be fruitfully connected to Hitchcock’s and Coppola’s conflicted iconoclasm based on the religious anxieties played out in their work and which Tanner describes in relation to a nineteenth century anxiety of discerning between devil and redeemer:

Not only does the painter sin by creating images of the natural so lifelike that they are mistaken for their image, but he violates the concept of the sacred by creating images of the natural so lifelike that they are mistaken for their model.231

These Romantic subjects were monstrously guilty of a fatal confusion between the model and its uncannily lifelike representation. The connection to contemporary noir is striking. We recall that Coppola describes Harry as more interested in technology than reality, in privacy than humanity.232 Unlike the Renaissance mother, the modern artist performs their art in an act of bad faith. The transgression, in both Romantic and noir terms can be described as the power to keep the form of the dead among the living. Or, to be more exact, it is the forbidden power that allows the form of the dead to seize the living in a “taking-after.”

230 Huet,172. 231 Ibid, 167. 232 Coppola and Murch, “DVD Commentary,” in The Conversation. 324

As Huet demonstrates, in order for the artist to represent himself as self-created, his mother—the imagination—must become his bride. He can then punish, or execute her as his model through the force of a selective memory. Thus the abiding project for the Romantics was to transcend nature's limitation against a monstrous hermaphroditism, by procreating with the missing mother as imaginary bride in order to affirm the thesis of parental singularity. The fatal life-likeness of portraiture was overtly self-reflexive, and ideologically subversive. It had less to do with its object than its subject. It’s power for fiction lay in its blinding revelation of the artist's “specular soul:”—an abstract interiorised vision of the female subject who is less a discerning artist than a bad copy of God. The portrait did not represent the model, but an idealised inversion of the artist's own incestuous desires. Art, then as diabolical, blasphemous meddling is not only a re-enactment of a blind maternal imagination that sees a model in an already mediated image, but is a monstrous restaging of the artist overly “enamoured of his art and not enough of nature.”233 The model thus becomes a pivotal image of the painter's blasphemous confusion regarding and intervention in the “natural” distinction between art recoded as masculine and reality recoded as feminine. And it is blasphemous in another important sense: the artist must erase the living in order to produce his art. Thus the metaphor of creation as art and art as the execution of a crime comes full circle in a Romantic rearticulation of the maternal imagination that it must re-write in order to revive the lone father and restage a hermaphrodite dream of sole genitorship. The mother and the father and the offspring become one in a work of art that betrays its own monstrous conception. As Huet puts it, if “progeny was a work of art, then art became a work of monstrous progeny.”234 In the nineteenth century’s reappropriation of the maternal imagination, the first project was to erase the image of the mother because, through a reversal of her transgressive desires, she almost certainly has produced the monstrous artist himself. Hawthorne’s savage critique of artistic meddling as a form of corrective cutting is a typically Romantic cautionary tale. It includes both art and science as signs of patriarchy run amok. It is a dark projection of a dehumanised male design on a collision course with

233 Huet, 171. 234 Ibid., 166. 325 a feminised human desire. The result is a critical wound from which fiction may never, and must never, recover. The conflicted quest for artistic mastery is a familiar theme in noir. It provides the conceptual framework for an aesthetic that presents a reality cut into by artifice, and heroics as an apparition, a monstrosity: a lie grown hoary and healthy with the retelling. With the exception of Welles, no filmmaker of the 1950s equals Hitchcock in so uncomfortably invoking and critiquing the novelistic obsession with “that privileged moment when the artist becomes the lone genitor and represents, reproduces without a model … at once father, lover, God.”235 The god-like power that becomes, as Rothman notes, Hitchcock’s obsessive subject is accessed not only through the innovative camera but through the character of Scotty Ferguson.236 He invokes the Romantic artist by playing out the God moment in a multiplicity or an assemblage that is simply monstrous. Vertigo’s Scotty, like Poe’s visionary artists, is transformed from a corseted emasculated invalid into an icon of tormented and sadistic masculinity. In Scotty’s efforts to cure Madeleine he is placed as the beseeching lover, often seated below her, for example when she is on the old buggy at the Mission. But later, when Scotty is on his own diabolical mission—prefigured by the appearance of the Mission’s fake tower—the mission in his head, he is looming over her like the Romantic artist in both Hawthorne’s and Poe’s tales. Note also how Scotty becomes infected by and then mimics the therapeutic language of Midge that beseeched him to start remembering and stop imagining. In Vertigo, memory is initially constituted as the good, reliable copy, only to have this formulation unpacked in the third act. Scotty is torn between urging the good copy to dissemble the past and authoritatively commanding the bad copy to resemble it. In Vertigo, the interplay between resemblance and dissembling and between possession and dispossession demarcates its location at the extreme end of noir. There, it pushes against the boundaries of the mode and gestures towards the new. As in “The Prophetic Pictures,” Vertigo’s Judy resembles the doomed Madeleine more than Madeleine resembles herself. In The Conversation Harry’s reproduced dialogue would kill him if it got the chance, and it does. Both are examples of art as

235 Ibid.,187. 236 William Rothman, The Murderous Gaze, (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1982) 102-103. 326 works of self-execution. If the impaired vision of the Romantic artist was an inverted restaging of the Renaissance monstrous imagination, it also plays into a noir critique of the hero who cataclysmically must bring a crime into being in order to see his own role in it. Impaired artistic vision is invoked in Vertigo by Scotty’s blind indifference to Judy, resulting in the erasure of the real thing with a work of art whose existence was incompatible with the existing order. Such faithless heroics invoke those of the Renaissance mother, while Madeleine as progeny is an E.T.A Hoffman-like automaton who appears to look right at Scotty without seeing him. In this of course she is simply, but paradoxically, a mirror into his blindness before the woman-monster assemblage. As Huet’s study so powerfully demonstrates, “life, understood from an artist's point of view, stems not from the female, but solely from the image of the female.”237 In Viper, both Dean’s and Chilling’s reproduction of the Diana footage is a similar re-enactment of the blinded artist who nevertheless sees too much in the image. The Romantic formulation of monstrously is both updated in The Conversation and relocated in the noir aesthetic. While The Conversation is a post-Romantic film about surveillance, multiple images of screens, mirrors, glasses and transparency demarcate Romantic themes of impaired sensory-motor function. Harry wears large spectacles that two women attempt to take off, the first so that she might see him clearly, the second or the counterfeit, in order to blind him to her treachery. One of the conspirators also wears glasses and his married lover tenderly adjusts them for him as they talk. This is a gesture that Harry repeatedly returns to in his mind in striking contrast to his own Oedipal self- blinding while the murder he again helps to commit is taking place. The strangely inhuman screen of the confessional is like a TV screen on the wrong channel. Only the priest’s listening ear is emergent in the visual static. Plastic screens at Harry’s warehouse notably divide him from his stalking, duplicitous bugger rival. In the end, however, the multiple translucent screens come down to the name of the subject: Harry Caul. Caul is Harry’s surname. A caul is that membranous cloak present in a minute proportion of all births and was believed in Medieval and Renaissance Christianity to give its wearer the ability to foretell the future.238 Harry’s caul gives him

237 Huet, 167. 238 That Harry himself bears the mark of the monster is further evidence for a sliding indiscernibility in the 327 such power: he sees his future role in an endless series of corporate crimes that he is powerless to stop. He sees the victim wound in a clear plastic shroud: the shower curtain. Like Harry, the (imagined?) killers wear plastic raincoats to protect themselves from the human stain. Cauls and shrouds are interchangeable in fiction that is in the end, always about the death of the subject. The caul is both symbol and demark in The Conversation. It is symbol of Harry’s thwarted desire for invisibility. It is demark in that it leaps of out the series of other duplicitous transparencies to become valid for itself as Harry’s future made present. Such images of deceptive, serial transparency galvanise The Conversation’s theme of monstrosity. In addition these images innovatively update the chiaroscuro aesthetic of noir. If the characters in classic noir emblematically move in and out of the shadows, in The Conversation, they emerge from and disappear behind screens. If memory’s unruly double—the imagination—was what gives the Romantic artist more time than he should humanly, and humanely have had, the refrain that echoes throughout Vertigo is “Try…and remember.” Thus Hitchcock’s camera is now amnesiac, now mnemonic, now phantasmic and always meddlesome: Judy steps out of the shabby shadows of the Empire hotel with the Exit sign flashing behind her. Exit Judy. Enter Madeleine. The new is revealed in a before that represents the after in the green wash of forbidden desire. Not only does the Romantic model privilege the father as an artist and as the agent of artificially-constructed resemblances but it replays a crisis of confidence in the signs of sameness. Romantic art as monstrous progeny imitates the reproduction of singular offspring by repeating the reversal in the mind where, through the powers of the imagination, art is literally mis-taken (metexein) for life, forcing life to be lived as art.

“He is dead,” or “if it moves, shoot it.”

model mentioned earlier and speaks to a Romantic anxiety about the monstrous origins of the artist himself, justifying a kind of figural matricide. As described by Hawthorne in “The Prophetic Pictures,” the model stands horrified before his own uncanny likeness, blinded by a revelation of its role in a crime of which they could have no prior knowledge but which, through their own inaction they are repeatedly powerless to prevent. Such artless guilt is what constitutes these figures, like the noir heroes and another 20th century monsters as Oedipally inflected serial killers. 328

The Conversation and Vertigo trace the workings of a monstrous imagination through the power of the bad copy to disrupt all possibilities of identity and of knowledge itself in favour of a perpetual becoming. Like Viper, they look to a postmodern model of becoming that depends on continual repetition or imitation rather than the reverse. The postmodern agent of multiple identities, conflicting desires and unstable filiations is heir to the Romantic artist as lone genitor in awe of his own creation. While not conflating these two historical movements, my purpose in discussing them together is consistent with my project of providing a new look at noir through the figure of indiscernibility as well as the monstrous imagination. Prior to discussing the films in question, a brief summary of Huet’s discussion of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, published in Vienna in 1915, provides a compelling illustration of some turn-of-the-century developments. The Golem mounts both a critical revival of Jewish legend and a critical engagement with a modernist crisis of confidence in identity. The Golem is an unformed mass without a soul born of words that contain traces of their own destruction. The Hebrew letters emet, or Truth, bring the Golem to life, while the erasure of the first letter, which leaves met, meaning he is dead, destroys it.239 This figure restages a millennia-old anxiety over the power of words to make as well as to unmake. In Meyrink’s novel, the Golem embarks on a serial rampage through the streets of Vienna in search of literally unspeakable origins. The Golem’s self- investigation poses the question: what is the meaning of art outside its own performance?240 As Huet asks, is art even possible when objects and words shape themselves from random events, circulating images and repeated conversations?241 The answer lies in the idea of repetition, and an impersonation that is mimetic enough to prevent total assimilation. The Golem’s leap from a Romantic privileging of the sterile artist to his elimination in favour of the proliferating artefact itself is nothing short of remarkable. Like the Golem and the modern automata that preceded it, notably Olympia in E.T.A Hoffman’s “The Sandman” of 1816,242Vertigo’s Judy is a subject grasping for a

239 Huet, 240. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 242 E. T. A Hoffman, “The Sandman, “in Tales of Hoffman, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 329 sense of self. In the second half of the film, Hitchcock switches sides in order to “describe an artificial birth from the point of view of the creature being brought to life.”243 Judy’s struggle as she is being recreated not from life but from art is to over-write a loathed filiation and find difference in the sameness of an unwanted resemblance. It is no coincidence that the meta-textual title of Hitchcock’s film noir also describes a symptom of anxiety over the status of repetition when the initial model is lost. The locus of such an anxiety in the noir mode is the protagonist—monster, automaton, criminal or forger. Such a protagonist is both deprived and liberated of legitimate birth by a lone artist whose crime is that of the memory-thief. The melancholy about origins lost to or stolen by a duplicitous memory is overwhelming in noir because this implies the forbidden serial exchange of memory with the imagination, an exchange that undermines the whole notion of resemblance. The Lady vanishes. In her place is a copy. Or is it the other way around? As Borges puts it, the hero is transfixed by the suspicion that identity, even his own, is “a projection of another man’s dream—what an incomparable humiliation, what a vertiginous deception!”.244 Scotty’s suspicions that he is in fact a bad copy of a good detective are verified at the moment he begins his remaking of Judy. Yet he cannot stop. Like the Golem, he must fulfil the self-annihilating noir imperative of critique through performance. He cannot escape the form. Yet the powers of the false enable him to cut into it as a force for change. In Viper, the Diana-footage is the monster modelled on an eternal princess, created by a global desire to “look down and not to fall,” a desire embodied in Trulli and Chilling’s exploitation of a collective lust for the moving image. The figure of Diana in Viper is a stand-in for the monster who has to suffer the incomparable humiliation of repeated inhuman projection. Prefigured by Hoffman’s automaton and Meyrink’s Golem, she is an “impalpable work of creation, inasmuch as the creation is ultimately subsumed by repetition.”245 Diana subsumes her creation through repetition of supposedly new, but

