The Skin Palace

14

Sylvia sits inside the Snapshot Shack and does the film inventory. She counts boxes Of Kodak and Fuji and Konica and the generic stuff that nobody buys. She arranges box after box in their shelving slots, organizes them by brand name, film speed, number of exposures, black-and-white or color. At ten o’clock the brown panel truck pulls up and delivers the morning’s prints. It’s a light load, a half-dozen envelopes full of vacation shots, birthday shots, half-focused cookouts that have been sitting in the camera since Labor Day. It seems like there are fewer customers every week.

By ten-fifteen she’s phoned them all, told them their prints are ready and they can pick them up at their convenience. She says, “Thank you for using the Snapshot Shack,” in this robotically sweet voice. It’s the only way the words will come out. By ten-thirty she’s so bored and tense she’s grinding her teeth and replaying every moment of yesterday until she’s got a headache that no amount of aspirin is going to relieve. And it bothers her how much she wants a drink.

She came up from the darkroom sometime before dawn. The kitchen door was still open the way she’d left it, but the Dewar’s bottle was empty in the sink and Perry was sound asleep in bed. She lay down on the living room couch, dozed off at some point and woke to find Perry gone. He’d left a note underneath her Ansel Adams coffee mug—

Sylvia,

I’m sorry. I’m stupid. We’ve got to talk.

Hated to see you on the couch.

I’ll call from work.

P.

She thinks, what is it we’ve got to talk about, Perry? Yes, she was wrong not to call. And if the situation was reversed, maybe she’d have been furious. She should have called after she left Herzog’s. She should’ve just found a phone and dialed the number. Told him what had happened. Assured him she was all right. But what she knew yesterday and what she knows right now, the thing she just can’t change, is the fact that she didn’t want to call Perry. She may not be sure of why that is, of all the different factors that might have kept her from the phone, but she knows she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t hear his voice at that particular moment.

After she showered this morning, as she was standing in the bedroom, brushing her hair in the mirror, she looked down to see a manila file that Perry had left on the bureau. She stood there, hesitated maybe for a second, then opened it and paged through the contents. It was filled with clippings and notes and memos, all of them ink-stamped with dates and the words FUD: File # 01-602. There were newspaper articles on censorship battles in various parts of the country, political position papers, summaries on ballot referendums, excerpts from speeches given by Reverend Boetell.

She put her comb down and randomly read some of the Reverend’s words: … and a crusade means blood, brothers and sisters. A crusade means staining the land scarlet as we war against the godless, unredeemable enemy. There must be a purity to our thoughts, a surety to our purpose, and a godly persistence to our resolve. For we battle against the filthiest of foes, the beast who uses the Lord’s natural urge toward loving procreation and subverts it into unspeakable perversion. But have stout heart, my chaste crusaders, and keep safe the gift of your modesty, for as he struck down the writhing infidels of Sodom and Gomorrah, so too will he bring his vengeance to the land of Quinsigamond. So too shall he vanquish the wicked of this soulless and sinister town …

At one point, a drop of water ran from her hair and fell on the page she was reading. She brushed it away immediately, but the paper was marked. She stuffed everything back into the file, got dressed quickly and left for work, but this feeling of nervousness had already set in, this sense of tension hidden just under the skin, a little like the way she used to feel back in college after she’d stayed up all night watching movies, drinking a full thermos of coffee. Exhausted but wired. Depleted but incapable of sleep. The images just rushing through the head, as if they were powered by some external force.

And now that feeling is still with her and she knows it’s not helping that she’s trapped for the next six hours inside this shoebox with only two cans of Diet Coke and an AM radio that keeps fading out. She should have brought a book or magazine, but she just wanted to get out of the apartment. She wishes that somebody would come by to pick up their pictures. She just wants to talk to a stranger. Say all the banal, trivial things they expect. Would you like a new roll of film today? We’re running a special on Snapshot Shack 200 speed. Remember, Thursday is doubles day. Here’s your change. Thanks for using Snapshot Shack.

She picks up the first envelope of new prints. She stares at the name for a while. It sounds familiar to her, but she can’t place it: Mrs. Claudet. She doesn’t recognize the telephone number. She puts the envelope down on the pile of new deliveries. She looks out on the empty parking lot. Then she picks up the envelope and opens the flap and pulls out the pictures.

They’re summertime shots. Two and three months old. The first photo is a beach shot, a woman about Sylvia’s age in a one-piece royal blue bathing suit. The woman is standing on an outcropping of jetty, water rushing around her feet. There’s a huge smile on her face. She looks a little bit embarrassed. She’s got a great figure. Probably someone who does aerobics four or five times a week. Maybe this is Mrs. Claudet. Sylvia has never seen her before.

She fingers through the stack. She sees the same woman straddling a bicycle, eating an ice-cream cone, washing a car and seeming to threaten the photographer with a hosing. She sees the woman in the arms of a man with a bushy mustache. Their pose says boyfriend or husband. Sylvia sees the man patting a dog, a small shepherd with a tongue hanging over the bend of its mouth. She sees the couple together in a restaurant and she imagines the woman asking an agreeable waiter to take the shot. She sees the man sprawled in a mesh lawn chair, wearing a tank top and shorts, raising a beer bottle in the direction of the camera.

They’re smiling in every picture. They look like they’re having the summer of their lives. The woman looks like a definition of the word vibrant. She looks like she’s placed a ban on all variety of problems. She looks beautiful and she looks like she knows it.

And Sylvia finds herself thinking I want your life, Mrs. Claudet when she hears the tapping on the glass. She jumps and the photos fly into the air and rain down around her. She looks up, ready to find the aerobic goddess staring at her, spying on her as she envies the record of a perfect summer. But it’s not Mrs. Claudet. It’s Leni Pauline. And she’s holding Sylvia’s camera.

Sylvia slides the window open and Leni says, “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I was just inspecting,” Sylvia says. “Checking the pictures.”

“Quality control,” Leni says, maybe sarcastically, then “I brought your camera,” holding it up in the palm of her hand, waitress-style.

“God. Thank you. Thanks so much. I thought I’d never see it again.”

“Hugo got it back last night,” Leni says. “He asked me to drop it off to you.”

“How did you find me?” Sylvia asks.

Leni shrugs. “Hugo gave me the address. I thought you’d given it to him.”

Sylvia takes the camera from her and says, “Not that I remember.”

“Yeah, well, yesterday was a little confusing, you know.”

“How’d Hugo get hold of it?”

Leni gives a laugh. “Hugo can get hold of anything if he wants it badly enough. Coco calls him the Evil Santa.”

“Coco?”

“One of the girls,” Leni says. “Down at the Palace.”

The camera looks perfect, looks like it’s been sitting in the darkroom all night. Not a scratch.

“How can I thank you guys?” Sylvia asks.

Leni stops herself from smiling and says, “Listen, here’s a little tip. Never say that to anyone in my profession, okay?”

Sylvia laughs and then realizes Leni’s not joking. Leni takes a step back from the window, looks up and studies the Shack. She’s wearing jeans and a burgundy silk blouse, ankle boots and a leather bomber jacket that’s cracked and fading from chocolate to dusty white.

She shakes her head and says, “You like sitting in this thing all day?”

“It’s not bad.”

“It looks bad.”

“You get used to it.”

Leni walks back up to the window and says, “You can get used to anything. That doesn’t mean you like it.”

“It’s a job. I don’t have to think.”

“You have something against thinking?” Leni says.

They stare at each other until finally Sylvia shakes her head no.

Leni changes the subject and says, “Hugo said to tell you there was no film in the camera when he got it back. He said sorry about that.”

“Dammit,” Sylvia says. “I had some great shots of the riot.”

“There’ll be other riots, Sylvia.”

“Not for me.”

Leni says, “That’s because you’re stuck in this goddamn camera-thing all day. Honest to God, I’d lose it in there. I’d get claustrophobic. I hate small places like that.”

“It gets pretty annoying sometimes. The day can go by pretty slowly.”

“See, my days, they fly. They’re gone. I get up, I get out, I do things. I walk around. I see people.”

“What about work?”

Leni shakes her head. “It’s not like I work every day. Average week, I work maybe three days. Nights a lot. Hugo loves shooting at night. He says people are more relaxed at night. I don’t know. Everyone’s different.”

“What do you—” Sylvia starts and then stops herself, embarrassed.

“What do I make, right? That’s what everyone wants to know. That’s the big question.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude—”

“It’s not rude,” Leni says. “If I didn’t want to tell you, I wouldn’t tell you. I do all right. I’ve got an arrangement with Hugo, so I’m not really the norm. I’ve got kind of this contract thing with Hugo. So I’m a little different. But the average is four, five hundred. The guys make more, right.”

“Five hundred a week,” Sylvia says.

Leni gets a big kick out of this. “A day, Sylvia. Five hundred a day. The real names, the women who headline, they can go up to a grand a day, a few go higher. Once you’re up there you can put together a more complex package, you know? You can have contingencies. You’re a name, you might take back a point or two after the net.”

“That’s over a hundred grand a year.”

Leni leans on the lip of the window’s counter. “You’re assuming you work fifty-two weeks a year, Sylvia. You know what you’d look like, you worked fifty-two weeks a year?”

Sylvia’s embarrassed but too intrigued to shut up. “She can’t help asking, “How did you get into this business?”

Leni pushes her hair off her face and says, “How’d you end up sitting inside a camera, Sylvia?”

“I just needed a job.”

“There you go.”

“It’s a little different, Leni.”

“Why’s it so different?”

“I don’t know. You didn’t just answer some ad—”

“That’s exactly what I did.”

“C’mon.”

“That’s how everyone I know got into it. You answer an ad.”

“What? You open a newspaper and it says woman wanted to get naked and be filmed having sex with strange men.”

The words sound insulting after they’re out there, but Leni just smiles and says, “It’s a little more subtle than that.”

“Like what? What does the ad say?”

Leni takes a long breath and says, “You’re really fascinated by this, huh?”

Sylvia feels defensive. “It’s just really foreign to me.”

“Honey,” Leni says, “you don’t know foreign. You’ve never even seen foreign.”

“You make that sound so depressing.”

“You hear it that way. It isn’t anything to me. It isn’t one way or another.”

“How long have you been working?”

Leni doesn’t answer. She leans down and actually sticks her head inside the window and looks around.

“It’s incredible to me that you sit in here all day,” she says. “It can’t be healthy.”

Sylvia shrugs. “I’ve got a radio. I bring a book. I can read. I get a lot of reading done.”

Leni stares at her and says, “Listen, you’re so curious, what’re you doing for lunch? You must eat lunch. They let you eat lunch, right?”

“Yeah, they let me eat lunch. I usually just just run down to that convenience store and grab a yogurt.”

“A yogurt,” Leni repeats and Sylvia nods.

“You want to go to lunch?” Leni asks. “I know a place. We’ll have something. I’ll give you the lowdown.”

“Thanks, but I can’t leave.”

“You just said you run to the convenience store.”

“That’s like five minutes. You can leave to go the bathroom or on a quick errand—”

“Aren’t they generous.”

“Really,” Sylvia says, “I’ve got to stay here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leni says. “You’re just so busy. The lines are backing up here.” “Business is dead. I’m amazed the place is still open.”

“Sylvia, no one’s going to miss you for a half hour. I know a place five minutes from here. You’ll love this place.”

“Leni, I can’t just—”

“You have to, Sylvia. It’s not healthy in there. You’ve got to trust me on this.”

“I can’t. They’ll be furious.”

“What will they do, huh? They’ll fire you? It’ll be really tough picking something up this stimulating. And I’m sure the money is tremendous, right? You said yourself the place’ll probably close up in a month—”

“I never said—”

“—and will they give a damn about you when it does? This is crazy, Sylvia. Do something fun for a change.”

Ten minutes later, they pull up next to Kunitz Tower at the top of Behrman Hill and just sit there for a few minutes looking at the thing. It’s a sixty-foot tall, two-and-a-half story monument built of boulders and cobbles and designed to look like a mini feudal castle. The structure is acutally two towers joined together by an open-air archway.

Sylvia lives less than five miles from the Tower, but she’s been here exactly twice — on a grade school field trip and in high school, parking with a boy names Bobby Fenton on their first and only date. She wonders now what ever happened to Bobby.

The Tower is surrounded by a circular gravel road that in turn is surrounded by a scrubby, overgrown woods that covers the hill. Supposedly the view from the top of the Tower is tremendous, but to get there you’ve got to walk up these dank and grungy stone stairwells that always stink of urine. The rumor is that during the day the drunks and the gay hustlers share the place peacefully, but at night it belongs to the teenage punkers whose malt liquor bottles get tossed from the observation parapet. Today, the place appears empty.

Sylvia looks at Leni and raises her eyebrows for an explanation.

“The Floating Kitchen,” Leni says and climbs out of the car.

They walk to the stairwell opening and start up.

“It’s a hit-and-run operation. The owners haven’t scored a restaurant or a license yet, so they jump around. They’ve been using the Tower for about a week now. No signs. No advertising. They get by on word of mouth. It’s a family operation. The Zumaeta clan. From a village called Puquio in Peru. Everybody works. The old man, Jorge, he came north about six years ago. Worked as a cabbie and a barkeep. Put in like a hundred hours a week. Work and sleep. Lived on coffee. Brought everybody up one at a time. Soon as he had enough cash — bang, here comes son number one. Six months later, bang, here comes a daughter. The last to come was Maria, the wife. She held the fort back home until they’d all hit the road. Jorge sets them all up with work. Same deal, they work till they drop. Then six months ago, Daddy gets the idea for the restaurant. Keep everyone together. Capitalize on Maria’s fantastic cooking skills. Only they can’t afford to buy a place. So Maria comes up with the idea of the Floating Kitchen. They find empty spaces, move in and set up shop. And as luck would have it, the Zumaeta’s moveable feast is now the hottest trend in the Zone.”

They emerge out onto the top platform and Sylvia walks to the edge and leans on the capstones. She can see miles in every direction. In the center of the concrete floor is a round wooden table with four mismatched chairs grouped around it. A stooped and withered old woman emerges from the opposite, twin tower with a broom and starts to sweep around the table. She’s dressed in a quilted mechanic’s jacket over an old fashioned cotton housedress.

Leni pulls out a chair and says, “That’s Gramma. I’ll introduce you to the whole crew.”

They sit down and Sylvia says, “How do you know these people?”

“I know everybody,” Leni says, then smiles and shakes her head. “I’m their big booster. I bring everyone up here. Except Hugo. Hugo refuses. Hugo would have a food taster on payroll if he could find someone willing.”

She starts to study the chalkboard menu that the old woman is now holding and Sylvia looks out again at the view and keeps asking herself questions like, what about the cops and how do you cook in this place.

When she turns back, Leni is staring at her.

“Isn’t this a little better than the torture booth?” Leni says. “That place just wasn’t right, Sylvia. Bad juju. You were drowning in there.”

“Little melodramatic. Leni.”

“This is where you’re absolutely wrong. It’s the little stuff that gets to you. Always. It’s the stuff we don’t pay attention to. Our environment is hitting us on a hundred levels every second and we don’t even recognize it. But inside we’re growing tumors and making plans to buy assault rifles.”

“Assault rifles,” Sylvia says.

Leni brings her head across the table. “You walk down the street in a big American city, okay? You walk by block after block of these big towers, these monster rectangles, that just shoot up forever. They’re just enormous blocks of glass and steel and concrete. No design. No angles. No color. No real variation. You know what those buildings are saying to you when you go by?”

“The buildings?”

“They’re saying—you’re worthless. You’re powerless. You’re a peasant. Your time here has no meaning. They’re saying you’ll never know what goes on in here.”

They stare at each other for a second and then Sylvia shakes her head.

“What?” Leni says.

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

“I just can’t help … I’m just … Do all of Hugo’s actresses talk this way?”

