Linger Awhile

2 Istvan Fallok

24 November 2003. ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly …’ Right? General disbelief. But the Wright brothers suspended their disbelief. They believed that man could fly and the rest of it followed from that. Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible. Yes. I keep telling myself that. I’m Istvan Fallok and I believe that I’m going to reconstitute Justine Trimble from the magnetised particles of a videotape. I believe it because when I saw her on that video it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Wham, I was in love. Irving Goodman’s an OK guy and he’s in love with Justine too but if I can make this happen she’s going to be mine, not his.

Right, let’s get practical. Google tells me that videotape is composed primarily of three components: magnetic (metal oxide) particles, a polyurethane-based binder, and a polyester base material. Particles yes. Particles and waves. Diffraction gratings. Particles in suspension. Particles in a suspension of disbelief. Waves of aggravation and frustration. Light comes through the grating as waves or particles. Interference patterns. Light. Justine on the video is made of light.

Wait a minute. Let’s think this thing through. Do I want to bring Justine to me or do I want to go to her? Not dead Justine but the waves and/or particles of her on the video? So if I go there, what then? Will I be the sixty-five-year-old me or will I be young like Justine? And western? With a pistol and a horse?

There was a name in my mind: Gösta Kraken. I had a copy of his book, Perception Perceived. I went to my shelves, stuck out my arm, and it leapt into my hand. So I knew it wanted to help. I’d flagged the page where he talks about being:

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

Thank you, Gösta. So it’s light and motion, blackness and stillness. Waves or particles? Waves and particles? Still, I’m thinking of it from her end. What about my getting to where she is? No good. Even if I could work out the translation of me into magnetised particles all I’d have is me stuck in Last Stage to El Paso. Endlessly. No, I’ve got to bring her to me. First I’ll have to scan the stillnesses and calibrate an electronic suspension of the black. Film runs at twenty-four frames per second; video at twenty-five and the black … Hang on, do I want the black? No, I don’t. Let’s back up and start again.

25.11.03. Sorry, Gösta. Can’t use you this time but maybe some other time. We’re talking about light here, not blackness. Justine on screen is particles of light. Or waves, whichever. OK, so I’ve got to get a frame with a good full-length shot of Justine, then I isolate her for transmission. How the fuck do I do that?

Went to see Chauncey Lim in D’Arblay Street. Optical novelties. All kinds of pocket-size things with lenses, keyrings that talk and buttonhole cameras. On the wall an acupuncture chart and a calendar with a photograph of a black rooster from Aunt Zophrania’s Herbals & Dreambooks Est. 1925 ‘Harlem’s Best’. The place was pretty fuggy and there was the kind of smell you might get if you opened a box of Transylvanian earth. You have to take Chauncey as you find him. I bought a fountain pen that projects a photo of Virginia Mayo (still big in Morocco) to put him in a good mood.

‘You already have three of these,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me this time?’

I said, ‘I’m almost afraid to tell you, it’s such a crazy idea.’

He began to look interested. ‘Crazy is good,’ he said. ‘Too much not enough crazy in this world. Tell me anything, I’m very electric.’

‘You mean eclectic.’

‘That too, but I sing the body electric. I’m talking Walt Whitman here.’

‘Please don’t. Can I tell you what I want now?’

‘OK. Always you’re in a hurry, Istvan. Slow down, smell the flowers, listen to the birds.’

‘There aren’t any birds, the radiators are knocking and what I smell isn’t flowers.’

‘It’s High John the Conqueror root, I grind it up and make little incense cones out of it. This root gives power, it’s good luck, one of Aunt Zophrania’s top sellers.’

‘Right, are you going to let me tell you my problem now?’

‘Go ahead. I can see that your problem wants to become my problem.’

So I told him and he became quite excited. ‘This is top crazy,’ he said. ‘Show me the video.’

I handed him Last Stage to El Paso. He put it in his VCR and played it, backing it up now and then to see a scene again. ‘This is a woman I could fall in love with,’ he said.

‘First of all, she’s dead,’ I said.

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he said.

‘And I saw her first,’ I said.

‘Keep your shirt on. You want to isolate her, this is what you have to do.’ He gave me detailed instructions and I took notes.

‘Let me know what happens,’ Chauncey said as I was leaving.

‘You bet,’ I said.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘take some High John with you, you’ll want all the power you can get.’ He gave me a box of the little incense cones.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘See you.’ I hurried home and got started while everything was still fresh in my mind. With Chauncey’s instructions I converted the video to a digitised version that I could scan frame by frame. I got a JPEG of the frame I wanted, then I started up Photoshop and highlighted the background. I went to the inverse of that and got Justine with black all around her which I cut out and pasted on a blank Photoshop canvas. So far, so good.

What I had in mind was to do a small-size trial run first. In order to use a diffraction grating I devised a converter that would laserise the light from the Justine figure and aim it at the slits in the diffraction grating. The grating was something I remembered from sixth-form physics. This was a low-tech job made of cardboard and only fourteen inches high with two slits in it. I had a sheet of photographic printing paper covered with foil on a little easel about two feet away. I darkened the room, put Justine up on the screen, triggered the laser, and uncovered the paper as the interference pattern appeared. Then I covered it again, went into the darkroom, and printed it. That gave me the particles of the interference pattern on the paper. I dissolved the paper in hydrochloric acid and then what I had on the bottom of the tray were the particles alone.

1 January 2004. Everything grinds to a halt for Christmas but I took a taxi out to Thierson & Bates Biologicals in Surrey and got some frog specimens before they closed. Chauncey Lim helped me out with the chemicals I needed and by New Year’s Eve I was ready to have a go.

I poured the particles into a test tube containing polypetides that I’d prepared from the frogs. I figured that my primordial soup would bind the particles in a suspension of disbelief and the frog DNA wouldn’t interfere with the identity of the particles. I lit the High John cones and when the room smelled lucky I zapped the soup with 240 volts. Smoke came out of the test tube and there was an electrical smell. Then Jesus Christ, there she was in the test tube in black-and-white, about four inches high. She looked scared, and stood there twisting slowly with her arms above her head because of the narrowness of the tube. As I looked at her from all angles I had a crazed feeling of power. Then I suddenly felt so sad that I began to cry. I was shaking, and with the test tube in my left hand I put my right hand behind me so I could lean on the table but I pricked my finger on the point of a scalpel. When I held up my hand a drop of blood fell into the test tube and all at once tiny Justine blossomed into colour. She looked at me and mouthed, ‘Oh!’ Then the colour faded and with it the whole figure, ghastly in monochrome as it shrivelled into nothing. Oh, my God, the sadness! I stood there holding the test tube and looking at the emptiness where she’d been with my head spinning round on the first day of the New Year.