1982), 85-125. 243 Ibid. 244 Jean Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, (New York: Grove Press), 1962, 62. 245 Huet, 264. 330 indistinctly familiar material. Thus, traces remain, over which she must rescript her own character in order to be equal to the world’s obsessive attempt at remastery. Diana’s aberrant motions captured on a still camera enact a realisation of her own monstrosity, a life lived as art, and incompatible with the existing order of a dubious nature. The footage turns against itself in a choreographed movement severed from any point of reference outside her own performance. In Diana’s role as blind replicator and misguided representor, she re-enacts the paradox lying dormant in Renaissance theories of the maternal vis imaginative. In her autopoetic film she artfully and artlessly reproduces the distortions already imposed upon her subjectivity as if they were real—again. She self-reflectively enacts Princess with Flowers, Princess with Prince, Princess Kissing. Princess Leia? Who is this Princess? What is she? Is she, like Judy, an actor playing the part of a non-existent character? This Diana, whoever she is, re-presents a past already tainted with the future in a serial demarcation located in the interval between past presents and presents passing. Whatever she is, she is not what her representors want. Their rejection of the footage can be read as an affect of incoherence in the text. If it looks like Diana, moves like Diana, dies like Diana, and isn’t Diana, then it must be punished. Both Chilling and Dean in their separate, mirrored caves attempt to force the footage to submit to a mastery it knowingly refuses. Where does her identity reside? The questioning audience re-enact a crisis of confidence in the signs of sameness replayed in the footage as a simulation of Viper’s story. Diana looks at Dean as if he isn’t there. Perhaps he isn’t. Further, the concept of monstrosity impacts on Viper because Diana is not the only apparition. Dean is a demon-seed, and also not the only one. Unlike Chalmers, he has no conscience but his need for self-mastery is tied to a dehumanising upbringing. Chalmers is only one in a series of guilty fathers who must come to terms with the idea that it is less his own god-act than proliferating signs and images that have made Dean monstrous. The truth of Dean’s encounter with the only human “Hate-boy” is undecidable. Its impact nevertheless is cataclysmic and an exercise in self-annihilation. Dean, like the Golem, gestures toward the demise of the father as lone genitor, underscored by Chalmers’s mistaken, yet doubled, paternity of Lena. The child Dean is the father Chalmers’s uncanny double, or Doppelganger. Like Chalmers he is a misogynist, a thief, profligate. 331

Yet he finds a role for himself in the excesses of his act, a role not weighed down by the human sentiment. Dean has no conscience to lose. Thus paternity presents itself as an appropriate fiction in which to frame a critique of filiation and mastery against a context of post-globalisation in Viper. Like the Golem, Dean is an embodiment of “filiation from the point of view of the hateful son.” 246 Birth in Viper, prefigured in The Golem and in Vertigo, is described as a kind of dispossession. Birth is life and a resemblance inflicted on a character against her will. Such an anxiety over legitimating birth is at the heart of Lena’s character in Viper. Lena, like Judy, is a slashed identity undone by both “fathers,” one who couldn’t claim her and one she cannot claim. This transforms the dynamic of filiation, and re-links it to the desire simultaneously to possess and destroy the mother. Both Dean and Lena’s problem with origins includes the adulterous maternal vanishing act as much as the paternal god-moment. Even more than Dean, Lena is like the monstrous progeny of Meyrink’s disturbing tale. She strives to obliterate through words the writing of a hated paternity and forge a role for herself in a fateful confusion of resemblance. She is driven by rage for the father, while longing for and fearing the return of the mother. In Viper, the double agent Jay Diaz is a reworking of Hammett’s Continental Op. This is a character who has spent too much time watching nations inflict their wounds on each other. He even looks like a criminal. Or a rock star. Or a sculpture: a work of art. Like Hammett’s Continental Op, Diaz has gone blood simple. He, too, looks at Dean as if he isn’t there, and such an impaired vision creates its own truths. Like Dean, Avi takes the money and runs, but the galactic differences between the good and bad copy are only just becoming apparent to Chalmers. Dean is the monster that Chalmers created. Dean was born into amorality because Chalmers had buried his own conscience. Chalmers finds it again in the face of the student Avi who is just another pawn in Trulli’s memory-game. Chalmers saves Avi, but pays a high price for this, not just in rupees, but in his identity, literally stolen by yet another faithful yet indiscriminating son: Dipak. If Avi takes Chalmers’s money, Dipak takes his words to create another story. Dipak’s powers to dispossess Chalmers of his identity are connected to a generous, if literally mistaken imagination, an act of good faith that rewrites

246 Ibid, 247. 332

Chalmers’s words as his own, or vice versa in a symbolic self-proliferation provisionally readable as monstrous. Viper enacts a postmodern crisis of representation where acts of procreation are themselves so convoluted that fathers and sons, lost forever in their own nightmares of self-reproduction, may never come to meet. Their encounters are endlessly mediated and self-mediating through unreadable writing and duplicitous decoys. Viper refers in its final pages to the old proverb of the bird in the hand. Like a bird beating its wings against the blind grasp of its captor, the characters enter into a serial modification of subjectivity only by pushing against the human boundaries of the form, a modification previously unendurable to both Dean and Trulli. Chalmers finally claims his deligitimised daughter Lena by writing directly to her, albeit through the unpredictable words of Dipak, the good son. Dipak waits with him in the symbolic cave for the fake daughter who make never come and whose claim to filiation is not so much false, as undecidable, according to the rules of indiscernibility. Without the laptop, Chalmers dictates to Dipak but in the shadow-realm of the cave, who knows what Dipak is really writing? Who knows if Chalmers’s faxes ever reached their destination? Or what they actually said. His son uses them to clean up excrement. Viper is stylistically noirish in its mirrored characters, locales and lusts. It is cut up by flashbacks, dreams and denials. Fake fathers, step-siblings, die-hards and Di-hards proliferate between suburban lies and urban ruins and jungle outposts. Viper’s incoherent repetitions, as in The Conversation and Vertigo, renew the question of resemblance and its role in a fearsome filiation. Silence is unleashed at the end, but it is silence from the interval, a long way down and with its own story to tell.

Conclusion

By cutting together descriptions of Huet’s monster-makers, Plato’s image-makers, The Conversation’s automatons, Vertigo’s diabolical artists, and Viper’s cave-dwellers, I am arguing that such a serial arrangement is suggestive of a taking-after, or a becoming that plays into a noir heroic. The model, or good copy, falls into the intervals created in the chronic movement of the series toward and away from its own self-bifurcating limits. The artist and the creation also turn against each other and away from a lost original in an 333 indiscernible exchange of identity. During the interval between gazing on the model and reproducing it, something happens in the creative process that generates a copy that is bad because it is false. It both simulates and fails to represent an original eradicated in the process of becoming. It is duration, the interval between the model and its actualisation in the image that unleashes the false. Nature appears never to copy without models, but as we have seen, this is just an act, a ruse to put the counterfeit detector off the trail. Thus I stress that, while fiction is deceptive in nature, a protagonist constituted by and undone by deceit is a figure of Promethean importance in noir. 334

CHAPTER FOUR

NOIR’S CHASMS

“Then you take all this alphabetical parade and put it in your book, and although it’ll be an obvious fake, because all that stuff doesn’t make much sense in your pages, that doesn’t matter a bit.” Miguel Cervantes, Don Quijote (1605)

Introduction

The powers of the false are the focus of this chapter, and I begin with a discussion of their enabling concept, the interval. I argue that it is the site of a simulation that is both heroic and serial in terms of a reversible exchange across the modes of description, narration and story telling that I apply to The Conversation, Vertigo and Viper. I am arguing that the interval both facilitates and intervenes in this exchange in order to force texts into the open through the powers of the false. The interval is made manifest through the action of cutting into the image and has chronic implications for the hero. In using the term chronic, I refer both to the actual affliction that plagues the protagonist and to Deleuze’s concept of repetition literally with no end in sight. Thus, my analysis transcends both Deleuze’s and Huet’s arguments and demonstrates that the noir subject is a locus of a neurotic compulsion on the part of representation to exceed its own limitations. To briefly recapitulate: the powers of the false relate to an image assemblage that is a contamination of the subjective and objective viewpoints in serial, crystalline exchange. This is the time-image in which, “the before and after are no longer themselves a matter of external empirical succession,”247 but instead take their place along a series. The series “orients and inspires the first sequence (the before) and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn towards another limit (the after)”.248 The series is

247 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 248 Ibid. 335 in contrast to sequential relations that are tethered to an empirical whole in the time- image’s predecessor, the movement-image.249 The unified, higher consciousness of the whole is ideologically inflected because of the assumption of a vantage point that allows verification of this totality by some—the subjects—and not by others—the objects. This is what we mean when we say that if the problem in conventional story telling is the subject-object conflict, its solution must be the resolution of these points of view at the end. Narratives such as those I discuss operate to defer this conflict resolution through an indefinite exchange between subjective and objective points of view that severs the story from the whole. The series opens the present up to the wound, and redirects power from the real-imaginary dialectic to a dialogic realm beyond the true and the false. Or as Deleuze says:

the false ceases to be a simple appearance or even a lie, in order to achieve that power of becoming which constitutes series or degrees, which crosses limits, carries out metamorphoses, and develops along its whole path and act of legend, of story-telling. Beyond the true or the false, becoming as a power of the false.250

The cut not only between but also within the image constitutes an interval in time that sets in motion a contamination of the past with the future, and calls into question in troubling ways the hero's incapacity to differentiate between them. It is such a subjective impairment that forces the closed system of representation into the open and suggests both an originary function to literature, and a tragic origin to noir.

The Interval.

The irrational interval, hitherto referred to as the interval, is that space in time between durations that belongs neither to the beginning of one, nor the end of the other.251

249 Deleuze, Cinema 1. See especially, “The Crisis of the Action-Image,” 187-211. 250 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 275. 251 Ibid., 181. 336

It is made manifest in the cinematic cut that unleashes the powers of the false by being incorporated into the frame and entering into its modification. Like the monstrous imagination that reproduces life as an objective presence with all of its subjective distortions in place, the time-image embodies the split between and restitching of the real and the virtual in a monstrous assemblage. Such an assemblage is none other than the noir hero. The fictional chasm between the past and present or future can be likened to the irrational cut between sets adopted by Deleuze from mathematics. A rational interval forms a part of either side of the split: {123, 246, 592} {x, y, z} {2,336, 4672, 9244}. In contrast, an irrational interval bifurcates, rather than connects the series, making it impossible to predict the direction or nature of the new series. As Rodowick points out, the irrational interval is the key figure of the time-image, “sustaining all its forms of difference.”252 Like its mathematical namesake, and unlike the rational cut, noir chasms signify neither the beginning of one time nor the end of another, but an rather an enduring rending of the moment itself in which time appears in a series of passing presences that indefinitely proliferate. “Since it no longer bridges two images, nor assures the commensurability of sound and image, the irrational interval now exists as a force encouraging a change of state.”253 Thus the importance of the surreal, hyper-real or extraordinary in noir is related to time. The Promethean plunge into the past fundamental to noir is activated in the interval because it is into this (time)frame that the protagonist must plunge. The inevitability in noir of falling into the interval is portrayed as both possibility and peril, and explains why Chalmers’s repeated refrain in Viper is “don’t look down.” Fear of falling is the only story that is not only in, but also of noir, because of the interval. Through critical performance and paradoxically because he bears the wounds of these self-metamorphosing battles, only the hero can show us the text-world for what it is—falseness and duplicity. And only the hero can beat the world at its own game, which is why artifice is endemic to the noir universe. This realm is composed of a suspect

252 D. N Rodowick, “Unthinkable Sex; Conceptual Personae and the Time-Image,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/rodowick.htm (accessed May 2007). 253 Ibid. 337 relation of the real and the virtual that is a projection of the assembled protagonist’s subjectivity. As Edward Said writes, “The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction.”254 Don Quijote, our first noir exile shows us how the simplest object—a barber’s basin or windmill—has the extraordinary potential to transform the objects of disorientating loss into the symbolic subjects of a new world to rule. In this way, Don Quijote is re-enacting the very subject of Cervantes’s critique: the conquistadors and intrepid crusaders whose project was to transform base humanity into precious metal. The hero’s subjective wounds and psychic cuts are objectified through the interval, specifically through the interval's time-stopping function. This time-stopping function facilitates an exchange across description, narration and story telling that, in terms of resolution of subject and object indefinitely defers the representation of the whole. It is significant for the connection I draw between film noir specifically and the novel in general, that the cutting in as opposed to between the image is not only a feature of the mise en abyme, but a function of an adulterous camera that, like the Renaissance mother, sees too much. Through the cut, noir cinematographically generates the new through a continual stitching together of an irreconcilable difference in the image. Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between dialectical narrative and dialogic form may provide an additional framework for understanding how such irreconcilable difference cut into the image impacts on the films in question.

Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness -- and that’s how you get dialectics.255

Thus the dialectic summons a higher power of an abstract and unifying consciousness—the whole. Dialogic energies, on the other hand, literally force a

254 Said, 24. 255 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern McGee, (Austin: Texas University Press, 1986), 147. 338 multiplicity into the conversation. For Bakhtin the dialogic imagination is one of the great powers of the early novel, and allowed meanings to interact with each other in a collision of content-fracturing utterances.256 In his influential formulation, what unites the multiple conditional discourses is their content-fracturing potential. This potential is primarily what gave rise to the early novel. Bakhtin’s work thus allows us to see the interval not only in the cinematic image but also in the novel. So while the idea of cutting is not routinely associated with the form of the novel, we have nevertheless observed the role of the content-fracturing word (“original”, “confidence”, “trust”) in texts such as The Confidence Man and Viper (“nevermind”,”slash”). The proliferation of the image, as Bakhtin states, is the word alive in an entirely different form: the simulacrum. The word, thus formulated, is therefore the true hero of the work.257 It is universally accepted that the power of character in fiction arises from the heart (the psyche) in conflict with itself. In noir, this conflict arises from the agony of the cut, a monstrous decomposition of identity that the hero is serially and tragically compelled to perform. The series simultaneously increases and removes psychic distance between the protagonist and the others in the series including not only other characters but also the author and the reader or viewer. Because these elements are separated by irrational intervals, they become marked by incommensurable divisions or cuts that unleash divergent series that can no longer be resolved into a synthetic whole. It is in this way that the interval expresses a “power of falsification where difference is no longer subsumed by identity.”258 By this, Deleuze means the identification of the subject with the object: the closing of dichotomies. Instead, the interval measures the degree to which the protagonist can remain immune from the world’s infection (metexein, that which lurks in the narrative interval to contaminate conditions of existence). The interval spans the degrees to which the protagonist can separate the past from the present

256 Bakhtin, “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, “in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Micheal Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hoquist (Austin: Texas University Press, 1981), 272-273; Speech Genres, 147. 257 Ibid., 133-137. 258 Rodowick, “Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, “ 42. 339

(indiscernibility). The interval is the site of identity assemblage on a whole new footing (in a becoming). The interval is a recurring motif in The Conversation in terms of Harry’s conflict between human and inhuman. As Donald Ritchie has said of Kurosawa’s foray into film noir:

The refusal to be involved, the affectation of omnipotence, is—like sentimentality, like cynicism—a question of balance … the human sentiment … has its consequences.259

The consequence of the human sentiment for the noir hero can be cataclysmic in terms of the subjective chasms it opens. In various parts of the film these dark chasms in identity narrow and vertiginously widen—staircases rise into space and fall into darkness; hallways stretch endlessly behind him; elevators mysteriously empty; mirrors open up into infinity. In a telling scene, Harry hides in a shadowy landing, staring down into the abyss of his lover's basement apartment. To borrow from Nietzsche, the abyss gazes back.260 Thus an impossible reciprocity is set up between what he thinks he knows and what he thinks could be known about him: that he is the greatest hoax of all. For how can he represent humanity when there is no humanity left to represent? In The Conversation, the corporate machine has taken over minds, and recording devices have replaced the human conscience, and only an inhuman silence remains. As in Viper a conversation that never really was is finally over. Harry repeatedly stands at the abyss of this unnarratability, In this way, the character of Harry Caul harks back to the characters of earlier noirists like Hammett and even Melville. And he stands in contrast to more existentialist noir heroics found in, for example Raymond Chandler through to the early work of Brett Easton Ellis. How does Harry’s particular relation to the abyss of subjectivity make him different from existentialist noir heroes? Harry has transformed himself into a de-

259 Donald Ritchie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996) 150. 260, Friedrich Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Vintage, 1989) Aphorism 146: “He who fights with monsters must take care less he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back.” 340 humanised functionary, unwilling to acknowledge that he is literally a means to a false end—or vice versa. His originary tragedy is paradoxically that at the moment of acknowledging his own fictional nature, he enters into a change of state and becomes real. Yet his exile from fiction paradoxically places him in the unnatural world of the perpetually homeless, a world uncannily like our own. He is doomed to an unlimited but contained repetition with no end, no truth, in sight, even at the bottom of the abyss, where the crumpled figure of representation literally lies bleeding. Framing, in The Conversation opens the interval out to time. The framing assumes a machinic subjectivity by refusing to centre its human subject, by its fixed position above or below the three-quarter line, and by panning too slowly or too swiftly for its human subject. The cinematography creates the time-image because, as Deleuze says, in the time-image, “[s]pace … loses all primacy of the vertical axis…”261 The time-image refuses a dependence on the vertical human position, an archetypal feature of 1970s neo- noir productions. Think of the diagonal and gridlocked reordering of images in Alan J Pakula's paranoia trilogy, Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the Presidents Men (1976). No other aesthetic more clearly demonstrates Deleuze's assertion of the shape-creating mutation of form engendered by the new automata. 262 Such a form- defying exchange between style and subject is what we mean by saying that in noir, form is destiny. The framing in The Conversation cleaves a passage between what the filmmaker sees, what Harry sees and how they see are seen by a third, intrusive consciousness, the camera that sees too much. The role of the third in the powers of the false is to show how the time-image is “definitely not a dialectic” between the subject and the object, or the past and the present. 263 Instead, the time-image is resolutely non-relative, and unleashes a Bakhtinian form of dialogic framing in both films. This we can see as the product of an adulterous camera that sees too much. This is the camera that produces images from the misguided union of art and life. In The Conversation, cutting becomes increasingly dialogic as the film moves further and further into novelistic territory.

261 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 266. 262 Ibid., 265. 263 Ibid., 164. 341

Consider the cutting in the warehouse party scene after the convention. Harry and the lady in green, models of ill-begotten lovers, are having their own conversation. The camera seeks them out. Harry is unknowingly wearing a wire. The bugger is bugged. As their misplaced confidences accrue, it becomes clear by the slow repetitive circling of the camera, broken up by the occasional forward pan and sudden pull-back, that there is something wrong with this picture. The camera circles a conversation with its own oblique and spiralling movements, entering into the dialogue’s endless modification. Through a gradual, virtual elimination of shot-reverse-shot, the conversation loses its binary orientations, and a kind of indiscernibility is unleashed between the poles. Such indiscernibility eliminates any pretence to dialectics. By opening up the abstraction of the whole to the time-image and thus severing the series of images from a totalising yet singular consciousness, the camera thus allows a multiplicity into the image through the cut. The uncharacteristic privacy of Harry’s misguided conversation with the lady in green is as violated by technology as the conversation between the adulterous lovers; as encircled in human duplicity; and as bifurcated by the intrusion of a third consciousness. Harry’s contamination by technology is the price he must pay for his own ethical, evaluative cutting into the world again. Again he gets it wrong. The lady in green is the human hook, but the wrong one. Thematically then, as well as stylistically, The Conversation, like Vertigo, is an example of the noir mode at its most serial, heroic, and tragic. In order to bring the interval to bear on Vertigo, it is useful to note that Hitchcock’s imagery remains, for Deleuze, on the threshold between the movement-image and the time-image, introducing what Deleuze calls the mental or relation-image to cinema.264 However, by comparing the relation-image to the time-image in terms of the interval or mediating third consciousness, I demonstrate that there is something of the time-image in the relation-image. Thus I discuss Hitchcock in a way Deleuze himself does not: in terms of the powers of the false.265

264 “With Hitchcock,” writes Deleuze. “a new kind of ‘figures’ appear which are figures of thoughts.” Cinema 1. 203. 265 Yet, even for Deleuze, one might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit…what Hitchcock had wanted to avoid, a crisis of 342

Nevertheless, even for Deleuze, then Hitchcock stands at the gateway to the new. This is why, in Hitchcock’s films we see a precursor to the intrusion of the cut as an additional element in the frame. The innovations to which Deleuze refers include the mental-image that takes the form of an insertion of a third subject into the image. For Deleuze, the first subject pertains to the actors, the second pertains to the action, and the third involves a consciousness about the “set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught.”266 The immediate examples that come to mind are the shot in Vertigo and The Conversation that show Scotty or Harry respectively watching their object, subjectified in the act of gazing at another. In Vertigo, for example, there is the shot of Scotty spying on Madeleine gazing at the portrait of her suicidal forbear. In The Conversation, there is the shot of Harry spying on the Assistant reflected in the mirror of the convention foyer, or Harry in the elevator with the lovers who pretend not to know him. In these shots, the protagonists are the third, duplicitous consciousness in the frame, which sets up a contagion between the all three. What makes this a mental-image is that consciousness becomes a subject in itself. This consciousness is partly that of the seeing audience—whose impaired vision generates suspense—but also that of the actor, Scotty, whose vision is impaired because of indiscernibility between the subject—what Madeleine sees— and the object—what Scotty sees her seeing. Thus Deleuze's conception of the Hitchcockian protagonist can be seen to overlap with my own argument about the noir protagonist’s chronic impairments being embodied in the interval. For this reason these shots function as both mental-image and time-image. In my discussion of how the interval works in Vertigo, I relate concepts Deleuze specifies for Hitchcock—the demark and the symbol, in particular—to Deleuze's later arguments about the powers of the false. I do this in order to show how Hitchcock's own work comes to be modified by such powers. In chapter II, I explain that demarks are colliding natural relations in a series, and symbols are nodal points of abstract relations in a set.267 The demark is a colliding natural relation in a series because it does not follow logically from the previous element in the series, nor lead logically to the next. The

the traditional image of the cinema, would nevertheless happen in his wake and in part as a result of his innovations.” Cinema 1, 204-205. 266 Ibid., 200. 267 Ibid., 202. 343 demark is a sign of rupture in the naturalness of the series because it comprises the product of the past, present and future moving around in the wrong order. A symbol is “a concrete object which is a bearer of various relations, or of variations of a single relation.”268 We might think of the coil in Vertigo as a symbol of spiralling into the past, the plastic raincoat in The Conversation as a symbol of the duplicitous transparency of representative bodies, and the cave in Viper as a symbol of the closed system of representations. And these three symbols also function as demarks, as I show, when they jump out of the series to be valid in a new context that they create for themselves. Whereas for Deleuze, symbols and demarks are the primary signs of the relation or mental-image, my intention is to extend these elements to apply to the time-image in noir. Like Coppola, Hitchcock replaces a dialectic cutting with that of the dialogic impulse that opens the image up to the multiplicities rumbling beneath its surface. Hitchcock’s rapid tracking toward and then away from the characters’ faces in dialogue imitates the vertiginous zoom-in zoom-out of Scotty’s neurosis. Here, I am referring to the definitive shot in the film’s prologue where the detective’s vertigo is made apparent through the cinematographic technique of zooming in while tracking back. A similar distorting effect sets up Scotty’s surveillance of Madeleine. The camera closes in on Scotty who is looking at Madeleine, then pulls out again, only to pan in on her and track back to a close-up of Scotty.269 Thus, although film characters in dialogue do not necessarily equate to a Bakhtinian dialogic, it is in such a uniquely noir setting that they enact this novelistic formulation. The interval both cleaves the image and sustains it long enough for it to contaminate and thus create the third consciousness to which I refer above. This is the vision into the dark chasms of identity at the moment of its becoming other. It is into this vertiginous interval in the image that the characters literally plunge in Vertigo. It is from