Leni sits back in her chair and says, “A. I’m not a possession of Hugo Fuckhead Schick. You’ve got to watch your terminology there, Sylvia. And B. No, the actors I know are like everyone you know. They’re all over the board. I work with stupid people. I work with really savvy people. I work with an occasional neurotic and I work with a lot of just average, boring stiffs. I did my last film with a girl who had a master’s degree in anthropology—”

“Get out of here,” Sylvia interrupts.

“You come down the Palace, I’ll introduce you to Miriam.”

A teenage girl comes to the table with an order pad in her hands. She nods and smiles at Leni, who says, “How are you doing today, Alejandra? I think I’m in the mood for Cuy. Maybe some Papas Arequipena. And a house coffee with the shooter on the side.”

“What’s Cuy?” Sylvia asks.

“She’ll have the same,” Leni says to Alejandra, who scribbles on the pad and walks away.

Sylvia opens her mouth to protest and Leni says, “Trust me here, all right? You’ll love it, okay?”

If Perry pulled something like this Sylvia knows she’d be annoyed for the rest of the day. But something makes her want to give over to Leni. Sitting here with her might mean forfeiting the Shack job. But so what. Leni’s right. You can always get another job. And maybe the Shack was doing something to her. Maybe sitting inside that big camera all day was getting to her in ways she couldn’t perceive.

Alejandra comes back with two mugs of coffee, black and looking thick. The mugs are only about three-quarters full and next to them she places two shot glasses filled with a clear, slightly green liquid.

“Uh-uh,” Sylvia says. “It’s too early in the day. And I drank way too much yesterday. I felt horrible this morning.”

“It was the thought of going to that hut out there. God, just the thought of it.” Leni imitates a full body shiver and picks up the shot glass.

“No, really—”

“Here’s what you do,” Leni says. “You take half of it in your mouth and hold it there. Let it roll around the gums. Tremendous. It heats up. Then you dump the rest into the mug, swirl it once, take a big sip of coffee and swallow the whole thing down.”

Sylvia gives her a skeptical look. “What is it?”

“Hootch. Their native moonshine. They won’t tell me the real name. No liquor license, you know.”

Sylvia watches the routine, then follows Leni’s lead, fires half the shot, dumps, swirls, and swallows. Then she sits back. The rush comes in about five seconds. It’s like she applied Ben-Gay to the inside of her throat and chest. It’s like her lungs have been soaked in mentholated muscle rub.

Leni is looking over at her, a huge grin breaking on her face.

“Isn’t that great,” she says.

“Does it let up?” Sylvia asks.

“Who wants it to let up? God, your whole face is flushed,” Leni says. “Gives you great color. You look gorgeous right now.”

“I feel like I’ve just breathed ether.”

“This is better than ether,” Leni says, straight-faced.

“I’m not going to be able to eat.”

“Three minutes, you’ll be ravenous.”

“Any other side effects I should know about?”

“Well,” Leni says, looking from side to side as if checking for spies in their little watchtower, “it doesn’t short-change the libido.”

Sylvia stares at her, finally says, “Am I ever going to know how much of what you say is the truth?”

“Sooner or later,” Leni says, “everything I say is the truth.”

Alejandra brings three bowls, one filled with what looks like potatoes mixed with eggs, olives, and red chilies, another with an unidentifiable meat dish, and the last filled with Ritz and saltine crackers. Leni takes a handful of crackers indiscriminately and crumbles them over the top of her food. Sylvia leans down and smells garlic and maybe mustard.

She lifts up her mug to take a sip of coffee and Leni says, “You’re going to want to make that last.”

Leni starts stirring her lunch with the concentration of a jewel cutter. Sylvia picks up a spoon, starts to make the same motions, moves her food in slow circles, reversing direction, cutting through the middle, pushing the top layer down to the bottom. She feels a little like a precocious monkey.

“So you want the big story,” Leni says.

“Huh?”

“My life. You want the unabridged version. You want triple X, right?”

Sylvia doesn’t know what to say.

“You’re curious,” Leni says. “Don’t worry about it. That’s how we learn, right?”

Sylvia takes a mouthful of meat. There’s a sweetness she doesn’t expect, nothing cloying, but a definite sugary tang.

“I was born twenty-four years ago,” Leni begins and right away Sylvia doesn’t believe her.

“My mother was originally from around here. Couple towns out. Came from a family used to work the apple orchards, you know, out on route 34. She married at, I don’t know, maybe seventeen. Guy was a salesman from an auto parts company. That’s what she used to tell me. He moved her out to Indiana right away. I think it was Lafayette. She was pregnant with me in the first year.”

Leni stops, takes a sip of coffee.

“You’re hoping I’ll cut to the chase, right?” she says, then before Sylvia can answer she adds, “Sorry, you have to sit through the previews before the main attraction. Remember that. There’s got to be buildup.”

“Is your mother still alive?”

Leni shakes her head no and swallows. “The old man took off a month before I was born. Never heard from again. No letter. No phone calls. Just gone. He was a sweetheart, huh? Mom had to come back here. And though I only know her side of it, her people weren’t exactly sympathetic. A little I told you so going on there, I guess. She moved in with her older sister and her family. That’s where I lived for the first six or seven years. Then there was some huge blowup. I’ve got no idea what it was about. But we left and moved here into the city. Mom got us a little apartment on Froelich Way. You know those row houses over there? I actually loved it there. Great place to be a kid.”

“How’d you get by?”

“You’re an intuitive woman, Sylvia, aren’t you? You know the right questions to ask. You should’ve gone into law, you know that? Mom got a job at the old Viceroy Theatre. She sold tickets. She sat in a little booth just like you’ve been doing.”

“The Viceroy,” Sylvia says.

“That’s right,” Leni says. “The bells go off. One of the city’s first adult theatres. I mean the features were pretty soft-core compared with today. This was early seventies. I think they still called them ‘nudies’ back then. That was before the industry really took off.”

“She couldn’t get anything else?”

“You mean a job? I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want anything else. It got complicated. She started dating the manager, a real, original greaseball, you know. One of these dicks who always wanted me to call him uncle. I couldn’t stand the bastard.”

“Was there a problem—”

“Abuse question, right? No, it was nothing like that. The guy was just a jerk. Mort Greneway. Never forget his name. He used to slick his hair back. Had terrible breath. He treated my mother like shit. But after my father’s little act, you know, I think she felt kind of desperate … I don’t know. She started drinking. Old story. She aged like crazy. Looked twenty years older than she was. I think about it now …”

She breaks off and Sylvia picks up her mug and holds it to her lips without drinking.

“Things went progressively downhill. We changed apartments a lot. They got smaller and smaller. By the time I hit high school it was all over with Morty and Mom was out of a job and nursing Johnnie Walker for breakfast.”

“What did you do?”

“C’mon, Sylvia. Think about this. Where did you meet me?”

“I mean, how did it happen? How’d you end up making films?”

Leni plants her spoon in the remains of her lunch, pushes her bowl away from her, and wraps both hands around her coffee mug.

“I was about fifteen, sixteen. I wasn’t getting to school much anyway. I dropped out. Went down to the Zone one afternoon. This was back when a few of the factories were still open and they had those strips of bars down on Grassman. This was just before the first boho kids moved in. I got a job waitressing at this little dive called the Wintergarden. Year later the owner sold out and they changed it to a topless place called Lodge 217. The new guys asked me if I wanted to dance. I said sure.”

“Dance?”

“Yeah, dance, Sylvia. You know what I’m saying. They put in a runway and wrapped the bar around it. Doubled the price of the drinks. Hired half a dozen dancers and hung red and blue spotlights from the ceiling. We’re talking a tacky place here. The runway was made of little mirror tiles and they’d chip and crack but nobody would replace them. Cheap. These guys — Doug and Jerry — these were very cheap guys. And no business sense whatsoever.”

“How did you learn how to dance?” Sylvia asks and sips some coffee. She wants the whole story.

“What’s to learn?” Leni says. “This is not the Bolshoi, okay? It’s pretty rote. You’ve never seen a strip show?”

Sylvia shakes her head.

“Piece of cake. You’d learn it your first time out. It never changes. You go across the whole country, okay, you’ll see the same setup. Only the accents change. The 217 had this three-dollar cover charge, then you could stay as long as you wanted. The bar seated maybe twenty-five people and there were a dozen or so cocktail tables beyond it. I’d do five sets a night. Six if it was a weekend night. You’re on a total of about two and a half hours.”

“What did you do the rest of the time?”

Leni raises her eyebrows. “Well, you’d have to put some time in during the breaks hustling foam. Not what you think. That’s what we called this horrible booze they sold by the bottle. This industrial carbonated shit. They called it Schmitz Champagne, but it was like this blend of grain alcohol, club soda, and pink food coloring. Unbelievable. They brought it off the truck at twenty bucks a case, made us sell it for twenty a bottle. Just shameless. It’s an old-time scam now, but back then Douggie thought they were so innovative.”

“Who’d you sell it to?”

“The droolers. You’d find some schmuck just couldn’t take his eyes off you. Then when you’d break you’d ask him to join you at a back table and once he sat down you’d ask him to buy you a bottle of Schmitz. They always went for it. Really sad. But when I wasn’t dancing or hustling foam, I was reading.”

“That explains it,” Sylvia says and then regrets it, but Leni isn’t going to let the comment go.

She says, “There’s a real attitude there, Sylvia. It’s the only unattractive thing I’ve seen about you so far.”

“I didn’t mean anything. It was a compliment—”

“No, no,” Leni says, “don’t hide behind that. You find me intelligent and confident and you couldn’t figure out how a slut like me came to have a brain. Have opinions and ideas and everything.”

“You’re overreacting,” Sylvia says. “I didn’t mean to sound condescending. You said you’d dropped out of high school and—”

“There are all kinds of classrooms if you look for them, Sylvia. I’d sit in the dressing rooms down Lodge 217 and I’d always have a book with me. I hit the library every morning on my way down the Zone. I read everything I could get hold of. The owners teased the hell out of me. Stupid grunts.”

“You were supporting your mother at this point?” The question comes out somehow harsh.

Leni nods. “For a while. She didn’t last long. But what you really want to know, Sylvia, is — did she know? Did my mother know how I was earning a living? Right?”

Sylvia just shrugs.

“The answer is no, Sylvia. She never knew. She was beyond caring about things like that anyway. If you haven’t lived this kind of thing, you haven’t lived it. What can I say?”

Sylvia sits back and thinks about her story. “I don’t mean to be obtuse,” she says, “but I just can’t get past the fact … I mean, you walk in off the street, you’re what, sixteen years old—”

“I was a mature sixteen years old,” Leni says. “In every way.”

They stare at each other for a few seconds, then Leni breaks eye contact, reaches into her pocket and pulls out roll of bills, peels off a few and slides them under her shot glass.

“Finish that,” she says, gesturing to the mug, and Sylvia drains the last of her drink.

Leni slides out of her seat, yells goodbye to the Family Aumaeta and heads for the stairs. Sylvia follows along and says, “I think I did need to get out of that booth for a while.”

They exit the Tower and as they start to thread their way through a cluster of zombie-like drunks that’s materialized during lunch, Leni says, “Sylvia, I think you met me just in time.”

15

Sylvia wants to think that there will be a point maybe five or six months from now when this blur, this weirdness of the last few days becomes understandable. She wants to imagine some fixed point in time, some day up ahead when the apartment is quiet and she’s come in from work and it’s another hour or so before Perry gets home and she’s sitting at the kitchen table drinking a club soda or an iced coffee, leafing through the Spy, looking at what movies are playing at the colleges, maybe reading her horoscope. And then she’ll think back on the day she went in to buy the Aquinas. And she’ll follow her steps through, she’ll be able to see herself move from location to location, meeting these people she’s never seen before, going to these places she never knew existed. Behaving in ways she never did before and never will again. And the distance from these events will give her some perspective. She’ll sit there and sip her coffee, take a melting ice cube into her mouth and suck on it, and she’ll come to an understanding of why she did those things, why she fought with Perry and prowled around the Zone and walked into a riot and sat in a sex theatre. She’ll just naturally, easily, come up with answers, like remembering some math forumla that orders all your components and solves the equation. A will equal B and B will equal C. Maybe she’ll laugh at herself there alone in the kitchen. Maybe she’ll just shake her head and still feel uncomfortable with the memories and go back to scanning the paper, finding out if this is a good day for Moon Children.

She wants to have faith that a day like that will arrive.

But the problem is that she’s felt this way before. Dislocated. Strange to herself. Motivated by forces that she can’t name. After her mother died and she was living on the couch, subsisting on breakfast cereal and cookies and every Rita Hayworth movie ever lensed, she knows she tried to tell herself the same thing — that a moment would arrive like something destined by prophecy, and everything would be made clear. That she’d be straight about her mother’s death and her own decline. That she’d receive this innate explanation of why the only things she could tolerate were Chocolate Chip Clusters and another showing of You Were Never Lovelier.

But that instant, explanatory moment just didn’t arrive. There was no epiphany. No second of pure satori. Life simply changed. She just got better and moved on, left the couch. She found a job, found Perry, integrated herself back into the flow of the normal majority.

And she’s had days when she’s sat at the kitchen table, listening to pop songs from her years in college, thinking about what to make for dinner, chopping vegetables for a salad. And she’s gone back three years, regressed so completely that she could feel the harsh wool from her mother’s sofa against her face, could feel her eyes glaze up with the third watching of Cover Girl. And she’s expected the answer to roll in with the next second. She’s expected that this time, her recall will give her that clarity that’s just beyond her reach.

But it’s never happened.

Sylvia doesn’t know why she sank in the way that she did. She doesn’t know what was going through her mind during those months she was tethered to her dead mother’s apartment. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t just shake loose and move on. Do something. Save herself. She just knows that at one point she couldn’t. And at another she could. Life changed. The wheel turned. Things altered. But there was no wisdom earned in the process. Just raw experience. And to this day it feels like a useless wound.

So maybe next summer, she’ll be checking the times on the feature at the Cansino Drive-in. Maybe she’ll be at the kitchen table making sandwiches to take to the movies. And maybe as she slices the bread and pushes the sandwich into the little plastic bag and folds the flap secure, she’ll suddenly flash on this moment with a porn actress named Leni Pauline, driving through the Canal Zone in a Citroen, taking in air and trying not to be sick, woozy from booze and weirdness. Maybe she’ll be able to call up this exact scene with photo-clarity.

But she doubts she’ll understand anything about what she’s been doing. She doubts the memory will hold any meaning or tell her something that’s been previously hidden. It will just land there for a minute, in her brain. Behind her eyes. It will just remind her how odd things can turn at any given moment.

They come around the corner onto Watson and Leni hits the gas and Sylvia’s stomach lurches. They screech to a stop in front of the Skin Palace, hop the curbstone and come to a stop at a tilt, two wheels in the street, two up on the sidewalk.

Leni kills the engine, raises up in her seat and gives a horrible, shrill whistle. One of Schick’s beefy spandexmen comes out the front entrance, glancing up and down the walk, still wary from yesterday’s rumble. Everything’s fairly quiet though and Leni climbs out of the car, tosses the keys through the air and says to the bouncer, “Be a gentleman and park it for me, huh Franco?”

He mimes a kiss at her as she passes and then looks at Sylvia to see if she’s going along for the ride. Sylvia takes a breath and stumbles out to the sidewalk, stands still for a second to get her balance. She looks up at the theatre and the wave of dizziness comes over her again, so she tries to ignore it and follows Leni into the lobby.

Inside there’s an old man slouched on one of the lounges, sound asleep. He’s deep into it, locked in REM-stage right here in public. His eyes and one of his hands are twitching, just like the way you see dogs quiver and kick out an occasional limb when they dream. An usher moves past the old guy and ignores him.

Sylvia hears the rumbling sound of corn popping and walks around the corner to the concession stand where Leni is behind the counter scooping newborn buds into a stiff paper cup that has the Skin Palace logo stenciled on it.