268 Ibid. 269 Mark A. Wollaeger, “Killing Stevie: Modernity, Modernism, and Mastery in Conrad and Hitchcock,” Modern Language Quarterly 58 no. 3 (Sept. 1997), 323. Hitchcock’s dialogic camera work was in keeping both with what he saw as film’s potential to go beyond drama and as Wollaeger says, “with its close-up, point-of-view, and reaction shots, claims access to a realm of privacy unplumbed by theatrical role-playing, and the power to invade a character’s innermost being gives the camera and the director a “godlike power” that becomes Hitchcock’s obsessive subject. “ Yet, like a novel-writer, Hitchcock plunges in on a character's consciousness, only to pull back just before total invasion of privacy into authorial commentary, a perpetual negotiation of the boundaries between subject and object that is essentially novelistic. 344 where their stories come and to which they must return, because they are incompatible with the present order. It is this order that will kill them if it gets the chance. Hitchcock’s intervals include the back entrance to the Madeleine’s florist, a narrow canyon between skyscrapers, an interstitial bookshop that bleeds its own light into the night, or a petal- strewn bay, or the rings in a cross section of a Sequoia tree. The interval is thus usefully understood as a spatial image of time because its dimensions are organised by the aberrant, chronic movements of the imagination. It is thus resolutely other in reference to memory, which, in its chronological movement from beginnings to an end, is a good copy of the Platonic real. The spatial aspect of the time- image allows identity to bifurcate toward difference. This identity deferral is evident in how the image separates from itself in noir's typically long takes, deep focus, split sets, oblique camera angles, and blatantly artificial rear-projections. Cinematically speaking, the interval is self-suspensive. An understanding of the interval is important for my argument connecting the monstrous imagination to the powers of the false. In the irrational cut lurks the demonic double, an agent of a false heroics inextricably linked to the monstrous imagination. The double agent’s distribution in this interval is what Deleuze describes as nomadic, or outside the precise limits of representation. Note in Viper, the recurring theme of double- trouble, the impact of duplicity, and of working both sides. Such a nomadic imagination clearly speaks to the aberrant, bifurcating spatiality of the time-image, which is “without property, enclosure or measure “and is thus no less than the realm of the monster. 270

Such a distribution is demonic rather than divine, since it is the peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ field of action as it is to leap over the barriers or the enclosures, thereby confounding the boundaries between properties…the leap here bears witness to the unsettling difficulties that nomadic distributions introduce into the sedentary structures of representation.271

270 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36. 271 Ibid., 37. 345

Thus, the leap, or the interval testifies to the perturbations that these nomadic (re) distributions, or the demark makes in the hierarchical structures of representation. One further feature of the interval needs to be mentioned. This is the enabling indiscernibility between demark and symbol. Again, I relate concepts Deleuze specifies for Hitchcock’s relation-image to my own argument about the powers of the false in general and the time-image in particular as unleashing the interval. How does this work in The Conversation? Again, the demark serves to arrest time by demarcating an anomalous space between sequential elements. Yet the demark is latent in representation itself because of the memory/imagination assemblage. In The Conversation the demark works through an association with audio recordings, and especially with photography. The use of the photograph—of a dead woman, a car crash, or the criminal—has conventionally bifurcated the noir telos from Otto Preminger to James Ellroy. It was prefigured in the Romantic narratives of portraiture, and updated in several classic noirs, including one of the most perverse portraits of virtual necrophilia, Laura (1944). Similarly, in The Conversation, the many photographic images of the duplicitous lovers in conversation that Harry pins to the wall of his lair serve to demarcate the irrational interval by a literal arresting of teleological movement—cinema—itself. Think of the arresting photograph of the faithless, murderous wife, in duplicitously absent Director’s office. Tracks—soundtracks, camera tracks, train tracks—are stopped, repeated, crossed over and rewound in the spiralling thrust of demarcation that serves, in both The Conversation and Vertigo to set up temporal and cinematic intervals. In The Conversation, the interval is opened by the mechanised cut of the conversation into the opening shots to disrupt or redirect mimesis by addressing the problem of the automaton's memory.272 As Cohen argues, “Memory appears as the machinic enforcer of mimeses out of which the ideological closure of identification and subjectification can occur.”273 Yet, as a machine of serial return, memory also cuts into mimesis when difference—symbolic, visual, and narrative—emerges through repetition. Harry’s compulsion to repeatedly re- mark the absent secret of the conversation is an effort to counter-act the empty site of

272 Tom Cohen, “Hitchcock and the Death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible),” in Anti-Mimesis, 227-259. 273 Ibid., 227. 346 origins with the machine of memory. The consequences of this chronic counter- movement are to be found in the radical segmenting of the interval, the investigation and deconstruction of identity, and the mutation of cinema through the point of view of the automaton. In Vertigo, a film essentially about the sutures artificially connecting memory and the imagination, art serves the same time-stopping function as the photographs in The Conversation. The portrait of Madeleine’s suicidal forbear, Carlotta, serves as a kind of mirror image of Madeleine’s infected memory. Midge’s ghastly cadaver exquis literally stops Scotty and cinema in his and its tracks. Chillingly, in the manipulative mastermind’s office the multiple seafaring paintings and models of movement frozen in time also disrupt and redirect cinema toward the interval. The interval is thus a key figure of noir and sustains its central contradictions. Similarly, in terms of movement, the spiralling vertigo in the film serves the same interval-creating function as the tracks in The Conversation. There are two vertigos in Vertigo. One is the vertiginous demark that that spirals out into the interval of time. Examples of this are the spiral hair knot, the spiral staircase in the tower that immobilises the hero, and the criminal conspiracy to expose Scotty as a counterfeit detective. These produce a direct image of time because they sever time from empirical movement, from its invariants in action. The second vertigo is in the spiralling camera that is indiscernible from Scotty’s circling surveillance of Madeleine’s own random circles around her lost identity.

Vertigo communicates a genuine image to us; and certainly, what is vertiginous, is, in the heroine’s heart, the relation of the Same with the Same which passes through all the variations of its relations with others (the dead woman, the husband, the inspector). But we cannot forget the other more ordinary, vertigo … .274

Vertigo is thus both symbol and demark—and this split in and by the text divides the frame against itself in the interval of noir. Further, it is the interval that untethers the

274 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 204-205. 347 image from an empirical whole and opens it out onto the series of time. The interval serves to metamorphose the movement-image into the time-image, where, through an indiscernibility across description, narration and story telling, it unleashes the powers of the false. I show in chapter 1 that the powers of the false proliferate firstly in the crystalline description where the real and the virtual chase each other in a perpetual yet contained exchange (along the limit-tending series, or bursts of series in a becoming other). 275 Secondly, they are generated in pure falsifying narration that “poses inexplicable differences to the present and alternatives which are undecidable between true and false to the past.”276 Thirdly, the powers of the false are unleashed in a story-telling function that raises the false to the power of a monstrosity.277 It is in this way that the noir subjectivity is projected across the text rather than emergent in a stable identity. This is because in noir, as we have seen, the essential story is that of a riven hero whose subjectivity is raised to the level of an apparition, automaton, or monster, because of its contamination by the object; superhuman powers as a result of physical impairment, neurosis or stigmata; and a quixotic tilting at the human sentiment. This is why the subject of noir is always a counterfeit detector.

Description

The crystalline description of the time image provides us with the first concept for analysing the works in question. As understood by Deleuze, the parameters of conventional, or 'organic' descriptions are entrenched in notions of an empirical truth activated and reinforced by representation. However, the crystalline descriptions that concern Deleuze in the powers of the false, and thus impact on my analysis, constitute their own reality:

275 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127. 276 Ibid.,131. 277 Ibid.,150. 348

What we will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it … and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace or modify the preceding ones.278

In Deleuze’s schema, description must become crystalline in order to unleash the powers of the time-image. One way to visualise the crystalline description is in terms of the hologram. William Gibson puts it thus, “A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image.”279 Like the hologram, the crystalline-image can be described as both multi-faceted and indiscernible. These two inter-connected qualities give it its serial nature. The most important point to take from Deleuze is that it is the “description itself which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object.”280 Deleuze’s concept of the powers of the false draws on chaos theory, particularly as it is explicated by Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers in their seminal Order out of Chaos (1984). A cornerstone of the theory is the thought experiment that describes a piece of paper that on both sides contains the identical sentence: Everything you read on the other side of this sheet is false. Which is the other side? Which side does the other overwrite? And if they are both rendered unreadable, then where does unreadability reside in a critique of readability? These uncertainties are the principle behind the crystalline description. I introduce the opening shot of The Conversation in chapter I. Here I return to it in some detail because it provides an abiding example of the crystalline description, especially in terms of indiscernibility. Indiscernibility describes the futility of discerning between two distinct poles because of a constant interchange between them. These poles can be the real and imaginary or the objective and subjective. The point, however, is that discernment between truth and appearance breaks down and, in the process of self- cancellation, a new realm is generated between the poles.

278 Ibid.,126. 279 William Gibson, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose, “in Burning Chrome, (New York: Voyager, 1995), 57. 280 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 126. 349

We are thus in the situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary but indiscernibility of the two, in perpetual exchange.281

It is in this situation of perpetual interchange with its polar opposite, that identity moves out of individualistic and existentialist territory and becomes serial, crystalline, and metamorphic in noir. Although this opening sequence is a series of objective shots: the lunchtime crowd, the couple moving through it, and the surveillance cameras, all are overlaid with the truncated syllables of the conversation as an intrusive sign of a third, digitised consciousness that is the recording apparatus.282 The high crane shot above Union Square contains a description of everything that follows and that has gone before. It harks back to the opening shot of A Touch of Evil in a series of vanishing centres that are as vertiginous as they are revelatory. It shows us a man whose desire for invisibility is demarcated by a duplicitously revelatory coat. It shows us the persistent shadow of the past in the figure of the mime. It shows us the bad copy in the form of the recording. It shows us the connection between the execution of art and the execution of a crime in the “shot-gun” cameras (in addition to a shotgun microphone, a parabolic microphone and the shopping bag microphone) trained on the conversing couple. All these differences and repetitions are wrapped up in the soundtrack: “when the red, red Robin, comes bob, bob, bobbin… .” Crystalline description in The Conversation, as in film noir generally, is falsifying both visually and aurally. Similarly, in the scene where Harry is in his apartment after discovering that the landlady has invaded both it and his identity, we are subjected to an objective shot of Harry berating her the phone. He is stripped down to his underwear, and cut into this image is the subjective image of the building’s demolition in progress behind him. Coppola does not cut to a subjective shot of Harry seeing the demolition, but radically cuts the subjective into the objective shot. The machinery that is tearing down the walls,

281 Ibid., 273. 282 Jarrett, 10. Strictly speaking, the sounds weren’t digitised. Walter Murch put the conversation through a synthesizer in simulation of emergent digital technology that he speculated would have been part of Harry’s repertoire. Walter Murch is sound editor on the re-released Director’s cut of Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1998) and also on Francis Ford Copolla’s Apocalypse Now (1979). 350 leaving them as empty frames, is slowly exposing the rooms in the building. The exposed frames in the demolished building resemble a film set, and their repeating pattern of open squares simulates a strip of film itself. Thus, through crystalline description, subjectivity is here augmented to the brink of objective disintegration. The disintegration of the outside (objective) is directly correlated to the crystalline multiplication of the inside (subjective). Like a series, it is impossible to tell where one end begins and the other ends. Deleuze argues that, unlike the organic system of description that is a regime of relations that can be localised and linked causally and spatially:

The crystalline regime is completely different: the actual is cut off from its motor linkages, or the real from its legal connections, and the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualisations, starts to be valid for itself.283

The two modes—the actual and virtual—are now combined in a circuit, or series, where they chase after each other, take after each other, exchange roles and become indiscernible. If indiscernibility presents a problem of readability, then it also foregrounds an incoherence in the image which means, as Deleuze points out, “that the whole image has to be ‘read’ no less than seen, readable as well as visible […]; it is the literalness of the visible world which constitutes it like a book.”284 Cinema has both thought and image. At one point it can be read as objective and actual, at another it is mental and virtual. The constant movement between the poles of the image that remain distinct, even while exchanging their identity, is what is at stake in indiscernibility. Discernment breaks down in an infinite, crystalline exchange. To return to my central argument, the crystalline description in noir simulates the self-cancelling drives of the novel, and is replicated in a heroic of the false. Each facet or fragment of the time-image reflects an image of the whole but from a falsifying angle, often distorted or indistinct. Where does the reflected image begin? We think of the scene supposedly inside the foyer of the Director’s building but which is actually shot in an external set. In an extraordinary shot, Harry is unable to remove his

283 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 127. 284 Ibid., 22. 351 caul, even in bed with his lover, so strong is his need to see what is cut into time. In the Director’s office walls seem to disappear. The camera crosses the axis to capture Harry walking toward himself twice. In these scenes, the time-image is not only descriptive, but also performative and becomes valid for itself. Deleuze claims that crystalline description is no longer found in the cinema of the agent but now in the “cinema of the seer.” However, I extend his work to argue that description itself has taken on the role of actor. By doing this, I more clearly elucidate my argument for the spatial aspect of the time-image. In becoming virtual—moving across space through the imaginative act rather than that of memory—description is no longer in the service of chronological ends. Thus these relations that Deleuze originally attributed to the mental-image can in noir, be newly connected to a before and after that perpetually shadow the time-image. The mime in The Conversation is important in terms of the theme of shadows so salient in noir. Harry is shadowed by a past that paradoxically holds the present hostage, foreshadowing a retroactive future contaminated by a “mournful and never-ending remembrance,” as Edgar Allen Poe describes it.285 Shadows in The Conversation are clearly demarcated and take their place in the repetitive series. The mime randomly apes (repeats) human movement, attaching himself to characters like a shadow. There is no escape from the performance or its implication for the spectators. Shadows in the film do not just follow, nor do they always have a flesh and blood counterpart, or at least not immediately. They regularly precede characters, as in the chilling shot of Harry’s bug- detector preceding his bodily entrance into the frame. The shadow works both to foreshadow presence and in a demarcation of absence. Shadows take human form (the mime, the Assistant) but also machinic (the bug-detector) or animal (the Director’s guard dog). Like the raincoat, the shadow is both demarcating an anomalous cut and is a demark that flees from the series of Harry’s falsifications. Harry’s place on the series is now raised to the powers of false. The shadow is therefore the sole and the soul bearer, because it bears witness to Harry’s psychic re-assemblage.