“You want some?” Leni asks as she pours salt over her corn.

“I’m supposed to be back at work,” Sylvia says.

Leni seems to stop and think for a second, then puts the popcorn down, comes forward and leans on the counter.

“Look,” she says, “I brought you back here ’cause the boss wants to see you.” She pauses, then adds, “I just hate running Hugo’s errands, okay?”

“What errand? You mean bringing back my camera? I could’ve come down—”

“Look, Sylvia,” Leni says, “Hugo wants to make you a job offer.”

Sylvia gives her a look and Leni finally smiles and says, “It’s not what you think. He’s looking for a photographer. But don’t let on I told you, all right? He likes to do these things in his own way.”

“What kind of photographer?”

Leni picks up her popcorn and moves out from behind the counter.

“What kind do you think?” she says. “He needs publicity stills. Poster shots. You know.”

“Nudes?” Sylvia says.

“For Christ sake,” Leni says. “You are unbelievable. Wake up, will you? Look where you are. This is what we do here. This is our business. Nudes? What the hell do you think he wants?”

She heads for the grand stairway and not knowing what else to do, Sylvia follows her, but once they’re upstairs, instead of going into the theatre, Leni turns left, heads down the corridor to another stairway and keeps ascending to a third floor. And like some dim apostle, too confused and maybe scared to walk away alone, Sylvia tails behind. At the landing, they swing past a huge metal door at the top that has the words Editing Suites, Do Not Enter stenciled across it in red block letters. Leni cuts a sharp left and starts jogging up a narrower spiral stairwell made of some black, cold metal. It empties into a small foyer with high ceilings and walls painted scarlet. Hung on the walls is a series of framed and matted old movie posters. Sylvia recognizes Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora’s Box and The Last Laugh, but then there are a couple in German that she’s not familiar with. The far wall of the foyer is a set of huge, wooden double doors. Near the top of the left door, in the same red lettering as downstairs, it reads Studio A, but someone has spray-painted a fuzzy black line through this and written Henrik Galeen Memorial Studio underneath in this childish, cursive scrawl. The lettering ran before it could dry and each word drips downward toward the floor. Above the doors is tacked a cardboard sign that reads Hot Set.

Leni says, “Get ready for the screaming,” then without waiting for any response she walks up, shoves a door open like a storm trooper, and charges inside.

Sylvia hears Hugo scream, “Son of a bitch,” followed immediately by someone else yelling, “Cut, cut it now, hold up,” and then a general chorus of moaning and cursing.

Sylvia looks back to the stairwell, but hears Leni say, “Oh, God, I did it again, didn’t I?” in this barely sarcastic voice.

“Get over here,” Hugo’s yelling. “Someone take hold of her. Bring her over to me.”

“Let’s break for ten,” a new voice sounds, followed immediately by Hugo shouting, “Who said break? Hans, what do you think …” and his voice trails off and for a couple seconds Sylvia gets only mumbling and an undercurrent of machine-ish noise, kind of a whirring hum, like her mother’s old refrigerator used to make. Then half-naked bodies, a half-dozen of them, two men in short terry robes and four women in campy lingerie, walk out of the studio, ignore her, pass by and start down the spiral stairs.

A guy in jeans and a workshirt emerges with coils of thick black cable slung over his shoulder. He says, “They want to see you,” as he passes.

She steps into the studio and is startled by how big it is. The cramped foyer didn’t prepare her for this cavernous loft. It’s like an old-time gymnasium. A lot of wood and brick and a musty smell. The ceiling rises up about two stories and the far wall seems like a football field away. But the place is junky, a museum to disorder. It’s as if someone decided to build a maze out of found trash but got bored halfway through the project. There are clusters of furniture sets and tilting racks jammed to bursting with hanging clothes. There are tables covered with power tools and ragged sheets of plywood stacked against every free piece of wall space. There are ladders and step stools and mismatched chairs, camera tripods mounted on makeshift dollies, microphones hanging from their leads, suspended from ceiling girders. And lights. There’s lighting equipment everywhere and most of it looks like it’s been salvaged and repaired. Everything’s nicked up and dented and heavy-looking. There are reflectors and deflectors and all kinds of filtering equipment.

She’s surprised when she spots three old Panaflex cameras. In this age of high-definition videotape, Hugo sticks with bulky and expensive film. He marches over now, already half-bowed as he moves. It’s weird, there’s this stiffness and oiliness to him at the same time. He grabs Sylvia’s hand and lifts it to his lips, plants a kiss and says, “Forgive my outburst. I didn’t realize we had company.”

“I didn’t know you actually filmed here. I thought this was just the theatre.”

He seems to like her confusion. “We’re a self-contained package,” he says, gesturing with his hand at the room in general. “I insist on control and I learned long ago that the only way to have it is simply to have it.”

He gives a conspiratorial wink as if she’s supposed to understand what he means and continues, “I don’t like dealing with middlemen. Landlords, agents, distributors. The Palace had ample room, so over the years we’ve become more and more self-sufficient. I have my own contract players perpetually on the payroll. Would Jack Warner have spent time chasing after this week’s megastar? Would Louis Mayer? You sign them young, support them, develop your own talent. It’s an investment.”

“So every film gets made right here?” she asks.

He takes her arm and leads her toward a floral couch out on the set itself. “We sometimes film on location, though I dislike outdoor work. It’s a difficult balance, finding the control of the studio without getting too visually boring.”

“And you even market the final product?”

“We have a small holding company. Pretori Distributors. It’s a separate corporate entity.”

“God,” Sylvia says. “It’s amazing. You do the whole show. Soup to nuts.”

“So to speak,” he says, suddenly amused.

“I wanted to thank you,” she says. “For finding the camera—”

“Say no more,” he holds up his hands. “I’m just sorry that we couldn’t retrieve the film. But you’ll take other pictures. You’ll do even better work, I’m sure.”

She looks out and for the first time she notices what must be today’s set, the place they were shooting just minutes ago, before Leni ruined the shot. It’s a huge bedroom. It looks a little like an old hotel room and it has a vague, undefinable style to it, kind of a pseudo-deco. Everything in the room is cut in sharp angles. In the middle of the set is an enormous bed, larger than king-size, maybe custommade.

“You have to remember,” Hugo says, seeing her studying it, “we can manipulate perspective. Within the frame of the camera, I can make this room do anything I want. It looks much smaller with your own eyes. You’ll need to see the finished product on the screen.”

And it suddenly comes home to Sylvia that as she stood out in the foyer, people were lying on this bed, having sex under these lights, being recorded by Hugo’s old cameras, moaning for the benefit of the hanging mikes, sweating and grinding and groping while she stood in the next room.

And then they walked out past her as if they’d just left their desks at some anonymous bureaucracy, as if they’d just broken off from some clerical report to grab a little coffee down in the company cafeteria.

“You know,” Hugo says, “it’s fortuitous that you came to visit today. Yes, it’s actually kismet. I was going to give you a call tonight.”

The job offer. She thought Leni might have been putting her on.

“You were going to call me?” she says.

He nods, brings a hand up to stroke his chin.

“Yes. Absolutely.” He stands up, paces to the set, turns to face her. “All my career I’ve trusted my instincts. And rarely have they let me down. Surely never when the hunch has been this strong.”

“The hunch,” she says.

“Now, I realize I’ve never actually seen your work. But as always, my need for a feeling, an intuition, is much stronger than my need for physical evidence.”

“Very simply, Sylvia, I need some photographs taken. I need a photographer on the staff. Someone with both taste and flair. Subtlety and a sense of originality.”

“You’re offering me a job?”

“Exactly. Yes. A position. There’s an opening in the organization and I’m extending it to you. You could learn quite a bit. I’m sure we could work out the financial particulars.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Something makes her want to take his offer.

Sylvia’s life this far should have exempted her from this entire situation. She’s getting a job offer from an Austrian pornographer. She doubts anyone she grew up with or went to school with can make this exact claim. And on the heels of this she realizes that maybe there’s something inherently subversive within her. Maybe something that’s been there all along. Because as much as she thinks she wants to get things right with Perry, to get back to the normal routine, there’s this other desire, this other knowledge that it would be a very real and very potent rush to sit opposite Perry over dinner, over that boring chicken and rice dish he loves so much, and somewhere in the midst of their lazy supper conversation, sometime after he’s run down everything that took place at Walpole & Lewis that day, she’d love to casually take a sip of wine and let it wash over her tongue and then clear her throat and look at Perry’s face and say, “Honey, I just took a job on a pornographic movie crew.”

“I’ll tell you what to say,” Hugo says, “you say ‘yes.’ Or at the very least you say ‘I think it over, Hugo.’”

“But, honestly, you’ve never seen anything I’ve done—”

He cuts her off. “Sylvia, please. You have to understand how I operate. When I’m in the restaurant. When I’m in the shopping plaza. When I’m in the balcony of the Palace’s lobby on two-for-one night and all the college boys and girls are walking in laughing and embarrassed and thrilled. And when I spot that face, that young and genuine countenance. That look that captures me, that sets off the alarms. Do I stop and say, ‘but can she act?’ Do I hesitate and wonder, ‘are there any unsightly blemishes I haven’t yet seen?’ No. Never. I approach them on the spot and I make them the offer. I tell them I’m a director. I tell them I wish to put them in a film. I may be rebuffed or even slapped. This has happened often. But that is fine. I’ve made the attempt. I’ve acted on the impulse. That is the nature of my work. The impulse. The instinctual sensation. I’m correct much more often than I’m wrong. Trust me, Sylvia, I don’t need to see your work.”

She shakes her head. She looks again at the set. The goddamn bed is so big you could get lost in it.

“Don’t you ever worry about the police?”

He gives a smug and icy smile.

“Shall we say,” he laughs, “that is but one line on the budget sheets.”

“You pay them off?”

Now he really lets loose with a laugh. “I will never lose my love of that innocent American bluntness.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Not at all,” he says, then adds, “but my arrangement with our city fathers has nothing to do with your position.”

“Right. Of course,” she says. “What exactly would be my position?”

“We have a small portrait facility over in the Willi Forst Studio—”

“Willi Forst?” she says.

“Studio B,” he says. “On the other side of that wall. I sometimes film simultaneously. I pop back and forth between the two sets. I find it stimulating, keeping the story lines separate.”

She wants to ask what possible difference could it make if the story lines get confused. Instead she says, “So I’d be doing portrait work?”

“Believe me,” he says, “you can get very creative. I need poster shots for each film. Publicity stills of my stars. Marketing pamphlets for the conventions. This type of thing. You’d pick it all up very quickly, I have no doubt.”

“Mr. Schick—”

“Hugo, please.”

“Hugo, I really appreciate your offer. It’s really very nice of you. But the thing is, I just don’t have a lot of experience doing portrait work. I’m much more a landscape person. Street scenes, that kind of thing.”

“Like the incident yesterday.”

“Well, no,” she says. “Not really. That was a fluke. I happened to walk into it. And I happened to have my camera.”

Hugo sighs and smiles at her. “If you can stand in the middle of that tumult and focus in on individual scenes, my God, Sylvia. You can do my work in your sleep.”

“But there are very different techniques. You have to be good with people to do portrait work. You have to put them at ease, bring out their best face. Keep things natural. I’m not great in that area,” she pauses and adds, “especially not when the people are naked.”

He looks shocked. “Oh, that,” he says. “One hour, you won’t notice it. Trust me, it becomes irrelevant.”

“I find that hard to imagine.”

“Don’t decide yet,” Hugo says. “You go home. Sleep on it. Whatever you’re making now, I’ll increase your wage. And I’ll pay a bonus on your acceptance.”

“Hugo, really, you’re making this very tempting—”

“That’s my job,” he says with a nod.

“But I just don’t get it. There are a lot of photographers out there. You must know dozens who are already connected with your field. But you seem intent on hiring me, even though I’m not connected. You met me yesterday, for God sake. You don’t know if I’ll fit in. And you’ve never even seen my work.”

He sits and seems to consider what she’s said. Then he leans forward, clasps his hands together and balances the weight of his doughy body onto one knee. He lowers his voice and says, “I view your innocence, your industry-virginity, if you will, as a virtue rather than a deficit. I’m always looking for a new vision, Sylvia. A new way of taking in the image and a new way of giving it back. I think you can do that for me, Sylvia. And I know that if you choose not to I’ll be terribly disappointed.”

He seems so goddamn sincere. She’s ready to cave in right here in front of him. She’s ready to sign on with Team Hugo. She’s ready to load up the Aquinas and shoot a whole parade of naked bodies.

She says, “I promise I’ll give your offer every consideration.”

He sits back, sinks into the couch and crosses his legs. He holds his arms out in the air and says, “I suppose I can’t ask for more than that.”

As if on cue, Leni comes up from behind and puts her hands on Sylvia’s shoulders.

Hugo cocks his head back, looks up at her and says, “I’m very upset with you, Ms. Pauline.”

She leans down, hands still on Sylvia, and kisses the top of his bald skull. It’s possible she’s left the red imprint of her thick lips, but from this angle Sylvia can’t tell.

“You can spank me later,” Leni says and Hugo looks around with semi-mock exasperation.

The actors and crew start to file into the studio. Two men disrobe as soon as they’re in the door and start to walk toward the couch. Sylvia tries to stare at the floor.

“You’re welcome to stay and watch me work,” Hugo says, standing up.

Sylvia gets up and says, “I’ve really got to be going.”

He takes her arm and walks her to the foyer, then with almost a fatherly stroke, he gives her cheek a soft brush with the back of his hand and in a low voice he says, “I’ll wait for your decision, Sylvia. I know you’ll fit in perfectly here at the Palace.”

Without waiting for a response, he turns on his heels and heads back inside. Sylvia walks down the spiral staircase on shaky legs, thinking suddenly about what she’s going to make for Perry’s dinner.

16

In the basement of the Hotel St. Vitus, Little Jiri Fric is laid out on top of a dusty Ping-Pong table. He’s covered by two black wool blankets that bear the white words Property of the Diocese of Quinsigamond. The boy’s entire body is quaking, vibrating in a constant, ever-growing shiver. Even in the dimness of the cellar, Jakob can see the glow of sweat running off the forehead.

Dr. Seifert is at a tool bench, repacking his duffel, shrugging in Jakob’s general direction and trying to hide his theft of a rusty pair of needle-nose pliers.

“There’s nothing more I can do,” the doctor says. “Even if we could get him to a hospital, it would make little difference.”

Jakob suspected the diagnosis from the start. Jiri lost so much blood on the way back to the St. Vitus that the doctor’s questionable medical background is beside the point.

“Jakob,” Seifert says, “if your father learns that I’ve come here—”

“Don’t worry about Papa, Herr Doctor. I will take full responsibility.”

“It’s just that, you know his rules about treating gang casualties. He—”

“I couldn’t let him die on the street,” Jakob interrupts, then fishes in his pants pocket, pulls out a hundred, shakes Seifert’s hand, pressing the bill into the old fraud’s palm. The rumor is that Seifert was just a second-rate meat cutter back in Maisel. But he speaks the old tongue and he knows all the superstitions, so he’s the only acceptable doctor for most of the Bohemian wing of Bangkok Park.

Seifert starts to climb the stairs to the kitchen, stops halfway up.

“If someone should see me—”

“Tell them,” Jakob says, “I ran out of the camphor injections.”

He turns and looks at Little Jiri, the youngest of the Grey Roaches, not sure if the boy is called “Little” because of his age or the deformed right leg that helped determine his stature.

Jakob moves to the old soapstone wash sink, takes his handkerchief from his back pocket, turns on the spigot and soaks the rag. Then he walks to the Ping-Pong table, sits down on the edge of it. Jiri is moving his mouth, trying to give words to the pain of his last dreams. Jakob leans in, brings lips near the boy’s ear and whispers, “It’s all right, I’m here, I won’t leave you alone.”

He holds the handkerchief above Jiri’s mouth and squeezes just a bit, lets water trickle onto the lips. Jakob folds the cloth and lays it on the Roach’s forehead, takes the boy’s hand and simply holds on.

And he finds himself thinking of Felice Fabri.

At the moment she touched him — in the back row of the Kierling Theatre, at that exact instant on-screen when Ralph Meeker, bigger than life, crushed the hand of some craven and greedy pathologist — Jakob’s life turned a sudden, dislocating corner.

If Jakob’s existence up to this point was to be viewed as an ongoing film — and, in fact, this was the primary way he viewed it, a piece of celluloid looped into a Mobius strip: a film about a boy who lives only to watch film — Felice’s hand falling between his legs was a plot twist he never could have anticipated. A story-curve that took the narrative of his life in a completely new and unknown direction, that employed techniques and stylistic innovations he had never dreamed of.

Passionate to this point only about movies, the heat of sexual initiation propelled Jakob into a realm where the entire city of Maisel became a fiction he could simply ignore. He stopped hearing his father’s harsh voice drone on about this promised land titled America. He became oblivious to Felix’s increasingly detailed descriptions of hit-and-run thugdom in the alleys off Kaprova. He failed to even comprehend the frightened babble of the neighborhood fish-wives as they gossiped over their washlines about the now daily street-beatings or the bombing of the Altneu Synagogue.

None of the miniature pogroms could impact him in any way. The images of the Hasidim being harassed and shoved to the ground could not compete with Felice’s body. The stoning of Rabbi Meyer on Moldau Lane just could not rival the power that ran along the surface of Felice’s skin. The burning of Hilsner Kosher Meats, just a block from Papa’s shop, simply didn’t penetrate the heady realm of pubertal, animal passion that culminated between Felice’s legs.

Everything boiled down to the essentials — the mysteries of Felice Fabri’s body and the images projected day and night on the screen of the Kierling Theatre. And, importantly, those two elements were tied together in a primary, fundamental way. The films led into Felice and Felice led back into the films. They were almost one and the same: Sanctuary. Satisfaction. Epiphany.

And so, of course, all their consummations took place inside the Kierling. The theatre, always a holy place, now became the altar for the sacrament of their coupling. Jakob became a kind of high priest prone to visions by way of ecstasy. He wished to consecrate as often as possible. And Felice, enraptured by this insatiable mystic she’d created, obliged him to the point of an aching, wonderful exhaustion.

Their affair lasted for a month, though it was never so much an affair as it was a bizarre, insatiable pilgrimage into the limits of the carnal. They both found it particularly exciting to move slowly, settle into their back-row seats, begin by simply feeding each other candy and popcorn, the dispenser’s fingers occasionally being sucked by the ingestor’s mouth. They attempted to enforce a limited fondle for the first reel of film, allowed a more rigorous groping through the second reel. And finally, if discipline was possible, surrendered to consummation only during the movie’s final moments. They copulated while watching Nightmare Alley and Peeping Tom and Kiss of Death and Kiss the Blood off My Hands and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

For four rapturous weeks, Jakob left the Kierling with his lungs in a sweet pain and his head dizzy with sensation and vague, racing impulses. Felice would pull him to a favorite bench across the street in Dvetsil Park where they would embrace in a post-coital, post-cinematic warmth. Within the soft heat of this embrace, Jakob allowed himself to fantasize an idyllic future beyond anything he could previously imagine, an Eden where he and his lover would purchase the Kierling from Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill, restore the entire building, and fashion a honeymoon apartment out of Yitzhak’s Zionist work-office. The boy gave full berth to these vivid dreams of a coming paradisaical time when his lungs were restored to normalcy by the power of love and the inhalation of fresh celluloid stock, an era when Maisel would supercede Hollywood as the motion picture capital of the world. When the Kierling would be seen as the crowning jewel of film institutes and archives everywhere and he would have to hire workmen from the Schiller ghetto to pour a long cement walkway so actors and actresses could forever come to leave their hand-and footprints as testament to the ultimate seat of imagistic power.

Holding Felice in Dvetsil Park, yards from the soft glow of the Kierling’s marquee, during the happiest month of his life, Jakob even allowed himself to imagine transforming the theatre’s unused second floor into a working studio, a great hall full of heavy black equipment, cameras, lights, boom microphones, pulleys for lifting and placing scenery, mirrors for applying makeup, and a wooden canvas-back chair inscribed with his name in flowing, scripted letters.

This would be his holy land—I’m sorry you can never understand it, Papa—and so, he named his dream-studio Amerikan Pictures.

He whispered these dreams into Felice’s ear as they sat on their bench on Dvetsil Park. He spoke of new camera angles he would try, pointed out interesting passing faces he would like to employ in specific roles, joked irreverently about remaking Citizen Kane. Mainly, Felice would nod and murmur a vague approval while running a hand lightly over his chest, beneath his coat. It was only when Jakob offhandedly mentioned that he was thinking of changing his name that Felice pulled away, let her body go stiff in his arms, and said, “Remember, Jako, you can only break the rules once you know the rules. And you can only cut away your past when you truly know your past.”

Jakob had no idea what she meant, but he was unnerved by the comment anyway and they parted that night with an edgy final kiss that, on his walk home, the boy could only think of as suspicious.

And the next night at the Kierling, this suspicion was still present. They had gone to see an experimental feature, a one-night-only event whose title Jakob has never been able to recall. He cannot remember the plot or the actors or the director. He cannot envision the settings or the wardrobes or the musical score. This is the only film in his life that has evaded him in this complete a manner. And weeks later, on the first day of his arrival in Quinsigamond, Jakob opened his notebook and wrote:

All I can remember is the image of a man being pursued through dark, decayed streets by a sea of eyes, human eyeballs, an audience of some sort, preying on this man, hunting him down for the marrow in his bones, the marrow in his soul. And this is simply an impression. A trace memory. Nothing I can verify or concretely describe. But instead of receding, the image is more and more relentless. It does not get any clearer. But it will not leave me alone.

Over the next three years, Jakob would attempt to find out what film this was. He would spend hours in the public library, poring through every cinema reference available. And he would be entirely unsuccessful.

But on that night, while the movie unreeled and the stark, grainy images were gunned onto the screen, Jakob and Felice made love in the back row, and that particular coupling proved to be the most violent and intense session of both their lives.

When the lights came up, they exited the Kierling and walked to Dvetsil Park in silence, both of them trembling, both almost worried about the prolonged intensity they’d just subjected themselves to. They took their bench, fell into each other’s decompressing embrace and, very likely at the same instant, looked out at the Pietá to see that the unconscious body of Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill had been draped into the arms of the weeping stone mother, another doomed child to cry for. Yitzhak had been beaten unconscious, but it wasn’t until Jakob and Felice ran to the statue that they discovered the real nature of the theatre owner’s wounds. Into his forehead had been carved the word Zionist. And below the dripping letters, his eyes had been gouged out.

“Are you out of your mind?”

The voice comes like an unexpected slap, like an open hand thrown full-force across the cheek, exploding the recipient out of a long sleep.

Jakob leaps off the Ping-Pong table and Little Jiri stirs and lets out an awful moan. Felix is at the bottom of the cellar stairs, an arm extended, a finger pointing at the gangboy’s quaking body.

“You brought a casualty to the house?”

“I couldn’t—” Jakob begins and Felix waves the excuse away, furious, his hand coming back to his face and rubbing over his eyes as if he could make the sight of Jiri Fric dying before him vanish.

“Do you have any idea the consequences this could have?” Felix barks. “Have you not heard a word your father has said? You brought a gang casualty back to your father’s home. My God, Jakob.”

Jakob looks from Little Jiri down to his feet, mumbles, “Well, he’s here, now.”

Felix rushes at his cousin, tackles him at the waist and they go to the floor. Jakob throws his head forward, smashing the bridge of Felix’s nose and drawing blood. Felix is shocked with the pain and in the instant his distraction allows, Jakob gets both hands around his cousin’s neck and begins to close off the windpipe, his thumbs pressing in on the throat with a power neither of them anticipated. Felix starts to choke and Jakob bears down harder, enraged, three years of repressed anger flooding from his adrenal gland like a tidal swell.

He leans down to his cousin’s face and spits, “You don’t know me.”

But Felix jerks to the side and throws a knee into Jakob’s groin. Jakob loses his breath, hunches into himself and absorbs a kick in the ribs that rolls him onto his side, fetal and gagging.

Felix grabs the edge of the Ping-Pong table, pulls himself up, then plants a boot on his cousin’s neck, but doesn’t apply any pressure. Through gritted teeth and faulty breath, he says, “You stupid little bastard—”

Then he backs off and Jakob can hear him sucking air. After a second, Felix moves into a shadowy corner of the basement and the noise of Jiri Fric’s labored breathing is displaced by the sound of careless rummaging, trunks being shifted, forgotten crates shoved roughly to the side.

Jakob gets to his knees, pulls himself to standing and looks to see Felix holding a small, threadbare throw pillow over the face of Little Jiri. The smallest Roach gives no sign of suffocation, beyond a sudden and horrible twitch of his deformed leg. Jakob shifts his vision from the slightly jerking foot to Felix’s eyes.

The cousins stare at each other in silence until Jiri Fric’s leg falls motionless.

17

Sylvia takes the Waldstein Ave bus to the westside, transfers and takes the #14 to Hoffman Square. As she’s walking the last two blocks home, she realizes that she left her camera in Leni’s car. But that’s the least of her problems. That feverish feeling from yesterday is starting to come back. Her legs are beginning to feel rubbery and her head is throbbing. She doesn’t want to think about anything beyond climbing up the stairs, writing Perry a note that she’s sick and getting into bed. She wants to sleep for the next two days. She wants to squirrel down under the covers, keep the shades drawn and just go under for the next forty-eight hours or so.

But when she opens the back door of the apartment, she can hear a chorus of unfamiliar voices coming from the front room. She walks as far as the doorway and looks in as all the talking stops.

“Honey,” Perry says as he gets up from the couch, knocking a stack of papers on the floor. “You’re home early.”

“I wasn’t feeling well,” she says.

Perry’s flustered. He hesitates between picking up his papers and coming over to her, then says, “We’re having a meeting here.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” she says.

There’s a moment of horrible quiet until Perry finally comes over next to her and starts introducing people, though she already knows who most of them are.

He gestures around the circle, all of whom, except for Boetell’s silent assistant Fernando, have manila folders at their feet and in their laps. The Brazilian kid is sitting on the floor in the corner, his head buried in a Bible. He doesn’t look up at Sylvia. She wants to ask him if he ever gets tired of wearing that stupid white robe.

“You know Candice, of course,” Perry says, “and this is District Attorney Meade. Reverend Boetell you heard speak the other night. You remember Brother Fernando. And this is Paige Beatty of the Women’s American Resistance,” his head bobs and he says, “This is Sylvia.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she says, wondering why the hell they’re not doing this thing at one of their big walnut conference rooms downtown.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling ill, Mrs. Leroux,” the Reverend says. “Perhaps we should relocate—”

“Krafft,” she says.

“‘Scuse me, ma’am.”

She can feel Perry stiffen next to her.

“My last name is Krafft,” she says. “Perry and I aren’t married.”

“Pardon my confusion,” Boetell says, though no one here thinks for a minute he was confused. “Perry, let us clear out of here and we can reschedule for tomorrow.”

Sylvia puts her hand on Perry’s arm and says, “No need for that. I’ll just be in the next room. It was nice seeing everyone.”

“Excuse us for just a second,” Perry says and follows her into the bedroom. He closes the door and Sylvia sits down on the bed and looks up at him.

“You okay?” he says in a modified whisper.

“My head,” she says. “It’s just killing me. I’m just going to take some aspirin and lie down for a while.”

He nods.

“Sorry about this,” he says, edgy, looking at her face as if he was trying to figure something out.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I just want to lie down for a while.”

“It’s just,” he starts, then restarts, “Ratzinger thought it would be better if the group gets together outside of the office. He sort of volunteered my place.”

“The group,” she says.

He jerks his thumb in the direction of the living room.

“Technically,” he says, “Eddie Meade isn’t supposed to be here. It’s weird.”

“Look,” she says, “go back out there. You can tell me all about it later.”

“Can I bring you anything?”

“I’m all set. I’m just going to sleep for a while. I’ll be fine later on.”

He gives her a nervous shake of his head and says, “Just give a yell if there’s anything I can do.

She nods back. He comes forward and plants a kiss on her forehead, then goes back to the group.

She takes off her shoes and massages her feet a little. She gets undressed, grabs a T-shirt out of the drawer and pulls it on. Then she climbs under the covers and curls up, all fetal and cold. She wants the room pitch-dark. She climbs out of bed and turns off the wall switch. She squats down next to the door and puts an ear to the crack. She hears a woman’s voice, probably Candice’s saying, “We can go over to my place if you’d like. It’s not far from here.”

There’s some mumbling that she can’t make out, then Perry says, “It’s fine, really, It’s not a problem. Let’s just continue.”

She sits down on the floor, pulls the door open just a bit more. Someone gets up and walks past, out into the kitchen. She hears the faucet run for a second, then footsteps returning to the living room.

“My people and I,” Boetell says, “are still very uneasy about the nature of Miss Beatty’s march. I think we need to hear more about this stunt. I think we need to be allowed to review these films she plans on showing.”

“The march has nothing to do with you,” Paige Beatty responds. “It’s our statement and we’ll take the consequences. I’ll make that completely clear to the press, Mr. Boetell. You don’t have to be worried about being soiled by associating with us.”

“I think we’re getting way ahead of ourselves,” Perry says. “We’ve got a lot of work in front of us tonight and we need to be methodical here—”

“If this is going to run into the evening,” Boetell’s twang interrupts, “perhaps we should order a little supper. Does anyone else enjoy Chinese?”

“Can’t do it,” Meade says, “I’m meeting Welby back at the office at four.”

“Candice,” Perry says, “why don’t you run down the notes we compiled at lunch.”

Sylvia hears papers shifting and Candice says, “Can I have that green folder,” a pause and then, “Basically, this is the prep-work that Perry and I assembled over the past month. We’ve put together a summary and analysis of all the Herzog initiatives going back ten years. We looked at licensing hearings, zoning board debates, letters and editorials written in the Spy, council speeches. Every two to three years cleaning up the sex trade becomes a hot issue for less than a season, then gets forgotten. The usual pattern is for a candidate or church group or community organization to make some up-front noise. The paper throws out some perfunctory headlines and op-ed fire. The council chambers fill with two sessions’ worth of yelling and podium bashing. And then the dust settles and Schick and his compatriots quietly continue to go about their business.”

“It’s going to be different this time,” Boetell promises.

“I’ve taken an informal survey,” Perry says, “through very informal channels—”

“You bought lunch down at Valhalla,” Meade interrupts and Perry gives him a forced laugh.

“The problem is basically twofold. You need the newspaper to keep the fire up, which they won’t do. And you need to kill debate, get some real legislation out of committee and voted on. A single local ordinance could change the face of Watson Street in a year. Six months if the real estate started to look good to anyone.”

“What we want to avoid,” Candice says, “is a First Amendment circus. The last thing we want is a free speech debate. That could lead to outside funding and even ACLU targeting. You don’t want to get inside a courtroom where anything can happen. Our recommendation is that the best course of action would be to cement the appropriate support, then move quickly from all sides.”

“We need to determine exactly who’s doing business with Schick and company,” Perry says. “We need to follow the money and see whose pockets it’s flowing into. Then we need to make that information public. Put some photos on page one.”

“Basically,” Candice says, “we need an icon. We need a face to stand for filth. We need a big bad guy. And Schick is perfect for the part.”

“He’s a naturalized citizen,” Perry says. “So we can tap into the whole xenophobic current. We can have this city hating him in a month. We can build up a real passion in two, depending on our budget for media.”