285 Poe, Theory of Composition, 1580. 352

As Deleuze puts it, “crystalline descriptions, which constitute their own object, refer to purely optical and sound situations detached from their motor extension.”286 The crystalline series can be thought of as the dialogue between all the elements in a shot. The high crane shot of the prologue circles in the end to a description of itself within the frame. The camera-men are perched like snipers from high windows surrounding the square behind shotgun microphones trained on the couple. There are thus two sets of camera-men: the real and the virtual that coalesce in crystalline series with each other. The song, the shot, the conversation … these are each repeated along a series yet raised to the factor of n so that serial repetition severs the descriptive act from its point of reference. Mimicry and repetition, both optical and sound, remain the only description in The Conversation. Sight and sound are thus “no longer a preliminary to action” but rather “occup[y] all the space and [take] the place of action.”287 The constant, chronic cutting endlessly modifies the story so that, like identity, its initial conditions are lost to time. But this loss occurs because of the “line of flight or deterritorialization according to which [it changes] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities”.288 The conversation is cut into and cuts into the frames so chronically that it has become impossible to trace and impossible to read: a symptom of incoherence in the image, an affliction in the hero. It is severed from its invariants outside the frame and cuts into other time-images in a crystalline form of description. The conversation is thus both demark and symbol. Earlier I discuss the refusal of the time-image to adhere to a humanist axis of verticality. The non-humanist camera, which Coppola tellingly describes as a dead camera, is a ubiquitous descriptive device in The Conversation. 289 In a performative strategy, the camera mimics the surveillance devises that are its critical subject. The framing in the film eschews modern, humanist verticality in favour of a mechanistic repetitive pan that is often too late, too early or out of time. The frame is periodically empty as it waits for a character to fill it. Repeatedly the camera pans away in the middle of an action, or lingers after the action is complete. Thus the camera movement impacts

286 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 22. 287 Ibid., 128. 288 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 518. 289 Coppola and Murch, “Commentary,” DVD, The Conversation. 353 on the frame. It takes the frame beyond humanist concerns through actions that cut the automaton's point of view into the objective. By not constantly adjusting the corners of the frame to place human action at the centre of the story, the image does not appear to originate in a human operator. Instead, it seems to be the product of a technical device at the centre, like Harry himself, of a “crucial matrix of ideologies”290 or a robot’s dream. The actor’s virtual experience of sensory-motor disconnection thus infects the viewer with an actual sense of inexplicable, otherworldly dread. Due to the interval in which the out-of-field intrudes, the out-of-field no longer provides the principle rationale for action or a point of reference for making meaning. 291 Fiction is the only factor in its own production, a descriptive device that endlessly defers identity. The result is that there seems to be nowhere to go. It is no coincidence that one of the most respected noirists of recent times entitled his post-war noir, The Big Nowhere.292 Similarly in the footage that Viper’s Diana makes of herself, the device of the still camera describes her becoming. It is thus too much for Dean to bear, and not just in terms of suspense. Because she is not what he wants, he can see no escape. There is no whole or hole for him beyond the fictional world he makes for himself to rule, because it ends up ruling him. By never fixing her gaze beyond what is in the frame, Diana refuses to acknowledge the viewer as an outside source of reality. Thus she constitutes her own monstrosity as objective. By refusing an external reality, Diana remains safe in the realm of the replicating image. Diana makes herself into the sole object, decomposed and reconstituted by an interchange across viewer and viewed. In addition to the shadowing motifs, the soundtrack and the still camera, the time- image is described in noir fictions through aberrations in movement. These false continuities provide the anti-rationale for both a heroics of the false generally and the

290 Jay Beck, “Citing the Sound: The Conversation, Blow Out, and the Mythological Ontology of the Soundtrack in 70s Film,” Journal of Popular Film and Television. 29 no. 4 (Winter, 2002), 157. 291 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 216-218. As it is understood in film practice, the out of field is that space offscreen from which characters originate and to which they must return. In conventional terms, the frame makes the image finite, a slice of the “implicitly continuous world” selected by the director. The viewer implicitly makes as much meaning from what is bounded by the frame as that which lies outside it. 292 James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere (New York: Warner Books, 1988). 354 development of noir specifically. Characters as exiles are thus self-impelled to haunt their milieu like ghosts. This in part explains their uncanny and superhuman powers. We think of devices in noir such as the detective’s infallible hunch, the obsessive’s stamina, insomnia as a general condition, the animal lure of the femme fatale, the hero’s physical prowess or preternatural flair with an anthropomorphic weapon, the role of coincidence, and above all, the subject’s ubiquity. The protagonist needs to be everywhere and nowhere at once. In terms of actualised movement, characters cover alien ground in a series of circular, or Brownian, or drunken or zigzagging motions, hampered by chronic conditions of alcohol or drug addiction. Physical paralysis, vertigo, phobias, or immobilising memories ultimately reduce the noir protagonists to seers or listeners rather than agents of action. Thus it is through a new description of movement in the interval that the male protagonist becomes aligned with the feminised subject. I describe above how the shadow was not only in, but also of the image. And it is not only the shadow, but also the proliferation of models in both films that extends the description beyond normal or abnormal relations and into the crystal. Repetition is both a monstrous refutation of the model and a manifestation of the faceted, crystalline indiscernibility of the time-image. If previously I describe how that stand-ins, copies, and repetitions proliferate in The Conversation, it is now in the crystalline description that I locate the model in a new context: the realm of the bad copy. There is a model of Union Square in the hotel, and of the Bay Area in the Director’s office as a symbol of the totalising corporate vantage point. 293There is a landscape painting of Old San Francisco in the room at the Jack Tar Hotel. We see a caricature of John Conzales that hangs behind the actor in the warehouse. The multiple locks, telephones, tape reels, mirrors, screens, and signs—Knight Security, Security World, Spectre—cut into in the action. So do stand-ins for the gun and killers—hidden cameras, movie cameras, shotgun cameras, recording devices. Endless hallways of endless doorways and grid-like balconies form tracks around the image like film stock wound caul-like around a body. And there is no way of telling where the repetition begins or ends.

293 De Certeau, “Walking in the City,”153. For De Certeau, it is this “lust to be a vantage point and nothing more” that informs the strategies of the oppressor. 355

Sounds also repeat and rewind. The recorded conversation is a model of the real conversation. It is repeated over the soundtrack, sweetened, doctored, remixed, transcribed and dubbed. It becomes a never-ending dialogue in which Harry is a third duplicitous consciousness, changing the set of relations entered into by the actors and the actions. The conversation is between conspirators as bad copies of lovers and in which Harry, a bad copy of human being, is indefinitely implicated. Harry must serialise the lie in a war of ruse over his own existence, real or imagined, dreamt or lived. By masking his life force, he enters into the indiscernible deception of and by the conversation, not in order to meld with it but to re-enter the serial realm of man-machine conflict on a whole new footing. Harry becomes then a copy of the conversation itself and in it he sees his own lost soul. The confessional scene shows that the robot has a soul. The endless repetition seeps into the barren inhuman soul of Harry. It infects his fevered imagination with a message from the past, perhaps from his buried conscience. Like the Renaissance mother, he is powerless to interpret the message and compelled to replicate it. Although I argue that noir is the locus of a heroic based on seeing rather than action, it is tempting to see the protagonists of classic noirs as retaining much of their action-hero status. However a closer analysis supports my argument. Think of how movement is inscribed in two classic film noirs, Welles's A Touch of Evil (1958) and Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), which was loosely remade as Body Heat by Lawrence Kasdan in 1981. In each of these films, a morally compromised protagonist—Orson Welles as Quinlan, Fred McMurray as Walter Neff—appears to be trying to act in order to transform disorientating loss into a new world to rule. Yet the descriptive cinematography, as well as the characterisation tells us otherwise. In A Touch of Evil, the protagonist Quinlan is a crumbling monument who must fabricate evidence to maintain his reputation. The film's long, sweeping takes teem with random grotesques and the camera sustains an addled subjectivity through hallucinatory lighting and purgatorial long focus. In Double Indemnity, Neff’s attempt at insurance fraud traps him in a maze of duplicity and deception. The camera's obsessive focus on random feminised artefacts (the anklet, the stairs; chimes and ice in Body Heat) amplifies the oppressive sexual dominance that pervades the film and immobilises the protagonist to the point of a Hitchcockian gender reversal. Like the imprisoned Ned (William Hurt) in the later Body 356

Heat, the hero cannot escape the fate imposed upon him by the form into which he writes himself. Yet he can begin to understand this, and possibly work within it, only when he refuses to move, and begins to see. How does description unleash the interval in Vertigo? The endless spiralling movements of the characters in Vertigo are raised to the power of the anomalous. Scottie trails Madeleine’s (green) Jaguar in a spiral that leads nowhere. His and Madeleine’s walks are so random as to describe a form of neurosis. The camera demarcates the couple’s plunge into madness by travelling toward them in a backward pan past the Portals of the Past landmark. Yet the camera is at its most descriptive when it spirals dizzyingly around them. Again, the camera first captures Madeleine at the restaurant. It is heralded by the metronomic toll of Hermann’s score that cuts into the buzz of anonymous conversations cleaved by the camera as it circles past Scotty, cutting a swathe through the other diners, thinking what it wants into the frame. The viewer is there also but does not yet know what the camera wants. There is a green gleam in the distance: Madeleine’s dress. The camera sees her and the viewer see it wanting her without knowing what it wants. She has her back to us. The camera makes her rise and pulls her into narrative time. The conversation stops, the camera sees what it wants without knowing what it is. It circles in for a close-up and a monster is made. It is a monster of the camera’s own volition, as we shall see, but one that like all monsters is the product of an adulterous union between life and that outside of its conception: art. These are all instances of what Deleuze would call crystalline descriptions and are the enabling device of the time-image. In Vertigo, repetition, mimicry and modelling describe the obsessive replication of the past by the hero. Midge is a model fiancé, but her ghastly self-portrait belies the fact. Judy is a model of an ideal woman. Both women are copying as an expression of human desire on a collision course with artistic design. Models parade in front of Scotty wearing versions of the grey suit. Repetition and modelling emerge as a kind of religious act, as cave-artists paint for luck in the hunt. Repeated visual motifs from the horizontal bar to the spiral demarcate a passage across time. The interval is modelled in the Missions, symbols of an interval between the old and the new, the poor district in which Scotty finds Judy, and the closet in which her serial identity lurks. Crucially, these are all cut 357 into the frame through the use of mattes, projections, props such as incongruous street- signs and blinking traffic lights—red, green, yellow. These are symbols of a tripling consciousness into which the hero inserts himself as one in a series of indefinite exchanges. Further, the horizontal line serves in Vertigo as a model of the Platonic divide between intention and expression in representation and is cut across as characters move across it at random. There is the horizontal bar of the ladder. There is the frame cut up by invisible travelators across which characters move as if by external forces that model Madeleine’s gliding movements. There is thoroughly modern Midge’s model of a bra modelled on the suspension bridge, for which San Francisco’s Golden Gate is a model. The suspended underwear of the heroine is a stand-in for the banality of desire: underwear as a bridge for the beguiled Detective, and undressing as a means of immobilising the love-object. The bad copy thus reflects the powers of the false back onto itself, but from a different angle. It is the descriptive device in noir. If the bad copy was what previously unleashed a becoming formulated by Plato as metexein, in the time-image the bad copy takes over, multiplies and introduces an irrational difference into the frame. The real and the virtual—good and bad copy—chase each other in a perpetual interchange which opens the frame directly out to time. Judy of course is a bad copy of Madeleine, who pretends to take after (metexein) her suicidal forbear. The Empire hotel, where Scotty finds her, is a bad copy of the McKitrick Hotel. Judy’s shabby frock on their first date is a bad copy of Madeleine’s gown, and in a striking reference to the suspended underwear of the earlier scene, Judy appears to be braless: a bad, slovenly copy of the Ideal, virginal Madeleine. The fake horse is a model for the real horse in Madeleine’s fake dream of Carlotta. The arches of the mission cut across the frame, and the overarching image is that of the spiral: the bridal bouquet tossed aside, Madeleine’s chignon, the spiral staircase, the conspiracy, and the secretively twisting streets of San Francisco itself. In Coppola’s The Conversation and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, then, monstrosity takes the form of the bad copy. Its multiplications do not assimilate to a representational protocol, or what Barthes has termed vraisemblance: resemblance not to reality but to a 358 reality effect. 294 The false copy that indiscriminately repeats an artistic effect outdoes the form. “Description stops presupposing a reality and narration stops referring to a form of the true at one and the same time”.295 The crystalline description then is the first point of entry into the interval of the false.