“Schick’s theatre is the biggest,” Candice says. “The grandest. It’s enormous. It’s excessive. It’s over-the-top. It’s perfect for our purposes. We make it the epitome of the evil pornograhic empire. We allude to other connections.”

“That would be my department,” Boetell says. “I’ve got a whole suitcase of stump speeches I can tailor to the Kraut—”

“He’s Austrian,” Beatty says.

“We hammer home child abuse, drug dealing, satanic activity,” Boetell says. “The satanic stuff plays real well. My boys back home have done the stats. Satan’s good for a ten to fifteen percent upswing in any given night’s gate.”

“Thanks, Reverend,” Perry says without a trace of humor in his voice. “We’ll definitely keep that in mind.”

“Every chance you get, you want to pull Lucifer into the stew,” Boetell says. “That’s what I tell my protégés, ‘hit ’em with the beast till they howl for mercy.’ Right, Fernando?”

“If there’s any way at all,” Candice says, “that we can capitalize on a satanic connection, rest assured we will. I’ll make a note for a Spy leak at some later date.”

Perry begins, “We’ll also want to—” but he’s cut off by Boetell who says, “There must be something amusing that I’m not privy to.”

“Look,” Paige Beatty says, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to bring down Schick and all of Watson Street. But don’t expect me to take your fire-and-brimstone rants seriously, Mr. Boetell.”

“People,” Perry says, trying for authoritarian and missing, “we already talked about our individual differences. About uniting for a common goal—”

“You find something comical about the beast, dear lady?”

“Let’s just say I’m not ready to lay the blame of ten thousand years of female abuse and oppression on Beelzebub.”

“Well, now,” Boetell says, the politeness of his voice somehow insulting, “whether you’re a believer or not is hardly the point here, is it? I think what we’re discussing tonight is manipulation. And as one with a Duke law degree and two years as a senior account executive at Ogilvy & Mather, I know just a little something about manipulation.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Reverend,” Beatty says, almost mimicking Boetell’s tone, “but as a woman who’s been manipulated half her life, I can’t help feel that Satan gets enough of a bad rap. And that lets the real criminals off the hook.”

“The real criminals?” Boetell says.

“The testosterone nazis,” Beatty says.

“We’re off track here,” Perry says. “We’re losing focus.”

“I’m sorry,” Beatty says, “but I’m not about to put my efforts into tearing down objectifiers like Schick if it means I have to toe some white-trash, Bible-thumping, patriarchal, reactionary, bullshit party line—”

“Young lady,” Boetell explodes, the voice high and slow and threatening as if he’s gathering strength for a real lambasting. But nothing follows and the room fills up with a silent tension until Candice says, “If we break down into internal squabbling, we can kiss this campaign goodbye.”

“Perry,” Meade says, “I’m really going to have to get running if I want to catch the mayor.”

“Why don’t we do this,” Candice says. “Why don’t we break up for dinner and meet back at my place around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. We’ll all be refreshed and we can work into the night. Try to build a head of steam. Perry and I would really like to show you some of the strategies we’ve put together this week.”

“I’m free,” Beatty says as if it were a challenge to Boetell.

“I cleared the whole evening,” the Reverend responds.

“I should be able to shake loose from Welby by eight,” Meade says. “Write down your address for me.”

“Okay, great,” Perry says. “Everyone go soak up some coffee. We’ll have a real study session. Seven-thirty we’ll meet back at Candice’s.”

There’s some throat clearing and mumbles and bodies rising from chairs. Sylvia jumps back into bed and turns her back to the door. She hears them pass by the bedroom and for some reason she stays perfectly still, practically holding her breath.

It takes a while for Perry to see them out, then the bedroom door whines open and he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. Sylvia rolls to face him, feigns like she had just started to doze. He brings a hand to her cheek and then her forehead.

“You feel warm,” he says.

“I’m freezing.”

“I think maybe you’re coming down with something.”

She gives a small nod.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I guess so.”

“Can I bring you anything? Maybe you should have some soup first? Put something hot in your stomach.”

“No thanks,” she says. “I’m kind of queasy.”

He nods, then in a low voice he says, “I don’t know what’s been going on the past few days.”

“It’s been weird,” she says. “I’ve been feeling lousy. It’s me.”

He pulls the blankets up to her neck and says, “I don’t know. I’ve just been tense, you know. I’ve just been caught up with things at work. I’ve just wanted this partnership so bad.”

“We’ll, you got it,” she says, trying to sound upbeat and ill at the same time.

“What we need to do,” he says, “is pick out a weekend and get out of here. Head out to the Berkshires maybe. Just go to dinner and talk all this out. Maybe a long drive to Stockbridge. You know what I’m saying?”

“I’d love it.”

“Weil just clear some time. We’ll make it a three-day weekend. Leave on a Thursday night. Stay at that place you liked.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” she says.

“Soon as I get the ball rolling with the new clients.”

“Just let me know,” she says. “I’m always ready.”

“You think you can get out of the camera,” he says with a big smile, referring to the Snapshot Shack.

“I think I can manage.”

“I don’t want to fight anymore.”

She nods her agreement.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “I’ve got to work tonight. I might not get in till really late. So you just roll over and get some sleep. I’ll try not to wake you when I get in.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she says.

“We’ll work everything out, honey. I promise.”

He leans down and kisses her again on the forehead, then walks out of the room closing the door behind him. She lies still and listens to him gathering things together. She hears him mumbling, probably making a phone call. But she can’t hear what he’s saying. She hears the refrigerator open and close. She hears the toilet flush. After about five minutes, she hears him go out the back door.

18

Café Arco reminds Jakob of one of the little coffeehouses down on Rossmann Lane back home in Maisel, one of those tiny, low-ceilinged storefronts that functioned more as minuscule libraries than pastry shops. Originally built in the sixteenth century as dormitories for the alchemists of “Mad” King Reinhardt, the cafés were warm cells of communal solitude where one could step out of the rain and read the latest journals while snacking on a piece of palacinky and sipping any number of Slavic kavas.

So too, the Arco is a mysteriously calm port within the noise and glare of the Canal Zone. Carlo, the shift manager, is always indulgent when it comes to loitering over a single cup of coffee. And last month he accepted Jakob’s gift of a framed marquee poster for the 1947 Warner Brothers release Dark Passage and hung it on the café wall. Oddly though, the Arco is not a Bohemian enterprise but is operated by a Chilean named Sarmiento. No matter, more and more, Jakob is finding it a perfect place to work on the screenplay.

Tonight, he takes his usual corner table with his back to the door, orders a kakao and a potato dumpling that will take him a half hour to “fletcherize,” and opens the Little Girl Lost notebook. He removes his red editing pen from his jacket pocket and begins to read.

LONG SHOT — EXT. CINÉ DADA — NIGHT — LOWEST POSSIBLE ANGLE (shoot from the gutter)

The movie theatre, seen through swirls of mist, looks haunted. Half of its marquee bulbs are burned out, though we can still read the title of the last feature — The Lady from Shanghai. Vandalism and the elements have taken their toll on the building. (Is The Ballard available? If not, can we appropriate for a night? Talk to Hrabal). From an alleyway across the street, the Doomed Man appears. At the moment of his appearance, distant sirens are heard. (Dub Note: Use the low-pitch horns of the July Sweep).

TIGHT SHOT — FACE OF DOOMED MAN

panicked, strobed in repeating flashes of light and dark. Fade sirens slightly and bring up diseased-lung loop.

MED SHOT — SORTINI AVENUE

as the Doomed Man dashes across the street, the clip-clop of his feet on the pavement terribly loud. He runs into the alley adjoining Ciné Dada.

LONG SHOT — THE ALLEYWAY

as the Doomed Man climbs up a decayed, rickety, iron fire escape. At the top, he uses his elbow to break open a window. He climbs inside the movie theatre.

For three years, since he arrived in America, Jakob has used the world of film to shield himself from, at times to obliterate all together, the ugly questions of what his cousin has called real goddamn life.

Right now, the question Jakob wants to avoid is—If I have to, can I kill cousin Felix? The reason for the avoidance is that he hates both possible answers. If the response is Yes, then he’s become that thing he’s resisted from birth. A gangster rather than an artist. A wheezing mirror of Papa the mobster. A moral vacuum that knows only the creed of acquisition and power. And the joke would be that he’s become this creature by virtue of the resistance itself, as if in marshaling all his strength in opposition to the Family mold he somehow damaged any chance of immunity from an inherited brutality.

MED SHOT-EXT CINÉ DADA

as a police car screeches to a stop in front of the boarded-up doors of the theatre. (Favors from Papa’s friends on the force?). ERNST “THE INSECT” BROD steps out of the squad car into the horribly quiet street. He is followed a moment later by his gunmen, POLLAK and WERFEL. The police car drives away. The Insect removes his gloves, pockets them, snaps his fingers. Pollak and Werfel draw long-barreled guns from their coats, move to the theatre entrance and kick in the doors. Their weapons extended before them, they rush inside.

TIGHT SHOT — BROD

alone, the movie theatre backing him, he removes a spool of piano wire from his overcoat pocket and begins to twine it about both his hands. He turns and walks boldly into the theatre.

But if the answer is No, then there’s still no hope of breaking away. Papa and Felix won’t allow it. It’s a version of the future they’re incapable of accepting. Papa will never stop pushing for an inheritor who will grasp the Schonborn with pride and ceaseless ambition. And Felix will never stop pushing until there’s a definite vacancy at Papa’s right-hand side.

MED SHOT — THE BALCONY

as the Doomed Man crawls on hands and knees toward the rear wall of the theatre looking for another exit. The balcony is jammed with broken seats, projectors, electrical cables, film canisters. Suddenly, a few lights in the theatre snap on with a loud, echoing, mechanical noise. A moment later, the sound system is activated and the cinema fills with the heavily accented voice of Ernst Brod.

He edits the questions, looks at it from a different angle. What if this was a movie? What if this time in his life was transformed into 170,000 frames of film? How would he conceive the resolution to the central conflict?

Obviously, he’s the hero, Jakob as protagonist, the audience’s identification figure. He’s the icon whose job is to carry all the desires and fears the audience can squeeze into two hours of passive observation.

Doesn’t the ending have to be the hero’s triumph, that moment of swelling music and dam-breaking emotional satisfaction when the audience’s boy overcomes every inner and outer weakness and plot-wrenching long shot to capture his heart’s dearest wish?

BROD (O.S.)

(in a singsong chant)

Come out, come out,

Wherever you are.

(speaking)

We will not hurt you, little man.

(awful laughter)

You won’t feel a thing! Babykiller!

The Doomed Man panics and begins to scramble for the far wall, knocking over a klieg light, which ignites and fills the balcony with brilliant illumination.

Not in noir. Jakob knows the makeup of the noir film too well, maybe better than he knows himself. In noir the hero can be crushed. The audience’s boy can turn out to be the audience’s enemy. In the noir film, you just never know if you’re going to get the resolution you’ve been trained to want.

LONG SHOT — INT. THEATRE PROPER

as Pollak and Werfel wheel around, aim their guns high and begin blasting an assault at the balcony.

Jakob looks up from his notebook. He pushes his dumpling away and runs his hands over his face. Things were so much easier back in Maisel. Growing up back home, he and cousin Felix had managed to overlook their innate difference, had been able to care for each other despite yearnings that were perfectly opposed.

It’s as if in coming to America everything became too defined, overly manifest, as if on the day he and Felix stepped off the boat and onto the American shore their vision became hyper-focused, instantly and painfully sharpened to the point where neither of them can now fail to see the threat the other has become. This new country has turned the Kinsky cousins into an either/or proposition.

MED SHOT-THE BALCONY

as a rain of bullets explodes around the Doomed Man, ripping up seats, ricocheting off metal. The Doomed Man, a frantic animal, scrambles, clutching at the velvet curtain that lines the rear wall. He yanks the curtain back to reveal Ernst “The Insect” Brod, framed in the exit doorway, holding out the garrotting wire and grinning maniacally. The Doomed Man reacts instinctively, tackling Brod around the waist. The two men fall to the ground and the surprised Brod begins to wildly maneuver the wire around the Doomed Man’s neck. Doomed Man shifts weight and the two roll down the balcony stairs to the railing.

Jakob grabs hold of the notebook and begins to tear out random pages, crumples them, jams them into his suitcoat pocket.

He swallows the last of his kakao and wonders what Felice Fabri would say. The love of his life, his mentor and his protector and his initiator into the mysteries of flesh and of film, what would Felice advise?

And he hears her voice, from the dark of the Kierling, that throaty, buttery whisper.

“Remember Jako, it will be your film. Yours alone. Not the studio boss, not the producer, not the investor. Not the bullying method actor and not the spoiled and sulking starlet. You don’t let any of them touch your work. Your eyes. Not even the audience, Jako. Not even the fickle, hateful audience.”

But Felice, he thinks, this is not a film. This is my life.

He picks up the red pen, turns to a fresh page in the note-book and begins to write.

TIGHT SHOT — BROD AND THE DOOMED MAN STRUGGLING ON THE FLOOR.

Brod manages to right himself, climbs on the back of the Doomed Man, leans forward and secures the piano wire firmly around the victim’s throat.

TIGHTER SHOT — FACE OF THE DOOMED MAN

as he begins to choke, his eyes bulging in agony and terror, color draining from his skin.

MED SHOT — BALCONY FLOOR

as, with his last burst of will, the Doomed Man rears up, his skull crashing into Brod’s nose, blood exploding. Brod, shocked, lets go of the garrote, staggers to his feet, at the same time pulling a gun from a shoulder holster inside his suitcoat. A bullet from below catches him in the chest, wheels him around. He drops his pistol to the floor.

POLLAK (O.S.)

(screaming)

Hold your fire! You’ve hit the Insect!

The Doomed Man pulls the garrote free from his neck. Stunned, close to blacking out, he tries to stand, grabs at the legs of Brod, pushes him forward. Brod loses balance, screams, falls over the railing. CAMERA follows body’s path as Brod crashes to the floor far below, breaking his neck.

Jakob feels a hand on his shoulder and immediately jerks and wheels around in his seat, pulls the pen into his fist and raises it like a makeshift dagger.

Carlo, the shift manager, jumps backward and yells, “Jesus, what the hell—”

“I’m sorry, Carlo,” Jakob says, “you startled me.”

“I was just going to clear your table—”

“I apologize, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

Carlo nods, shakes his head, grabs the pie plate and the mug and moves back behind the counter, mumbling.

LONG SHOT — THEATRE FLOOR — FROM BALCONY

Brod’s lifeless body spread prone at an awful angle, streams of blood beginning to flow randomly. Pollak and Werfel run to their boss. Gunfire sounds. Pollak and Werfel clutch their chests, collapse in a pile near Brod.

REVERSE SHOT — THE BALCONY

as the Doomed Man, bleeding slightly around the throat, lets a smoking pistol wave in his hands, then allows the gun to drop down onto the bodies below him.

Carlo returns with the bill. He puts it cautiously on the table and Jakob closes his notebook, pockets his pen and reaches for his wallet.

“Delicious as always,” Jakob says.

“Can I get you anything else, Mr. K,” Carlo says, “something to go, maybe?”

Jakob smiles and snakes his head as he picks cash from the billfold.

“I’m full to bursting,” he says, getting up. “I couldn’t take another thing.”

19

When Sylvia wakes up, it’s dark in the room. She feels like she’s slept for a week. She lies in bed for a while, takes some deep breaths, stretches her arms and legs and realizes she’s feeling a lot better. She’s still kind of foggy but the aching and nausea have vanished and she’s got some energy back.

She sits up, kicks off the covers. Perry isn’t here. She stands up and goes to the bedroom window and looks out. The streetlights are on and she can see the moon low over the church tower.

She walks out into the kitchen, closes her eyes and turns on the light. She opens the eyes slowly into a squint, goes to the table. There’s no note, no sign that Perry’s been back to the apartment.