Narration

Who is the narrator in this strange fiction, and what makes him or her heroic: a focus of the story’s themes, a witness to its lies, and a resident alien in its world? In order to determine this, we need to look first at how Deleuze contrasts the two regimes of narration: organic and crystalline. As understood by Deleuze, the economy of organic narration is such that:

Movements and actions may present many obvious anomalies, breaks, insertions, superimpositions and decompositions: they none the less obey laws that are based on the distribution of centres of forces in space.296

Thus, in conventional narration, time is an indirect representation. It is inferred from space, tethered to movement, and subordinated to action because actions unfold over time. As Deleuze points out, no matter how disordered the organic narration—flashbacks and dreams, ellipses and so on—time remains essentially chronological and revolves around a centre—the whole, or hole, as I suggest in Viper. Organic narration develops the characters as they react to sensory-motor situations in such a way as to disclose, reveal and locate the situation as truthful, even in fiction. Characters see in space, yet they act in time. A tension is created in the separation of the two, which must be finally, if provisionally, resolved according to lawful connections. 297

294 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory. ed. T. Todorov, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15. 295 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 135. 296 Ibid., 128. 297 Ibid.,127. 359

This is not the case in crystalline narration, which furnishes us with the second concept for analysing the works in question. This regime of narration crucially implies a “collapse of sensory-motor schemata.”298 As I mention above, false continuity does not refer to space in time, but to a time that is incapable of being localised. Relations cannot be verified using spatial means—by linking what is seen to who is seeing it—but are chronically unrepresentable because they are in a constant state of self-mutation. Think of the relations in Viper. Time, directly composing the image, can no longer reflect the truth, but in a tautological act, creates it. My argument is that this kind of chronos and the tautology of truth that it implies are endemic to noir. As Deleuze explains:

A new status of narration follows from this: narration ceases to be truthful, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying. This is not at all a case of each has its own truth,’ a variability of content. It is a power of the false that replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.299

It follows from this that the principle narrator in noir fiction is the forger. Like the bad copy, the forger assumes an unlimited seriality that permeates the image and severs it from a unified, centralising consciousness. Without unleashing the powers of the false, fiction cannot logically be true—the truth of fiction is not transmitted until it is ceases to be fiction. Fiction maintains a tension with truth by prolonging its opposition to, as Don Quijote observes, “the highway of truth whose very mother is history, time’s great rival.”300 Deleuze suggests that the difficulty of conceiving of a direct relation between truth or history, and time itself is what “obliges us to keep the true away from the existent, in the eternal or in what imitates the eternal.”301 Narrative theory reminds us that fiction is resolutely temporal.302 In conventional narrative, fictional texts move toward a resolution of the primary tension between

298 Ibid. 299 Ibid., 131. 300 Cervantes, 1.9:46. 301 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 130. 302 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), 90. 360 plotting and narrative. The narrative is a series of events in time as these events are ordered by memory. Narrative is the what and why of desire. Through reconstructing the past, narrative desires to recover it and submit it to representation. As I explain above, narrative memory exists to fix the past beyond the actual reach of the present. However, what Deleuze describes as dysnarrative is that of the chronically afflicted—the automaton, latecomer, and detective. Examples are Harry, Scotty, and Chalmers. 303 In dysnarrative, an alternative function of time arises out of narration based on the uncertainty principle. In this fiction a crystalline narration evades a conventional economy of structure that is a means to an end by providing a poetics of insecurity—vertigo—with no end in sight. Noir’s strange heroics literally unman the plot by depriving it of any transmission of meaning outside itself. Identity, in noir, is splintered by shards of time. Like holographic fragments, it is are fleetingly sentient of an indistinct image of the whole, a non-space in which to lure patriarchally coded desire. The empty or vaporous transmission of the outer limits of narrative significance—decoded in Hitchcock’s films not as human but as masculine—is sabotaged by characters coded as feminised, handicapped and haunted. Peter Brooks suggests a “psychic equivalence” to describe the relationship between narrative and plot. If narrative is that complex adaptive system of meanings connoted by perceptions of human time-bound existence, then plot is the ordering of those meanings extracted from narratives of human limits, specifically those of death. 304 Narrative ends paradoxically promise a transmission of meaning that is at its most complete at that moment of unnarratability. This is at the end and signals the becoming novel of the protagonist. Put another way, the metaphor shaped by archetypal narrative is the quest for life’s meaning in human terms. This is attainable only at the moment of meaning- transmission from the body of the text into the receptive world. The birth of the body of work is thus symbolised by the death of narrative. The central paradox rests on the difficulty of mounting a critique of the meaning of time in a state of timelessness. However, in monstrous, anti-mimetic narrative riven by the powers of the false, plotting cuts into the patriarchal drive for meaning. All that matters is for the false

303 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 137. “The cinema is … dysnarrative in so far as narration is affected by repetitions, permutions, and transformation which are explicable in detail by the new structure [of the series].” 304 Brooks, 90; John Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems, “ Daedalus 121 (Winter 92): 17-30. 361 character to just keep plotting, to out-plot the Plotter. In The Conversation, such outplotting is expressed by Harry’s misguided plot to out-plot the Director’s. In Vertigo, it is expressed in the outer limits of Judy’s duplicity which goes beyond the mastermind’s deceptions: she tears up her truthful confession and tells the audience, “I decided to stay and lie.” Thus dysnarrative is characterised by turning back on the world by using its own weapons: duplicity, betrayal, repetition, and flight. The moral high ground is not an option for the noir hero, who must refute the very existence of such an ideological space. Not only is this refusal a simulation of noir’s primary directive to upturn ideologies, but it is also a re-enactment of the most duplicitous fictional imperative of all: to deceptively falsify authorial presence. Thus the rebellious, maverick, duplicitous or disenchanted functionary in noir is not just an ideological figure. He or she demarcates the fictional character’s destiny, which is to turn the deceptive weapons of fiction against an ideologically suspect authorial intention and to live virtual life on his or her own terms. Thus, if a model plot is an intention shaped in and of time, and produces time in its own indirect image, then noir heroics turn against the model to mutate the text into a kind of hypershape, an indefinite fracturing of the constraints put upon the characters’ intentions in space. Noir heroics are located in the repetitive, ever widening ethical dimension in which they create for themselves. The dysnarrative of the forger opens up an interval between the black and the white in noir at the moment of his or her plunge through time: The frontier can be grasped only in flight, when we no longer know when it passes, between the white and the black, also between the film and the non-film; it is characteristic of film to be always outside its marks, breaking with the ‘right distance’ always overflowing ‘the reserved zone’ where we would have liked to hold it in space and time.305

Noir thus exceeds its marks when a conventional economy of narration is evaded as a result of the collapse of the sensory-motor schemata and because the powers of the false become the only principle for the production of images. It follows from this that the

305 Deleuze., Cinema 2, 154. 362 forger is no longer a determinate figure. She or he “exists only in a series of forgers who are [its] metamorphoses, because the power itself exists only in the form of series of powers which are its exponents.”306 So the powers of the false, like those of forger, do not originate in the individual artist/actor/mother/hero. The origins of forger are in the process of serial reproduction that is a means, not to an end but to the beginning of a new viability, a becoming. By literally forging their own being as a form of becoming, the protagonist enters into “an irreducible multiplicity, character or forms are now valid only as transformations of each other.”307 The forger can be understood as an archetypal modern and postmodern subject, one who grasps the “positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one’s life force.”308 The powers of the false enable the forger to narrate a totality that identity can never represent, working within, rather than against sterility. In other words, the forger moves within the interstices made by the repetition of the sign in order to evade a transmission of meaning. Michel de Certeau’s metaphor of “walking in the city” for writing demonstrates this guerrilla tactic in the battle over narrative:

The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations it remains daily and indefinitely other.309

The forger then narrates not a whole, but a hole that it is continually, and under cover of subjectivity, modifying the shape of the text. It does so by generating inexplicable alternatives to the present and undecidable alternatives to the past. This is so in Viper, for example. Dipak, the assistant, is one in a dazzling array of fake sons whose role has less to do with rational continuity than disrupting all sense of chronology or

306 Ibid., 145. 307 Ibid. 308 Massumi. 309 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 31. De Certeau makes an important distinction between tactics and strategy that could be applied to simulation and representation respectively. “A theory of narration is indissociatable from a theory of practices as its condition as well as its production.”(81) For de Certeau, tactics in everyday practice are those momentary performance “upon and within” systematic social strategies. (33) Strategies originate in places of power, while “[t]he place of a tactic belongs to the other” (xix). 363 genealogical identity. Identity is a decoy in the process of flight: princess as daughter, daughter as guerrilla, guerrilla as story-teller: a bird out of hand. This story evades representation by simulating a fragment of a story that is an image of the whole thing but from a slightly different angle and culminating in that interval between the indiscernible exchange of the text and the character. This exchange is the locus for a heroic of the forger. The forger is an unlimited figure in the narrative of this exchange, and like pure optical and sound descriptions, takes the place of stable identification.

The forger becomes the character of the cinema; not the criminal, the cowboy, the psycho-social man, the historical hero, the holder of power, etc., as in the action image, but the forger, pure and simple to the detriment of all action. The forger could previously exist in a determinate form, liar or traitor, but he now assumes an unlimited figure which permeates the whole film.310

Thus, in noir the serial forger is the agent for repetition as opposed to the limited action figure who was an agent of representation. In his reference to both Melville’s The Confidence Man and Robbe-Grillet’s The Man Who Lies, Deleuze contends that crystalline narration “does not develop organically according to legal relations in space and time” but rather “frees itself of this system; it shatters the system of judgement because the power of the false, (not error or doubt) affects the investigator and the witness as much as the person presumed guilty.”311 Thus, in The Conversation it is as if the offence of eavesdropping is metamorphosing each time and chasing the characters along a chain—the rival bugger Moran, the lady in green, the Director—each of whom comes up with an excuse, a falsehood, for his or her own purposes. Harry Caul—haunted by his crimes of the past—repeats the crime of eavesdropping on two lovers, then enters in a closer and closer relation with the taped conversation without us knowing what he wants. Finally the offence is reversed. As Deleuze suggests, the line of flight transforms the

310 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 132. 311 Ibid. 364 multiplicity—the bugger is the bugged and the error, “he’d kill us if he got the chance” is also a lie because it has lost its point of reference. The Director as Deleuzian “higher man”312 becomes the offender left to die by the final offence of the actors acting outside their role. In The Conversation, by the time the false crime is revealed, we do not know if Harry’s vision is prophetic or retroactive. The point is that these elements are serial in that they are constantly altered by the intervals of time into which they leap, and according to the terms of unknown initial connections of identity. 313 So, previously that which I described as the assemblage can also be understood as the forger. The elements in The Conversation—Director, protagonist, forger, and forgery—enter into a reversible exchange symptomatic of the falsifying narration that becomes the law in the powers of the false. Similarly, in Vertigo, the forger is an unlimited figure of the same. According to the powers of the false, it “carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced.”314 It is the site not of totalising proximity, the whole, but of total difference: the hole. Think of Hoffman’s Olympia, Philip K. Dick’s androids, Villier de l’Isle Adam’s Future Eve, Thomas Edison’s bizarre android who intervenes in a lover’s death wish.315 Madeleine fakes her suicide and falsely possesses her lover. Judy simulates her difference from Madeleine in order, paradoxically, to simulate her similarity to the model eliminated by her refusal of its mastery. She cannot move. The lie has seen to that. She must see. As with description, the powers of the forger unleash a crystalline narration that implies a collapse of sensory-motor schemata.

Sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and sound situations to which characters who have becomes seers, cannot or will

312 Ibid., 140. 313 Ibid. 314 Gilles Deleuze and Felix A. Guattari, Anti-Odeipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 87. 315 E. T. A Hoffman, “The Sandman, “In Tales of Hoffman, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1982), 85-125; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electic Sheep (London: Gollancz, 1968); and Villiers l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve, trans. Robert Martin Adams (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 365

not react, so great is their need to see properly what there is in a situation.316

The killer lies to Scotty; Scotty lies to Madeleine; Judy lies to Scotty. Thus, like the forger, the liar is the unlimited character in the chasms of noir. Vertiginously, noir is the fiction of deception. It outdoes itself. This is why, speaking of the simulacrum, Deleuze and Guattari state that “something is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks … underneath the mask and by means of it, it already invests the terminal forms and the specific higher states whose integrity it will subsequently establish.”317 Lying in noir is thus a form of the guerrilla warfare I describe in Viper. I argue that the noir imagination becomes monstrous through the powers of the false. The works I discuss ask what is the state of repetition when the initial model—Madeleine, the past, identity/humanity—has been lost? Judy is like Borges’s palimpsest—material on which the original writing has been removed in order to make space for another “I.” As such she is indiscernible from the text itself that she must try continually to deceive. It is not in her physical resemblance to Madeleine that monstrosity resides, nor is it in the conversation’s uncanny difference from itself. Rather monstrosity makes its appearance in the series of rituals, or repetitions necessary to reproduce and turn against the act of lone procreation. What is truly monstrous in Viper’s higher and truthful man (Dean, Trulli, Chilling) is that this ritual is repeated through words or the memory of a symbolic father who is the agency of a law that requires the erasure of the mother. A heroic of the false in noir then wishes to be, and sometimes is, a demarcation of this monstrous process. Like Don Quijote who frees the galley slaves only to have them turn against him, it is performative, liberating and critical in the sense of the Deleuze's triple consciousness. For Deleuze the series implies a clash of natural relations of time. “The powers of the false exist only from the perspective of a series of powers, always referring to each other and passing into one another.”318 In our model of the monstrous imagination the

316 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 128. 317 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 91. 318 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 133. 366 artist and the forger are placed on the same chain along with the truthful and the higher man. They are not chained to one another, but rather slide into and metamorphose into each other toward “the nth power of the false.”319 The nature of these powers is chronic, falsifying movement through repetition. As in mathematical terms, the numerical value of the exponent has no relation to the base except in terms of how many times the latter is a factor in its own product. Repetition is no less than the imitative act that liberates time from a chronological imperative and unchains it from its proposed telos. In Deleuze’s schema, the exponential series of the false conjures up monstrosity by leaving the in- human floundering upon a principle entirely alien to it. Thus, like the monstrous progeny I discuss in the previous chapter, the forger is in fact, a double deception, a counterfeit detector. This was demonstrated in the monster that paradoxically refuses to resemble its legal genitor yet resembles an image outside of its natural conception. Here it applies to the sidetracked protagonist who paradoxically finds himself on precisely the line of flight he needs to find in order to lose the model of omnipotence to which his identity is falsely tethered. The god walks the earth; the monster finds his reflection in the eyes of another. There he confronts the possibility that he is one species of liar, only one in an endless chain of “hanky-panky men” as Welles describes them in F for Fake (1974). This is not only the case with Hitchcock/Scotty/Judy, and with the Director/Harry/the conversation, but also with Chalmers in Viper who finally sees himself along the chain of liars and counterfeits that leads from Trulli to Dean to Chilling. Chalmers can mutate the series only when he disobeys his own patriarchal edict because there is no down, down there.

Story

Deleuze defines the story as the relationship of the subject to the object, but one that defies a “model of truth that finds its full expression in the adequation of the subject and the object.”320 Thus in conventional story telling, what the camera or author sees is a

319 Ibid., 134. 320 Ibid.,147. 367 model of objectivity, while what the character or protagonist sees is a model of subjectivity. Although this relationship can be clearly complex, the character seen for what he or she is—the object—and how the viewer sees things as they are is resolved in the identities of each. Deleuze describes this as Ego = Ego. “We might say that the film begins with the distinction between the two kinds of images [subject and object], and ends with their identification, their identity recognized.”321 This is the basic condition for the veracity of every possible story: the affirmation of the distance of the model from the real in a story-telling thread that moves along two poles of truth and representation from beginning to end. It can move backward or forward or both, but must never refuse the poles. The poles, as indicated earlier define the whole. But in Deleuze’s schema, there is another kind of story, one that no longer refers to an ideal reality. This is the story told in noir of the hero’s exile from the complex, duplicitous realm of modernity that generates him. He or she is destined to indefinitely traverse this realm via the irrational interval. The purpose of this cutting in, which is a form of haunting, is simple. It is blood simple, to borrow again from Hammett. The hero must make his or her mark on the story so that it in turn can over-write him. For this over-writing is literally that upon which the life of the character depends. As I indicate earlier, the story in noir is that of a conflict between the protagonist’s need for detachment—especially from his own origins, which he suspects are in a blood-stained authorial consciousness—and a situation that demands his or her involvement. Again, this is not just an ideological stance. It is the story of the world as multiplicity, as the randomly teeming, fatally riven heart of the word, and it is the true hero of the work. The Conversation tells the story of a character who has made alienation into a fine art. He has no friends, just jealous rivals. He has no family, just nightmares. He hides his mistress from the world and hides his identity from his mistress. He has an unlisted phone number. He conducts jazz sessions with ghosts. His apartment is bland. His physical appearance is modishly unremarkable. Like so many noir characters, Harry is a master at his profession. His enviable reputation and the legend of his jealously guarded secrets precede him. Again, this is demonstrated in the chilling shot of Harry following the bug- detector into the room. Harry in effect attains a form of omnipotence and indestructibility

321 Ibid., 148. 368 through a professional reputation that he uses as a mask. He chides his assistant for wanting to know the human elements of the case. Yet, Harry’s refusal to become involved is unbalanced because it is only an affectation of inhumanity. He is playing the role of automaton: Ruler of the Machine-World. Yet the lovers' false dilemma arouses a human response lurking in the cut between his physical form and his amputated conscience. The ineluctably human conversation triggers some response, some memory within him of his own severed humanity, and by extension the falseness of his inhuman stance. The result is his transformation from the conscienceless bugger to the bugger bugged by his own conscience. Similarly, Vertigo is the story of a fraudulent detective whose self-removal from the world and refusal to return to detective work stems from guilt and is similarly and in this film, literally unbalanced. Like Harry, a false encounter with the human sentiment of loss triggers the dormant detector within him. Madeleine makes him feel like a hero again by giving him a false world to rule. Conversely, for Judy, her encounter with human love transforms her into an indispensable object of human desire, rather than a throw-away subject of inhuman design. The story of noir’s darkening stain is not, then, purely that of style or context. It is, in spite of the role of artifice, a deeply human story of the anguish of choice: to get out or to go blood simple. It is the story of the cut, the stitching together of identities that mark one’s passage through the lonely chasms. The cut then, like a third consciousness, is integrated into the shot in a point of view inseparable from the character’s way of seeing which is always the story of a sequential loss stitched to serial gain in identity. The cut is now in the frame but also outside it in a monstrous adulteration of the subjective with the objective. In noir, the object is becoming another so there is, by definition, no object other than the imitation of a subjective abomination. In Viper, the adulterous Chalmers’s may or may not have slept with his mother. Dean may or may not have wanted to. Trulli willed his mother to fall down the stairs again and again so he could resurrect her as bride. Lena’s obscene loss of identity through Trulli’s ultimate deception bears witness to the chronic cut of incest. Similarly, Vertigo sustains a critique of veracity in the story in its contamination of the story of monster-making with the point of view of the monster-becoming. A 369 contamination of the two kinds of image—subjective and objective—creates what Deleuze describes as “bizarre visions of the camera (alternation of different lenses, zoom, extraordinary angles, abnormal movements, halts)”322 In order to express both the symbolic and a demarcated vertigo, Scotty’s point of view is only described in these singularities by “bringing the whole to the power of the false.”323 What Deleuze means by this is that the story no longer refers to an ideal of the true that affirms its own reality, but becomes a pseudo-story, or literally “a story which simulates or rather a simulation of the story.” In the new story, objective and subjective images lose their distinction. For example, a cut separates the shots of Scotty behind the wheel from the shots out of the car’s windscreen. But this distinction is lost in another Hitchcockian demark when the shot of Harry and Judy driving toward their mission is superimposed on a subtly reversed rear projection. It then looks as though he is driving on the wrong side of the road (track), and as with the crossing of the axis by the camera in The Conversation, throws everything thereafter into doubt. In the sliding indiscernibility of the story, the author or director becomes other simultaneously with the character’s self-creation. Deleuze argues that “I is another is the formation of a story which simulates, of a simulation of a story or of a story of simulation which deposes the form of the truthful story.”324 So, what was previously identified as a feminised or monstrous affinity with the time-image is here aligned with what Deleuze describes as the “story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster.”325 If the ideal of truth has always been sustained by fiction itself—the necessary resolution of points of view—then,

322 Ibid. 149. 323 Ibid. 324 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153. While for Deleuze this is the greatest achievement of cinema verite, I have taken his model as a tool for noir, much the same way that I have taken his time-image to apply to the director whom he specifically designates as being on the threshold between the two regimes. Under the condition of the time-image, the same transformation involves the cinema of fiction and the cinema of reality, and if Deleuze’s point concerning cinema verite is that is makes a fiction out of truth, then the powers of the false can also be applied to a mode that makes a fiction out of the truth of all fictions. 325 Ibid., 150. 370 following Nietzsche, it is modified in texts that tell the story that “the ideal of the true is the most profound fiction.”326 The political dimension of the powers of the false are realised compellingly in noir through what Deleuze describes as a “suppression of reverences,” such as truth, resemblance, and fiction. From the darkly subversive thrillers of the classic era (1941- 1955), to the paranoia films of the late century, noir belongs to this liberating moment by suppressing its reverence for cinematic, novelistic models of reality. In other words, the truth is by definition “that of the masters or colonisers” because it is a penetrative, intentional drive toward resemblance as the “most immoderate of human texts.”327 In a film noir such as Vertigo, cultural politics are traversed through the blurring of distinctions between genders, the contamination of the gaze, dialogical series, and above all by the story of a monster being born not only from its point of view, but also in a radical act of autopoiesis. Through the powers of the false, descriptions become pure. Purely optical and sound descriptions are unverifiable in action images. Narrations falsify through a series of indiscernible forgers. Finally stories multiply in the interval, in a monstrous bid to out- do form.

A Rearticulation of the Noir Hero

The essence of noir heroism is the throwing of character into the void where another I waits, as Raymond Chandler puts it, “in darkness more than night.” Thus, the Deleuzian interval furnishes the concepts with which to rearticulate heroics in noir. Tracking the past is the most common point of entry into the interval and it appears time and again as one of the primary anomalies of movement in noir. The hero on the trail of the truth gets side-tracked because truth is not what he or she wants, but rather a space in which to live closer to the serial nature that he or she is continually recreating.

326 Ibid. 327 De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 152. 371

As I show, the end game of noir is a critical indiscernibility, where the hoax and the crime are subject to a fatal confusion, interminably deferring resolution. The noir hero—as automaton, as counterfeit—must refuse the burden or entitlement of a final moral authority. To remain outside a system, a form that includes ones own duplicitous counterfeit character is to leave both intact. The interval rearticulates noir as the locus of a new heroic, whereby alienation and involvement become cut and stitched together in the assemblage. The interval is an inhuman space from which an intensely human, but resolutely non-humanist story emerges. We might say that the paradoxical compulsion of the automaton to act human, even when it is such an act that must destroy it, is his or her fatal flaw and marks noir as one of literature’s tragic and originary modes. By jumping into the human series, the automaton risks contamination by the very trait with which he or she is terminally incompatible. It is only by a suspension of judgement toward a more Deleuzian evaluative positioning on the series, that the automaton has a chance of metamorphosis. I discuss how the noir hero is more a visionary than an agent of action. This is because of the hero’s need to see what is too much in the image. This need is exacerbated by a physical or neurotic impairment as a result of the collision of art and life. In the excesses or truncations of their roles, the actors as characters must incorporate an awareness of needing to see this set of relations: this indiscernibility between actions and crime, innocence and guilt, truth and lies, or the past and the present. The protagonist must react according to the relations that indiscernibility introduces into the frame. This is why, as Deleuze says, by inserting the spectator into the frame—not as judge, but in terms of an ethical generosity based on “evaluating every being, every action and passion, every value, in relation to the life which they involve,”328 the spectator enters into the series. The spectator bears witness to “affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgement as transcendent value: 'I love or I hate' instead of 'I judge.'“329 Rather than judging the characters in the name of a higher authority, the spectator's identity enters into a becoming fictional, a transformative life form that sees new possibilities in an old

328 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 141. 329 Ibid. 372 wound.330 It is through the interval that we can approach a system, not of, judgement but of evaluation in noir heroics:

Only the good allows itself to be exhausted by life rather than exhausting it, always putting itself at the service of what is reborn from life, what metamorphoses and creates. Out of becoming it makes a Being, so protean, instead of despatching it into non-being, from the height of a uniform and fixed being.331

The bad forgers, like the romantic artist, on the one hand, and like Scotty, the truthful man in Vertigo, have an exaggerated desire for form and they have no sense or power over shape. After a certain point, they no longer know how to change. In contrast, a heroic of generosity, of good faith shines in the shape where the false is elevated to the nth degree. The gift of becoming resides in the image of the artist, creator of the true monster. In terms of a forged right and wrong this is what is immanent in the value system of bad copying. Heroics in noir are performative of the anguish of choice. The choice is to remain on the firm ground of detachment or to put oneself into the interval of a humanity that may or may not be worth saving. This is the ultimate act of good faith undertaken by a figure that is the ultimate in bad form.