She moves into the living room, grabs the remote, which Perry has Scotch-taped together, and turns on the TV. She stares at the weather channel for a minute with the sound off. A young guy with a mustache is in front of a map of the United States. Semitransparent swirling clouds move in a choppy pattern across the screen, left to right, as the weatherman gesticulates, points and sweeps these big hands all over the country. It’s an unsettling image and she shuts it off and goes into the bathroom.

She turns on the light and without thinking, moves to the tub and starts to draw a hot bath. She dumps in several capfuls of essence of rose bath oil, pulls off her T-shirt and tosses it in the hamper, then climbs into the tub and sits down and lets the water fill up around her. It looks like the color of the developer chemical. But it feels wonderful. It never fails that on the rare occasions when Sylvia does take a bath at night, she asks herself why she doesn’t do it every evening, why she doesn’t unwind in a steaming tub while Perry reads briefs or watches a game. She could bring in the radio and turn on a good station, maybe read something, one of those articles she’s got crammed in the desk, something she clipped from the art magazines and forgot about.

The water finally edges up near the top of the tub and she turns it off. The room is filling with steam, getting kind of misty, the mirror getting totally smoked over. She leans her head back and thinks about what Perry said before he left. I don’t know what’s been going on the last few days.

You don’t know the half of it, Perry.

She’s got no explanation for her behavior. The fact is, the things that have happened, the external things, she can accept, write them off the way you’d dismiss a slump, a couple days of bad luck. She’s just had a patch of weirdness, a run of strange hours. The outside events — the camera shop closing down, the riot outside the Skin Palace — don’t really concern her. Everybody’s got some story to tell about the day things went off-kilter. But what she really can’t get a handle on is her reaction to the weirdness. Instead of being repelled, it’s like she’s been sucked in. She’s sought these things out. She followed a strange old man into a pornographic bookstore. She walked into Der Geheime Garten on her own. She accepted Leni’s invitation to lunch at an unlicensed, hit-and-run Peruvian restaurant. She nodded her head yes. She moved her own feet. She was operating under her own influence and control. And now, sitting here in the tub, she’s got no rationale for why she did these things. There’s no precedent for it in her past. She’s never sought out these kinds of experiences before. For the most part, she thinks she’s lived a fairly narrow existence. Maybe more narrow than most. It’s as if for twenty-five years her brain has been functioning in this standard, middle-class, linear way and then one night, maybe while she was asleep, maybe in the middle of a boring and nonsensical dream, some switch just got thrown, some neurons just started firing in a different manner, a different pattern. And she woke up as this other woman, as this stranger, like in one of those late-night cable movies. Like in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

She props her feet up on the faucet and looks at them. These are the feet that brought her into Jack Derry’s Camera Exchange and Brady’s Adult Books and Herzog’s Erotic Palace. The feet look the same as they did a week ago. But something’s changed.

And she wishes she could pin down the cause. Even if she couldn’t reverse it and get back to normal, she wishes she could simply know what’s brought her to this point. She doesn’t know why she thinks this would make things better, or somehow more acceptable.

A week ago, the Snapshot Shack was not only tolerable but actually inviting. It was stable and simple and she loved locking herself up in that booth and running through the boring routine of every shift — counting boxes of film, phoning up customers to say their pictures were ready, handing change through the sliding window/lens like some toll collector on a highway people rarely travel anymore.

Now, she feels like Leni’s right, like the place is a prison and she’ll go crazy if she sits inside it one more time. But she’s got to do something for work and there’s no way she’s going to hire herself out to some studio that’ll have her running after wedding parties every Saturday.

There’s always Hugo’s offer. She could just let the feet bring her down to the Skin Palace every morning and shoot roll after roll of naked people groping each other. Perry would love it. Honey, you know the porn king you’re trying to shut down? Well guess who my new boss is.

She just can’t imagine looking through a viewfinder and focusing in on, say, Leni and one of those actors she saw this afternoon, caressing each other and looking at her while she yells out these inane commands like tilt your head up or could you flex for me a little?

She looks down at her own body sort of shimmering and enlarged through the oily water. She’d like to lose maybe five pounds. She’d like to tone up a little. Maybe get into an aerobics class. Nothing ridiculous, just a couple hours a week. She’s sure she’d feel better. She wishes her breasts were just slightly bigger. It’s not a huge problem, not like she’d go for surgery or anything.

Before Leni, Sylvia never knew a woman who was satisfied with her body. At best, back in college, she knew some who just never complained or joined in when the subject came to body image. But that’s no real indication of satisfaction.

She looks at her body now, rolled out here in front of her, magnified a little by the rose-colored water. She wonders what it will look like in another ten years. And then she thinks suddenly of the pictures down in the darkroom. Propp’s pictures. The Madonna and child in the ruins. How old is the woman in that picture? Sylvia is convinced the Madonna is lacking any body neurosis. And Sylvia knows she’s reading into the photo. She has to be. There’s nothing in those shots to indicate that kind of knowledge. You can’t even see the Mother’s face. Beyond the play of light on her back and shoulder and breast, the rest of her is in silhouette. So how can Sylvia be so sure, more certain the longer she dwells on it, that the Madonna is wholly content with her body?

There’s got to be something in the pictures that she’s not recalling. She pulls the plug from the drain and stands up, grabs the towel off the radiator and starts to dry herself. She goes into the bedroom and turns on the lamp on the nightstand. She grabs her jeans, holds them out to step into them and catches her reflection in the mirror above the bureau.

She tosses the jeans back on the bed, opens the bottom drawer and paws through T-shirts and pajamas and night-gowns. And then she feels the lace and pulls out what she’s looking for. It’s a full-length English nightdress, all sheer cotton trimmed with Battenburg lace, with this deep V-neck that can be secured by buttons at the neck, and long, ruffled cuffs and a flounced hem and a thigh-high side slit. It’s probably the most elegant thing she’s ever owned. It was a present from Perry. Way back. Near the beginning, when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

They went away for a weekend. It was near the end of winter and they drove into the Berkshires and stayed at this ancient Victorian inn. They were the only guests and they arrived around midnight. The woman who ran the place had left the door open and the room keys on the front desk along with a note that told them to lock up. They climbed a double-wide staircase past walls lined with dark oil portraits of people long dead. They moved down a narrow corridor until they found the Rose Room, small but with a huge brass bed and complimentary brandy in a crystal decanter. Sylvia went into the bathroom and Perry went for the bags. When she came out, he was still gone, but there was a gift box on the bed wrapped in thick floral-print paper. She sat down next to it and opened it slowly, folded back all the thin, white tissue paper and pulled up this nightgown. She remembers staring at it for what seemed like too long, running her fingers over the lacework around the collar. She remembers gathering it up against her chest, going to the door and peeking out into the hallway, looking for Perry and not finding him. Then she went back into the bathroom and put it on and it fit as if she’d picked it out herself. She stood in front of the mirror. She actually combed her hair for a few minutes. She remembers putting a single drop of perfume on her wrist. When she opened the bathroom door, Perry was sitting on the edge of the bed with just his jeans on, facing her, holding a cognac in one hand and a small bouquet of sweetheart roses and baby’s breath in the other. He held them out to her and says, “I was afraid they’d freeze in the trunk.” But they hadn’t and she took them from him and didn’t know what to say. He stood up and whispered, “Do you like it?” and she just nodded. Then he took the bouquet out of her hand and put it on the bureau, took her hand and led her over to an antique chaise longue in the corner of the room, this heavy velvet lounge chair that Sylvia just sank into. He stood back and looked at her and smiled and nodded, held up a finger to say one minute, went over to the camera bag and took out the Canon. Sylvia started to shake her head and made herself stop as Perry focused the lens, then stopped, put the camera on the bed, stepped forward, and raised the hem of the nightgown until it was just above her bent knee. His hand lingered a second and she remembers how it felt as he let his fingers touch the back of her thigh, still innocent, just above the knee, but on this soft part of her skin that sent a wave through her, jangled the rhythm of her breath a little. Then he stepped back and slowly shot off an entire roll of film. And halfway through the roll, without any provocation from Perry, Sylvia pulled the hem just slightly higher on her leg. And Perry stopped for a second and closed his eyes, then went back to shooting. When he finished, he moved to the other side of the room and rebagged the camera. Then he stood up and stared at her as he pulled off his jeans. Sylvia sat there and stared back. There was a long moment after his pants were on the floor and neither one of them was moving, this wonderful, onetime, aching tension, this palpable atmosphere that, even as it engulfs you, you know you’ll probably never capture again.

Perry came to the lounge, lifted her up, set her down on the brass bed, but never removed the nightgown, simply raised it above her waist

They made love that night in a way they’ve never repeated. Not an athletic endurance or a primal, dank kind of fierceness, but more a kind of trance state, filled with an intensity and a surety, an absolute correctness and a limitless empathy as if each knew exactly when to move and when not to, when to stroke, kiss, breathe. As if for the whole of that night in that room, they couldn’t make a mistake. They couldn’t be less than flawless for each other.

Or at least that’s how Sylvia remembers it.

She doesn’t know what Perry’s memories are. They haven’t discussed that night, as if they have a shared understanding that words could easily damage it.

The pictures never came out. And Sylvia knew they wouldn’t at the time Perry was taking them. He hadn’t used a flash and the speed wasn’t slow enough to compensate for the dimness of the room.

She’s glad those pictures don’t exist. She still has a very clear, very sharp idea of what she looked like in this night-gown. She loves that image of herself. It’s the only instant, the only image she has of herself as totally desirable. As completely sure of and comfortable with her own sensuality. And she knows more than half that idea, that image, is imagined. It’s a story. It’s a fabrication, more altered then true, more created than any airbrush could manage. And she wants to hold onto it forever.

She slides the nightgown on over her head. She pushes her arms down through the sleeves. She buttons the three pearls at the neck. Then she goes to the closet instead of the mirror, searches until she finds a virgin pair of white ballet slippers and slides them on her feet. She goes out to the kitchen, takes the key off the nail on the side lip of the molding, goes out the back door, locks up behind her, and replaces the key.

She heads down to the cellar, down into the darkroom, trying to keep the nightgown from touching the stairs or the rock and mortar walls that are covered with a hundred years of soot and grit. She gets inside the darkroom, turns on the white light, gathers up all the Propp pictures and spreads them on the worktable. She pulls the step stool up to the table. She grabs the magnifying glass and the softest dust brush she’s got. Then she bears down. She leans in over the first photograph until it fills her field of vision. She tried to break down the shot, divide it into separate quadrants, first by simple mapping, what lies to the upper right, lower left. Then by the fall of the light in the photo. Then by the shifting fields of focus. Then arbitrarily, wherever her eye takes her, she seizes on that section of the photograph. She looks at each small piece under the glass. She takes her time, burns the image in. She looks again, immediately, with her bare eye, her face less than an arm’s length from the paper. Then she climbs up onto the step stool and looks down from above. She changes the position of the light. She cuts the glare. She adds some glare. She brushes the shot clean. She rebrushes it. She gets up, takes it to the drying line, clips it steady and stands in front of it, six inches away, two feet away, four feet away. She squats down and looks up at it. Finally, she turns it upside down, rotates it on the drying clips at different angle stops until she’s come a full circle.

Then she repeats the process with photo number two. With number three and number four.

Time blurs until she hears the noise. It sounds like a cat scratching its claws over something harsh. Like a wire screen. She thinks for a second that it might be the furnace. Perry fills it with water once a week for Mrs. Acker. But the furnace still makes a knocking or rumbling sound.

Sylvia steps outside the darkroom, immediately hears it more loudly, turns to the cellar window and sees a face staring in at her. She keeps herself from screaming but starts to run for the stairway when she hears her name and stops. She looks again and now the face is exposed, lit up by a flashlight at its chin, and she sees Leni Pauline shaking her head and laughing.

Sylvia goes over to the window and looks. The frame is nailed shut but she can hear Leni say, “Lemme in. I’m bored.”

Sylvia points to the rear of the building, then shuts down the lights and closes up the darkroom. Leni’s at the back entrance wearing an oversized mohair sweater, tiger-stripe spandex running pants and those old burnt-orange construction boots. Sylvia steps back to let her in and Leni motions for her to come outside.

They go out onto the back landing and Sylvia’s surprised at how mild the night is.

“God,” Leni says, “you’re gorgeous.”

Sylvia’s forgotten she’s wearing the nightgown and suddenly she’s feeling too stupid and embarrassed to ask what Leni’s doing here. She tries to think of an excuse for why she’s got the nightgown on, why she looks like she just stepped off the page of some elaborately illustrated fairy tale, but nothing comes.

“C’mon,” Leni says. “It’s perfect.”

“It was a gift,” Sylvia says. “From my … from Perry.”

But Leni’s not listening. She’s taken hold of the gown’s hem and is holding it out from Sylvia’s legs and studying the beading in the glow of the moonlight.

“What Hugo could do with this number,” Leni says, almost to herself.

Sylvia pulls the hem away and Leni looks up at her with this self-satisfied smile on the lips. And for some reason Sylvia feels as embarrassed as if she was standing here naked.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I brought your camera,” Leni says, bringing it out from behind her back. “You know, you’re pretty careless with your gear.”

“It’s been a bad week.”

“You’re too tense, Sylvia. It’s not right, someone your age being this stressed out. Ten years from now, you’ll be looking for organ donors.”

“Real pleasant, Leni.”

“I’m trying to help you out here, kid,” though they’re most likely the same age, “You need somebody—”

“I’ve got somebody,” Sylvia says.

Leni nods, “Sure. The guy that bought the nightgown.”

“That’s right.”

“So where is he?” she asks, looking past Sylvia at the stairs. “I’d love to meet a guy who can walk into a store and score something this campy.”

Sylvia’s taken back. “You think this is campy?” she says, looking down at herself.

Leni retreats immediately with a shrug. “Don’t get me wrong, Slyvie,” and Sylvia realizes no one has ever called her Sylvie before, “it’s honestly gorgeous. It’s really beautiful but in this, you know, retro-way. This Victorian decadence thing. White on white. All cotton. Just screaming purity. But then there’s the plunging neck. And the slit up the side. The color and material say one thing. Then the cut and the fitting contradict it all.”

Sylvia’s flinching from self-consciousness but she doesn’t stop Leni.

“It’s the kind of thing I’m always trying to get across to Hugo. Less is more. The tease is everything. It’s the covered pot that’ll boil with the most intensity. You know what I’m saying. I know you know. The greater the repression, the more over-the-top the revolution.”

“You think I’m repressed?”

“God, Sylvia, you take everything I say as an affront. This is a compliment, all right? You look like a dream. You’re more erotic right now than a year’s worth of centerfolds.”

Sylvia folds her arms over her chest. Leni hands the Canon to her and says, “I threw a fresh roll of film in there,” then turns to leave and says, “Get back upstairs to the boyfriend and revel in it for God’s sake.”

“He’s at work.”

Leni stops and pivots but doesn’t say anything.

“He’s in the middle of a pretty important project,” Sylvia starts and then can’t believe she’s trying to justify Perry to Leni.

“One question,” Leni says. “Were you wearing this when he left?”

Sylvia shakes her head no.

Leni looks her up and down again. “So why did you put it on?”

Sylvia starts to shrug, then says, “You said one question.”

“Turn around,” Leni says.

Sylvia squints at her.

“I want to see the whole thing. Turn around.”

She feels funny, but does it, a full circle with the gown flowing around her legs.

“Come here,” Leni says, no play in her voice. She steps off the landing into the backyard.

Sylvia hesitates and Leni says again, “Right here, Sylvia. Come on. Let’s go.”

They walk down onto the grass. Everything’s silent but for their steps on the leaves. Leni looks around a little, concentrating, then without saying a word she comes over and takes the camera, takes Sylvia by the arm, leads her to an old catalpa tree and positions her in a shaft of moonlight that falls next to it.

“You’ve got a good eye.”

“Keep quiet,” Leni says, lifting the camera to chest level and looking down at the settings, then up at her subject.

“You’ve got to let in all the light you can,” Sylvia whispers. “Try opening it up all the way.”

Leni twists the exposure, brings the camera up to her eye, and fires the shutter a few times, then lowers the camera and asks, “How’s it feel to be on the other side?”

“Awkward.”

“You’re a natural,” she says. “Do me a favor. Unbutton the top button. Just one.”

Sylvia shakes her head, but as Leni focuses and starts to shoot, she complies.

“Lean back against the tree.”

“I’ll be in shadow,” Sylvia says and Leni shushes her and says, “Just do it.”

Sylvia doubts the pictures will come out and she realizes this disappoints her. She feels the tree against her back, wonders if she’s staining the nightgown.

Leni comes in closer. “Slide down till you’re sitting on the ground.”

“It’s cold.”

“Don’t whine,” she says, a little harshly, and Sylvia moves down until she’s seated.

She lowers the Canon from her eye, bites her bottom lip for a second, studying the image.

“It’s hard,” she says and Sylvia just nods back at her, pleased with the comment.

“Okay, bring the hem up just a little. Maybe mid-calf. You think?”

“Your call,” Sylvia says.

“Try it. No higher.”

Sylvia raises the hem of the nightgown from her ankles up her leg. Leni seems to take forever focusing. Sylvia keeps quiet and waits until finally she hears a single shutter release. Then Leni walks over and hands the camera down.

“That’s it?” Sylvia says.

Leni nods, extends a hand and helps Sylvia back to her feet, then casually reaches up to Sylvia’s face and gently pushes some strands of hair back behind the ear. It seems like this unconscious, almost motherly gesture and it sends a lick of cold down from Sylvia’s neck. Without a word, Leni turns and starts to move toward the street.

“Leni,” Sylvia says.

Leni stops and looks back.

“I was just …” Sylvia takes a breath. “I mean, do you have plans? You want to come in and watch a movie or something? There’s this Peter Lorre festival.”

Leni smiles, bends her head back, looks up at the sky. She walks back, takes Sylvia’s hand, says, “C’mon, I’m parked out front.”

By the time they park down on Dupin, Sylvia’s still putting up a fight. “I’m not dressed. I can’t go to a party dressed like this.”

Leni kills the engine.

“You ever go to the Zone’s Halloween block party? It’s an annual thing, Sylvia. You’ve seen the pictures.”

“You’re sure it’s tonight? Halloween’s a week away.”

Leni opens her door and says, “Sometimes this thing can run on, you know. Everyone will be in costume, honey. You’ll probably take home a prize. Will you stop worrying. Think of the shots you’re going to get.”

“I only have this one roll of film,” Sylvia says, pulling the camera into her lap and checking the meter.

“Then you’d better pick and choose very carefully.”

They start to walk down Dupin toward a pocket of light and noise at the intersection of Aragon. The air is fairly mild. Sylvia looks down at her feet to see the slippers going black from the filthy asphalt. On either side of the street, large and small packs of people are running to get to the block party. They’re dressed up as apes, vampires, gun-fighters, Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, and other more subtle icons, too vague to name at a glance. There’s a trio of Diana Rosses in matching pink sequinned gowns doing a passable version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” and even after they move by her, close enough to smell their Chanel, Sylvia still can’t decide if they’re men or women or some combo of the two. She sees a guy simply wrapped in an American flag jogging next to a woman who may or may not be going for a Little Orphan Annie look. She sees a werewolf in a leather jumpsuit, an obesity case in a pseudo-loincloth and with his hair in a topknot looking like a non-Asian sumo wrestler, some young women in yellow hard hats, T-shirts, work boots, chewing on cigars, spitting and catcalling at passing men, doing a lot of exaggerated crotch-grabbing. She hears singing and spots a small band of men completely attired in old Howard Johnson’s-style waitress uniforms, all orange and white with aprons and order pads. Some wear hair nets and all but two hold brown plastic serving trays over their shoulders while the duo with free hands carry aloft a banner that reads Verlin Ave Cross-dressers’ Lodge.

A parade of bikers on Harleys slides past her and she can’t tell whether they’re foregoing costumes or, in fact, they’re faux bikers, daytime accountants or orthodontists who blew a wad on one elaborate night of dress-up. And the same question arises when she sees a group of hookers high-heeling it around the corner of Waldstein.

“How do you tell who’s real and who’s not,” she asks Leni.

“Tonight,” Leni says, “it doesn’t really matter.”

They round Waldstein and come into the hub of the block party. The Canal Zone treats Halloween like some high holy day in a fanatical religion. Sylvia has never been to the festivities before. In the beginning, the Spy used to run a big feature the morning after the madness with a page of great shots, but as the costumes got progressively more lewd and graphic and just over-the-top weird, the paper left the coverage entirely to the Zone’s own free hand-out rags. Now, Sylvia feels like that might have been the right decision. The width of Waldstein Avenue is swelled to bursting with a Mardi Gras scene as directed by Fellini, a shoulder-to-shoulder circus of fire-eaters and tuxedoed stilt-walkers, snake-dancers and gypsy tarot booths, spontaneous crap games and doorway magicians and a tribe of roller-skating women in bridal attire. There are men dressed as women and women dressed as men and at least one accordion-wielding-hermaphrodite. There’s a reggae band playing from the top of the Radcliffe Building, drowning out these slightly annoying Renaissance chamber singers who are all swaddled in dark velvets and feathered hats doing an a capella number about good King John being dead by his own hand.

The whole scene reminds her of the first street carnival her mother took her to, one of those traveling trailer shows of wobbly cart rides and rigged games of chance that move into town for a week or two, then move out in the middle of the night leaving a muddy vacant lot covered with popcorn and powdered sugar and ticket stubs. The Halloween Block Party is much more free-form and wild than that second-rate carnival of her youth, but standing here now in the swirl of it she’s getting that same kind of virgin rush of being outside at night in the cool of the October air, just engulfed in flashing lights and noise, just washed over by hundreds of disparate, clashing sounds, and with no idea of what’s about to happen.

She wishes she could see the whole thing from up on a roof, get an overview that would allow her to estimate the size of the crowd and how far down the street the party extends. She catches herself wishing this and wonders why she’d want that. Why does she have such a need to see the total picture and analyze its meaning? Why can’t she be like everyone currently bumping into her, lost to herself, going with the moment and the surge? And suddenly she wants to thank Leni for bringing her down here.

But she doesn’t know where Leni is. She turns a full circle before she realizes that she’s already lost her driver and guide. And she panics just a little, starts to move through the crowd for the sidewalk, but it’s like fighting an ocean wave whose undertow keeps growing. She’s moving against the flow of the crowd, smacking into a fireman, a mummy, a vaguely biblical character with a braying sheep lodged up on his shoulders, bent around the neck. She turns and tried to move for the opposite sidewalk, jumps out of the way as one of those huge, old-fashioned unicycles comes rolling too fast in her direction, the pedaler honking a red rubber squeeze horn over and over.

How could Leni leave her like this? She searches for a familiar face but she’s pummeled with a nonstop rash of rubber masks and veil-hidden eyes. It’s like a cargo track full of stage makeup exploded moments before she arrived here. People are rouged or pancaked into caricatures, into mutants, into distant relations of what’s recognizably human.

She starts to make her way down Waldstein by turning sideways, ducking, sidestepping. Once she picks up the rhythm, she begins to make more progress. She comes upon a toga-wrapped Romanesque couple and it dawns on her they’re probably going for a Caligula-and-Drasilla act. They’re huddled with three burly men dressed in the old-time full habits of nuns. They’re all standing at the mouth of an alleyway with their necks craned back, focused up at the sky. She pauses long enough to see a tightrope walker with classic balance pole wavering midway between two rooftops, then she hurries on before the aerialist can either regroup and complete the crossing or free-fall into the blue trash Dumpster below him.

Sylvia moves past an organ grinder with a spastic monkey, a sleight-of-hand man manipulating cards and coins above a huge leather satchel, a small squad of unbelievably risqué cheerleaders doing a raunchy pep-routine for a drunken circle of old men.

And she’s just starting to catch the buzz of the night, to go with the communal adrenaline of the street, when she turns a corner and spots the woman she saw on the screen of the drive-in, Mrs. Ellis, the woman whose daughter is missing. Mrs. Ellis is trying to stop people as they run past, to press posters and flyers into the hands of the revelers. But she’s not having much luck. The people who do take a hand-out drop it to the pavement without giving it a look, most likely thinking it’s one more come-on for a club or a concert. But the missing girl’s mother persists, machinelike, as if there was no other option but to stand in the midst of these speeding, carousing celebrants and distribute the photocopied face of a ten-year-old daughter she may never see again.

Sylvia turns away, takes a quick left, comes to the food kiosks, dozens of carts and wagons emitting a wind of slightly diverse but collectively greasy smells and the overall sound of meat sizzling. Oldish, kerchiefed women hunch over butane-fed flames or beds of glowing charcoal, poking at potpourris of sausage, onions, peppers, tomatoes. She spots a compact and swarthy old man in a snow parka concentrating over what looks like a cast-iron black cauldron — that’s the only word for the enormous cooking pot he’s stirring at the corner of Goulden Ave. And his wooden stirring utensil looks like an oar from a canoe. He’s an apparition from some malevolent children’s fable and Sylvia walks up to him and looks inside the kettle and sees a sweet smelling goulash bubbling like mad, as if the contents were about to come alive, metamorphose into some sentient creature of her nightmares and jump into the fray around them looking for children. The old man glances up at her, reaches inside a deep pocket of his parka and offers her a tin mug for dipping. She shakes her head no and starts to move off, then, totally on impulse or instinct, she pivots back toward him, brings her Canon up to her eye, pulls this dark-skinned warlock into an exact focus and clicks off three shots: the face, this now-wonderful, crease-lined, eye-drooping face, captured forever in the vapors rising up from his mystery stew. When she takes the camera down he’s smiling and blowing a kiss at her. She mouths a thank you and moves onto Goulden.

She walks past a half-block colony of tentatively erected shacks and makeshift plywood counters selling a mish-mash of used junk — costume jewelry, buttons, bubblegum cards, dog tags, jackknives, chipped china teacups, old newspapers and magazines, devotional candles, bags of marbles, and at the last shack, crumpled old pinups, once glossy cheesecake pictures of long-dead starlets whose names no one remembers. Surprising to her, all these little wooden booths that look like they were thrown up minutes ago have mini TV sets flickering on the counter with the sound shut off. She lingers in front of the last booth, scans the leggy eight-by-tens clipped to a hanging wire run wall to wall. One of the photos — a willowy blonde stretched out on a sofa — has a faded imprint of full lips lipsticked below the model’s signature. Sylvia thinks about buying the pinup from the Asian behind the counter, but the clerk’s attention is consumed by the television and besides, she doesn’t have any money on her. Instead, she wades into the street, waits for a break in the crowd and clicks off a shot of the booth. Through her viewfinder she notices the proprietor is watching a Peter Loire movie. She stands for a second and watches Lone framed inside her camera, framed again inside the TV. It’s the central scene from M, where Lorre and his niece walk past Grosser Mittagstisch and then stop to look in the shop window. The niece notices the chalk-marked letter M that’s been imprinted on Lorre’s back. She tells him he’s all dirty. He turns sideways to look in a mirror and we see him in three-quarter profile. Then the camera tracks in until we’ve got a tight shot of just Lorre’s panic-stricken face, the reflection of his face in the mirror, and the condemning letter M on his back. Peter Lorre’s eyes give Sylvia an honest, awful shudder.

She looks away from the screen, pans to her left, beyond the sales strip, and sees an old Thunderbird convertible that looks like someone abandoned an attempt to turn it into a punkish parade float. There’s graffiti sprayed across the length of the body, a line she thinks might have come from Picasso—good taste is the enemy of art. Two mannequins have been positioned in the rear seats, manipulated into a state of awkward coupling. And a big Liberace-like candelabra is mounted on the hood with all its red candles aglow. Before she realizes how much she likes the scene, she’s already shooting it and wishing she’d brought a starburst filter to fracture the dozens of small flames into mini-novas.

She’s getting charged up now. She flies through the mob to the Thunderbird and climbs inside, stands up on the front seat and faces out to the street and immediately lets her instinct start picking and choosing, lets her fingers find that unison with the eye, lets her eardrum relish the vibration of the shutter’s click-sound. She finds a topless, co-ed tribal dance around an impromptu bonfire and she nails it. She finds and captures the passing face of the 1931 Karloff monster with perfect neck-bolts and facial scarring, sad mouth and anguished eyes. She swings high and traps the pinched features and wrinkled forehead of a middle-aged woman in a dark-colored bathrobe leaning out the window of the brick tenement across the road, maybe wishing she could get some sleep.

A speeding bulldog hauling a severed leash in its mouth and threading through the legs of the crowd.

Click.

A trio of teenage boys, all in camouflage pants, bearing toy carbines up on their shoulders, huddled around a pack of firecrackers exploding on the ground between them.

Click.

A limp toddler helplessly falling into sleep inside the arms of his wobbly mother as mommy drops quarters to the pavement trying to buy cigarettes from a vending machine that’s been pushed out onto the sidewalk.

Click.

The more she looks, the more images come, as if her only limitation is the speed of her shutter finger.

She gets out of the Thunderbird and starts to walk down Goulden. She sees a line of people in black-tie filing into the red-brick are of the Renger-Patzsch Tool & Die Company. She crosses the street and joins onto the tail of the group, but when she gets to the door a bouncer says, “Your invitation, ma’am?”

She stares at him and he adds, “This is an invitation-only event, ma’am.”

She lifts up her camera and shoots a couple frames of his beefy face, lowers the camera slightly and says in a strained-indulgent voice, “I’m from the Spy.”

He immediately steps back to allow entry and says, “Love your costume,” and suddenly she realizes that she hasn’t been conscious of wearing the nightgown since she lost Leni.

She moves inside the factory, which has been closed down for almost a decade but which still houses an awful lot of heavy machinery, big green and black oil-guzzling, ear-rupturing warhorses. The machines look like they’ve been arranged to transform the dance floor into a kind of industrial maze, a heavy labyrinth of cast-iron partitions. Somehow, it’s a little disturbing, watching impeccably groomed people ballroom dancing through these corridors of obsolete grinding monsters that were once gluttons for loose human fingers. Men looking like some elite cadre of movie ushers and women who could give new definition to an overused word like glamour are together in each other’s arms, gliding through a gauntlet of metal hulks that have stubbornly outlived their usefulness.

There’s an enormous banner stretched across the far wall that reads and underneath it is a digital clock with huge red numbers showing, Sylvia guesses, the elapsed time since the start of the marathon. The room is well lit by the hanging fluorescents so she maneuvers to an uncrowded corner and gets ready to start shooting.

The Bella C. Memorial Dance Marathon

to benefit

The Fund for the Preservation of Dangerous Art

shake your booty to break their balls

She watches new dancers report to an aluminum picnic table under the clock and banner where a d.j. is sorting through piles of tapes and CDs. The contestants crouch down as they present their invitations, as if they were second-string ballplayers thrilled and scared at their imminent insertion into a crucial game. The officials behind the picnic table give all the entrants some sort of punchcard to clip to an accessible part of their clothing. Most of the dancers arrive together but there are a few solo entrants leaning anxiously against a side wall, waiting for a partner. It’s this crew she starts shooting, zooming in close on the faces, on the palpable excitement and underlying anxiety. She shoots a husky young guy with ridiculous sideburns as he unconsciously snaps and unsnaps his cufflinks. She locks onto an almost-pretty woman, a little younger than herself, dressed in a fifties-style prom dress that, unfortunately, isn’t enough of a put-on. The woman’s eyes are turned all the way to the left and her tongue is running a chronic circle trying to keep the inside of her mouth moist. Sylvia finds the focus and she’s about to release the shutter when a man dressed like a cross between Zorro and a drug-dealing bullfighter suddenly steps into her line of fire and begins to approach.