Conclusion

Huet and Deleuze meet in the interval, the chasm in the image that is home to the bad copy. For Huet, the interval shifts from the domain of representation to a difference severed from its ‘natural’ conception. For Deleuze, it takes on a serial assimilation to a false model. The Deleuzian powers of the false irreducibly multiply fiction to a point of

330 Deleuze, 142. 331 Ibid. 373 self-cancellation and creation. In texts that seem to have always been with us the false copy works to shift resemblance from the domain of the real and the imaginary into that of the monstrously undecidable: the true or the false. The heroic derives from a critical reliance on bad copying in description; from the central role in narration played by the counterfeit detector, a bad copy of the detective; and from a story stained with the noir fear of falling. It is not important to decide whether deception is the disease or the cure, but it is important to acknowledge that is it the agent of change in noir. In this chapter I show that for Huet and Deleuze the powers of the false generated by the monstrous imagination and the crystal-image respectively are related directly to time. “Time,” Deleuze asserts (and Don Quijote would agree with him), “has always put the notion of truth in crisis.” 332 The subversive powers of the false meet time in the interval. Here time remains untethered from actualised signs of movement that, as a form of the true in fiction, would control it. Instead, virtual movement—unleashed in the artistic imagination—liberates time from the chronological rules of representation. Through a monstrous imagination, the image of time as becoming changes the story into a bad copy of fiction: the metamorphosis of the true, the emergence of the new (the novel) and the effective production of the real. What the fiction of truth has been able to partially conceal—not because it should, but because it could—are the images that it provides with the fake alibi of fiction. In a poetic of the bad copy, it is not images, or appearances, that repress the truth, but the reverse. At the gateway of interpretative telos, these tricky aesthetics have long been determined in theory as a given. Yet the monstrous image waits in the dark as an eternal reminder that in fiction, the hanky-panky men will always be with us.

332 Ibid.,130. 374

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

ORIGINAL POEM If all that might should turn to is, There’d be nothing more to be; If only what my eyes could see Were what my heart has wished!

But I want too much, for nothing and no one Can restore what’s disappeared; Time never turns, it’s never been done; No past reappears, No history draws near.333

The question that I raised at the start of this dissertation was how do the powers of the false unleash a monstrous heroic in noir. My response has provoked a series of questions, principally: how can the noir hero’s signature obsession with the past recreate a future—for heroics, for noir and for creative authority in fiction? For Cervantes’s protagonist, Don Quijote, whose tilting at the past sets the tone for this most novelistic of cinematic modes—film noir—the answer lies in repetition. The aging hidalgo, a bad copy of Cervantes himself—or is it, as Cervantes indicates, the other way around—embarks on the unrivalled imitation of a chivalric mode long overtaken by a modern crisis of confidence. This crisis is brought about by the refusal of the “new” worlds to model themselves faithfully on the “old.” If Don Quijote describes modernity as the ongoing attempt by a culture of self-appointed wizards to turn iron, land and people into gold, then its protagonist, in his tragi-comic refusal to be modern, is an inaugural hero. In his deceptive and deceived plunge into the fictions of the past, he anticipates Vertigo’s Scotty Ferguson who is a counterfeit detective searching for difference in the masked repetition

333 Cervantes, 2:18, 444 375 of modernity. Don Quijote also anticipates The Conversation’s Harry Call, a postmodern automaton who fatally confuses technology with reality. Like the monstrous Renaissance mother, Cervantes faithfully attaches the subjective point of view onto an objective reality in order to create a monster—the modern novel. Thus he paves the way for the diabolical and detached Romantic artist, whose fateful contamination of memory with the imagination becomes one of the dominant tropes of noir. In spite of their considerable differences, these strange fictional assemblages all speak to an ethos of indiscernibility and monstrosity in noir. For it is this ethos that results in the tilting that characterises the mode and drives the characters: tilting between alienation and involvement on the one hand and exemplification and critique on the other, tilting as the ultimate act of good faith in the bad forms of humanity. I argue in this dissertation that noir both exemplifies the form it is compelled to change. Noir thus critiques a modern ethos—an obsession with the future written into the past—masked as bad faith in the present. This performative tactic is an act of good faith only when the character leaps out of the series of totalising obsessions to re-invent what he or she really wants: the repetition of that about which one can have no knowledge: the new. Importantly, I do not attempt to evaluate good and bad art in terms of faith, or to state that a faithless likeness producing is somehow ethically better than an unfaithful resemblance-catching. Instead, my object is to explore a certain faith in imitation expressed by a subject driven by the monstrous powers of the false. In attempting to isolate this tactic in noir, I set up a dialogue between a creative work and a critical analysis. In its monstrous plotting, appropriations of noir conventions, and ethos of deception, Viper both engages with and exceeds the themes of the dissertation. Rarely is a work of fiction written to a theme. When it is it is rarely successful. Viper’s successes and failures may be measured along with its attempts to negotiate the thematic boundaries of the dissertation. Ultimately however these successes and failures are testament to my personal and artistic engagement with certain deceptions such as paternity, celebrity, film theory, language, and authorship. The monstrous aspect of the fiction-writing process has become something of a cliché. There is no doubt that in the writing of Viper, however, certain leitmotifs, such as caves, masks, mothers and so on seemed to proliferate. Characters’ personalities evolved and devolved in spite of me, and 376 their motives repeatedly confounded the constraints of plotting. I was able to experience first hand that the horror or monstrous nature of writing boils down to difference. Its nature is a sign not of nature, and not life itself, but as Huet puts it:

… a lifelikeness that no one can imitate precisely because it is not life itself. This lifelike image is the unique, fragile, unviable creation […] it is a work of art 334

From Viper’s Diana to Hitchcock’s Judy to The Conversation, the attempt at art uncreates itself through the powers of the false—false description, forged narration, simulating stories. These powers proliferate in a mode that, more than any other, is about the nature of art and the art of nature. Noir’s long-lived progeny are a monstrous reminder of the principle power of fiction to reproduce: not from originals but from models of models so far removed that the copy forfeits the role of legitimate representation and can now only be described as a bad, or false copy. Viper, in its themes of switching sons, copies of fathers, bad daughters, inhuman locales, and false powers was an act of good faith, expressing my confidence that there is still something new to say in and about noir. Similarly this critical analysis extends my novella by providing a detailed discussion of many issues raised by practitioners of representation from Plato to Deleuze, and from Cervantes to Coppola: particularly as these relate to trust both in and of the fictional text. Thus in Chapter I, I set up Deleuze’s crystalline descriptive, narrative and story-telling schematic in which descriptions are first, not necessarily connected to or verified in action, but can become pure in terms of optical and sound situations through an insertion of the cut into the frame. Second, narration is undermined by a series of forgeries that cut an irrational interval into time by being the only factor in their own reproduction. Finally, stories become simulations of stories—rather than fictions—by contaminating what would otherwise be understood as clearly either the subjective or objective focus of the image.

334 Huet, 128. 377

In chapter II, I show how the past is re-presented in order to produce its indiscernibility with the future. By stepping into the past, the noir protagonist makes the present new. The primary role of the protagonist is to identify this hoax, a hoax in which he suspects that he may be deeply implicated. I provide a postmodern model of noir based on a crisis of confidence in the text by the hero whose suspicions about his own role in the hoax draw on the most critical and inspirational moments in the novel itself. For this, Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, with its sliding, reversible identities, serves as an abiding example. I examined indiscernibility, the assemblage and becoming as they unleash a heroic of the bad copy in both Vertigo and The Conversation. In chapter III, I argue that through the monstrous imagination, characters cut up the past and stitch it onto the future in order to create an assemblage: a monster incompatible with the present order whose terrible burden is to bear witness to a future in which it might proliferate. I claim a connection between a Platonic metexein and a Deleuzian becoming that speaks to the monstrous imagination. Reading Vertigo and The Conversation through Huet’s model of the monstrous imagination, I show how it may be usefully mapped onto my own serial model of the noir structure. In this model, writer, character, monster and time slide into each other in a continual demarcation or shock of forces cut into the image. In chapter IV, I argue that the powers of the false cut time into the frame through the Deleuzian interval. In the interval, the possibilities of change are introduced by a heroic produced by noir’s split aesthetic, its monstrous plotting and by a falsification of description, narrative and story produced in the time-image. By arguing for the primacy of the time-image in noir, I demonstrate that the powers of the false are unleashed in the cut, not between frames but in the frame itself. Thus the time-image is not just the coalescence of the real and the virtual, but also an assemblage of the human and the automaton: the not yet and too late. In my dissertation and novella, I show that noir is self-consciously about the death of the modern subject. In this way it is ultimately a tragic mode.335 I demonstrate that in

335 “Tragedy, then is a representation (mimesis) of an action (praxis) that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude … It should moreover imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation (mimesis) … it follows plainly that the change of fortune presented 378 noir, form is destiny in terms of what the protagonist must push against. Does this therefore make noir a heroic mode, as well as a tragic one? As my analysis suggests, the degree to which the author or filmmaker is able to put him or herself at the service of the work is the degree to which the work can be described in the same terms as its hero. Thus the work can be evaluated, but never judged in terms of the author’s acknowledgment of the power of the false characters to take back their resemblances and in turn put them at the service of future multiplicities. The degree to which the characters are infected in a serial contagion by the epidemic of the false is the degree to which creative authority has been heroically misspent. My argument for a new look at noir rests on my confidence in both Hitchcock’s and Coppola’s uphill battle to master a mode that in its very innovations and artistic responses to dire social contexts, endlessly enacts its refusal to be mastered. The work that fiction does and the work that analysis does are different. Viper necessarily exceeds the bounds of the analysis. Yet even the work of the theorist, as Plato notes, is not without its perils. For even Plato was forced to concede that the only way to describe the theoretician or philosopher’s project is in monstrous terms “like a painter combining two or more animals into a goat-stag or similar monster.”336 If theory aspires to an approximation of the “true being of each thing” it is itself a representation. Theory thus embodies both the repetitive, truth-creating aspect and the dissembling, fake- producing aspect of the representations at which Plato so famously tilts.'337 My aim has been to investigate and reassemble the heroics of the false and monstrosity in Viper, and to elaborate on these ideas in my dissertation. I have no choice but to have confidence in this conversation, just as it is to be hoped that the dialogue between practice and theory is never-ending.

must be … that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not my vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” Aristotle, Poetics, 6, 53a. 336 Plato, The Republic, 488. 337 Plato, The Republic,480. 379

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SELECT FILMOGRAPHY All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Perf. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman. DVD. Warner Bros, 1976. A Touch of Evil. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Charles Heston, Janet Leigh. DVD. Universal. 1958. The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylto. DVD. Universal Pictures, 1963. Bladerunner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutgar Hauer. Ladd Company/ Warner Brother. 1982. Body Heat. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan. Perf. Kathleen Turner, William Hurt. DVD. Ladd Company/Warner Brothers, 1981. The Brood. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Samantha Eggar, Oliver Reed. DVD. Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1979. The Conversation. Dir. Francis Ford Coppolla. Perf. Gene Hackman, Cindy Williams. DVD. American Zoetrope, 1974. Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore. DVD. RKO. 1941. Double Indemnity. Dir. Billy Wilder. Perf. Barbara Stanwick, Fred McMurry. DVD. Paramount, 1944. F for Fake. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Joseph Cotten, Peter Bogdanovich. DVD. Janus Films, 1974. Klute. Dir. Dir Alan J. Pakula. Perf. Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland. DVD. Warner Brothers. 1971. Laura. Dir. Otto Preminger. Perf. Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox. 1944. The Lives of Others. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch. Sony Pictures, 2006. 387

Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Torneur. Perf. Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum. DVD. RKO, 1947. The Parallax View. Dir Alan J. Pakula. Perf. Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 1974. Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart, Kim Novak. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 1958. Yojimbo. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshiro Mifume, Tatsuya Nakadai. DVD. Toho, 1961.