She lowers the camera and glares at the guy, but he keeps coming toward her. He looks the right part for the costume he’s wearing — jet-black hair and a trimmed mustache that appears genuine. Sylvia thinks of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood if that movie were remade in, say, Argentina. He comes to a graceful stop just far enough away to bow toward her. He’s done up completely in black — matador shirt tucked into real leather pants, pointed-toe boots with spur straps, tapered gloves, a heavy-looking cape of some kind, draped over his forearm rather than his shoulders and, the crowning effect, a simple Lone Ranger-style mask to cover his eyes.

She’s about to sarcastically thank him for blowing her shot when it clicks in that he’s given her a more dramatic image than the jilted wallflower in the distance. He holds out a hand, palm up, and says, “Shall we?”

She brings camera to eye and starts twisting her focus ring and says, “Shall we what?”

“Take home the prize for best costumes.”

“Sorry,” she says and shoots him, “I’m working.”

But there’s no way he’s giving up this easily. “This isn’t a night for work,” he says.

“It is for me.”

“Your dress says otherwise.”

“I like to blend in.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” he says. “Blending in?”

“What I’m doing,” she says and hits the shutter, “is trying to take some photographs.”

She lowers the camera and leans forward, smiles and says, “Look for yourself tomorrow in the arts and leisure section.”

He moves quickly, reaches in, and before Sylvia can grab it, he’s got the Canon in his hands, then up at his masked eye, focusing in on her.

“For Christ sake,” she yells.

“Relax,” he says and fires off a frame. “How does it feel? Being on the receiving end.”

She stays calm, extends her hand and says, “Look, that’s an expensive piece of equipment. Just hand it back to me.”

Another shot and he says, “It’s a very intrusive art form, wouldn’t you say?”

“Give it back,” she says and a little helplessness bleeds through the mounting anger.

“You can see,” he says, intent, rotating the camera and firing again, “why the Indians despised it so much. The way it captured the soul and all.”

“What do you want?” she says. “You don’t like your picture taken? Fine. We won’t run any prints of you. Is that—”

“You don’t work for the Spy,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What do you want?” she repeats, getting nervous.

He takes his time for another shot, pulls her in and out of focus, tries a variety of angles until finally something he sees pleases him and he clicks off a shot, lowers the camera and says, “I want to dance.”

“I don’t dance,” Sylvia says.

He stares at her through the felt mask.

“One dance,” she says.

He nods.

“Give me the camera.”

“After the dance,” he says and deposits the Canon into some interior fold of the cape, then secures the cape around his shoulders. He takes her hand and leads her to an open spot next to an oil-scarred grinding machine up near the picnic table. Then with his free hand he gives this flourish of a signal to the d.j., who immediately fills the loft up with tango music.

Sylvia looks up at the guy and rolls her eyes and says, “I don’t know how to dance to this stuff.”

He throws an arm around her waist and pulls her forward and says, “After tonight, you’ll never forget.”

She says, “Be careful of the camera and let’s get this over with.”

He starts to lead and it’s clear this is no bluff. The guy knows what he’s doing. He could be some kind of professional instructor, for God sake. And within minutes this annoyance starts to turn into something fun and wonderfully different.

She’s getting warm and just slightly out of breath. They dodge behind one machine, zigzag past another, and somehow he’s willing her into matching each of his turns. Then they’re off the dance floor entirely, their arms locked straight out and their hands intertwined and they’re moving all the way to the rear of the building. He stops once and they pivot to the side and their speed seems to increase as they come right again and move forward.

In front of them, a double fire door is half-open and the cool outside air feels tremendous as it gulfs around Sylvia’s legs and neck. And then they’re headed for the door, moving out the door and into the alley in the rear, the music now starting to fade and her partner’s face suddenly grazing at her neck, her neck getting wet, his hand suddenly releasing her waist and taking hold of her behind and she starts to push him off but he half-dances, half-carries her farther away from the factory and they collide into a chain-link fence and he turns her until her back is pinned against the fence and now his hands are all over her, trying to pull up the hem of the nightgown, and he tears it in the process. Sylvia starts to scream but her voice just dissipates into the total noise of the block party. Then suddenly his whole body vaults into and off of her and she slides down the fence onto her behind and Zorro’s on the ground and it’s his voice she hears screaming alongside her own.

And now, standing sideways in front of her is another man. But this one’s got a baseball bat in his hands, choked up high in his fists, and Sylvia looks down to see Zorro-the-rapist bleeding like a son of a bitch from his head and trying to cover up.

And all Sylvia can scream to this bat-wielding stranger is, “Don’t break my camera.”

But the stranger doesn’t seem to hear her. He moves in on Zorro and pokes at him hard with the end of the bat, letting the tango-master get clear on what’s happened and maybe what’s about to happen. And despite the possible concussion the message gets through and Zorro starts to do a panicking scamper from side to side, tries to get to his knees, but each time the guy with the bat knocks him onto his backside with a harder blow until finally Zorro gives up and cowers in one place trying to cover his head. The standing man looks down on Sylvia, then swings the bat up to waist level, hesitates for a second, then chops down one last time onto one of Zorro’s ankles and snaps it into a sickening right-angle to the rest of the leg.

There’s a blast of screaming which the stranger ignores, turns to Sylvia and says, “Are you all right?”

She edges her way up to standing, runs to the cape and pulls out the camera.

Someone yells, “Marco? Are you all right?” and Sylvia looks to see two figures framed in the fire door. Then the man with the bat is reaching for her, grabbing her arm so hard she almost drops the Canon. He jerks her forward into a run and heads for a smaller connecting alley, moving away from Goulden Ave, making turns and rounding corners as if they were threading their way through a brick maze that narrowed with each directional choice. Finally, they turn right and dead-end into a trash-filled alcove, a tiny mini-alley between two identically nondescript buildings.

The man lets go of Sylvia’s arm, hunches forward onto his knees for breath and, staring at the ground, says, “Are you all right?”

She leans back against the wall, only now being hit by the facts of what just happened to her.

“I was dancing with him …” she starts and trails off.

She looks up to see him staring and fishing in a back pocket. “You’re safe,” he heaves. “And the bastard isn’t going to be doing any dancing for some time.”

And suddenly Sylvia’s terrified. She’s alone in a deserted alleyway with only one exit, with another strange man who’s holding a baseball bat over his right shoulder.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says and takes a step backwards, pulls from his pocket a keychain weighted with dozens of keys and moves to a tiny doorway near the dead-end wall.

Sylvia starts to edge backwards toward the opening of the alley. The man looks sideways at her, expressionless as he fiddles with a door lock. He says, “You can go if you want,” and she nods and keeps stepping backwards until he says, “but I’d like to know why you’ve been asking so many questions about me.”

And she stops.

“About you?”

He finds the right key and opens the door, stands up straight, runs a hand through his hair and nods at her. They stare at each other for a few seconds. It’s the first chance she’s had to get a look at him and right away there’s something familiar. He’s small and wiry, with a broad forehead and salt-and-pepper hair that’s grown too long. But the feature she locks on is the cool, pale blue of his eyes.

“C’mon, Sylvia,” he says. “I don’t have all night.”

He knows her name. And she’s hit with this awful surety that she knows his. And she makes herself open her mouth and say, “You’re Terrence Propp.”

20

They move through basements that connect to secondary basements, cellars that lead to subcellars. They follow the yellow beam of Propp’s penlight, though Sylvia gets the feeling he could find his way in complete darkness. They’re silent except for the short yell that slipped out when the first cobweb blanketed her face.

They climb through small portholes that have been sledgehammered out of brick walls. At some point the ground turns from concrete to loose earth and Propp slows to a halt. She hears him take a long breath through his nose, then he shines the light on her, lets it play on her face for what seems like a long time, finally asks, “You okay?”

“Where are we going?”

He swings the light up to his own face and says, “Home.”

He shines the beam in front of them and Sylvia looks ahead to see the tunnel they’ve been walking through has started to narrow down, the floorway rising and the ceiling lowering until they intersect at two heavy wooden cross-beams, these fat, dry, dense-looking timbers, like logs used in building a cabin. The beams are fitted into an X and they create an inept barrier.

“We’ve got to squeeze through here,” he says. “The beams are thorny, be careful you don’t tear your gown.”

She looks in the direction of his back and thinks he must be kidding. Her gown turned into an expensive cleaning rag when they entered the first basement. She follows him and ducks and twists until she manages to slide past the posts and ends up huddling down in a crawl space, pushed up against Propp’s shoulder. She hears him fiddling with rusty metal, then he seems to lean back against the cross-beams and kick his feet out. A half-door, like a metal hatchway, swings outward and a dim red glow of light reveals a much larger tunnel beyond.

“You’ll have to go first,” he says, “so I can resecure the door. Just edge over the side here until your foot touches the rung. It’s a short climb down. Less than ten feet.”

She does what he says. She comes forward on her behind until she can dangle her legs out and her heels hit a metal ladder rang. She reaches down and takes hold, lifts herself out into the air, pivots around until she’s facing the ladder and climbs down.

He follows, shuts the hatchway, comes next to her, takes her arm and says, “Not far now.”

They start to walk down a small incline that empties into a railroad bed. They’re in what looks like a kind of primitive subway tunnel. There’s an old bulb-eyed red railroad light mounted on the wall on the other side of the tracks. Propp motions to it and says, “It’s always on. No idea what powers it.”

They head down the middle of the tracks and Sylvia says, “What is this? What were these tracks for?”

For a second she doesn’t think he’s going to answer, then he says, “You know, the Canal Zone wasn’t always just a nightclub for dilettantes.”

He picks up the pace a little. “Quinsigamond used to be one of the biggest manufacturing centers in the Northeast.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You’ve heard the truth. The city’s first industry was a paper mill. Early 1800s.”

She can’t believe she’s getting a history lesson here. She’s in a storybook nightgown, walking with a myth-figure through an underground railroad bed. And he wants to lecture about the industrial revolution.

“Everything from wooden wheels to hoopskirts got shipped out of here at one time. Bail wire, industrial wrenches, furnace chambers, drill presses …”

His voice drifts off and he stops walking, turns and points to a break in the opposite wall. A huge shaft is visible, like a loading platform, a shadow box whose floor is a flat apron of cement that juts out slightly from the facing wall and is covered with a kind of metal grid, a big mat of iron slats. It looks like an empty prison cell with the front wall of bars removed, a square room of three facing walls and a floor, but no visible ceiling.

“Old story,” he continues. “We all know some part of it. The city thrives. Goes into a kind of hyper-life. The need for cheap labor is filled by European peasantry. The population explodes and Quinsigamond grows into a kind of gritty, redbrick metropolis. You can picture it. Teeming streets. Tenements popping up. More factories. Bigger mills. For a time, everything congregated here.”

He turns and kind of dramatically points down the tracks in the direction they’ve just come from.

“The raw materials came in this way by handcarts,” he turns again and faces the loading platform up the embankment. “Got off-loaded to the appropriate building and then,” he makes his hand into a thumbs-up sign, “hauled up into whatever factory where it was transformed into ball valves or skiving knives or gearboxes or grinding wheels—”

“I get the picture,” Sylvia says.

He nods and continues, “—then it was lowered back down below the street, loaded onto an outgoing freight cart and sent on down the commerce highway.”

“Till the need for skiving knives started to wane—”

“And the climate in the South started to look better and better—”

“And the railroads started to groan and die.”

He says, “You know where this track leads, don’t you Sylvia?”

She looks past him into the darkness and tries, “Gompers Station?”

He nods and starts to walk again. She moves up next to him and says, “You really are Terrence Propp, aren’t you?”

“Why’ve you been looking for me, Sylvia?”

“How do you know my name? And how do you know I’ve been looking for you?”

“I guess,” he says, “we both have a lot of questions.”

“You said we were going home. You live down here?”

His voice goes lower. “Here in the tunnels? Of course not.”

“Doesn’t anybody know these tracks still exist?”

The track bed begins to curve to the left and a new red bulb lights their way.

“If you mean the DPW, probably. It’s still on their maps, though it doesn’t tie into any currently relevant sewer or power lines. If you mean the little leather bohemians writhing around above us, they don’t know their affected asses from their affected elbows.”

“Sounds like you hate your own devotees.”

“I never asked for devotees of any kind, Sylvia.”

“I’m not exactly a devotee,” she says. “I never heard of you before this week.”

“Then your luck took a change,” he says, sounding unoffended.

“For better or worse?”

“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it.”

He stops, shines his penlight up at the rounded ceiling to show a series of cracks in the masonry, veins that spread wider and wider where the concrete has separated from itself.

“The ’53 earthquake,” he says. “June nine. I don’t think anyone in this city even realized we were sitting on the O’Toole Fault until it hit. You’re about to see the most pitiful casualty of the quake.”

He clicks off the light and pockets it, takes her hand, and as the tracks begin to incline toward street level, Propp veers to the right and crawls up an ash and gravel embankment and then squeezes through this horrible manmade corridor that looks like it’s been hacked out of the earth and stone by pick ax and shovel. They have to walk sideways to fit through, Propp leading the way, and thankfully it’s only a short path, maybe ten feet, but long enough for Sylvia to get a little claustrophobic, especially when she feels the cold of the rock face behind her narrowing in.

But then they’re in the open again and the space is lit by two hanging plastic lanterns throwing bluish light and she’s standing staring and not believing the vision in front of her: In this brick-and-stone cave, this crater-like hollow, this dank earth floor chamber, covered with silt and dust and ash, but still recognizable, there’s a classic Quinsigamond Lunch-car Company diner, one of those little boxy restaurants that look like stationary train cars. It has no windows and parts of the barreled roof are missing and the walls are cracked, but it’s sitting there like some petrified museum piece. And it’s underneath the street.

She looks to Propp for an explanation and he looks pleased.

“I told you we were heading home,” he says.

“This,” she says, “is where you live?”

He points to the ceiling. “We’re directly below the lower level of Gompers Station. Where the tracks broke left, the handcarts would have been coming up into the station.”

She nods and stares at the diner and waits. He pushes his hands into his pockets like some barely shy date, self-impressed but trying hard not to show it.

“It’s called St. Benedict’s,” he says. “It sat for years down on the lower level of Gompers. Owned and operated by a family named Guttman. It was mainly frequented by the trainmen and the freight crews. The passengers, the travelers, they all ate upstairs at the Grand Pavilion.”

He walks up to the structure and brushes at the outer wall with his hand.

“It’s a small diner comparatively. Could only seat forty-nine bodies at full capacity.”

He turns and faces her. “In ’53, when the quake hit and the fault opened, the old wooden columns just buckled, snapped like twigs, the flooring beneath the diner gave way and the whole thing fell through and came to rest down here.”

“Which is?” she asks.

“Some kind of subcellar vault the rail company had built. For storage, I suppose. There are dozens of them under the station.”

She looks past him to St. Benedict’s. “It’s amazing the thing wasn’t completely destroyed.”

“A testimony to their construction. The damage you see, I don’t even think it happened during the quake. I’m fairly certain it was during the attempt at salvage.”

“They tried to pull it back up?”

He nods. “A logistical nightmare. How do you get a crane inside Gompers?”

She shrugs.

“You don’t,” he says.

“I can’t believe,” she says, “I didn’t know about this.”

“You didn’t know about me either.”

“But this must have made the papers and—”

“The Spy did a huge spread. Amazing photographs. But this was what, Sylvia, a good fifteen years before you were born.”

“Still, you know, over the years, a feature article or something.”

He shakes his head and mimes a laugh.

“The Guttmans took their insurance money and left town,” he says. “I’ve heard they thought the city was cursed. The P&Q Company cemented over the hole and then the rail line took another painful twenty years to rust over and turn into a freight service. Everything gets forgotten, Sylvia. Your first important lesson of the night. And that fact can be as wonderful as it is horrible. But I don’t mean to offend a history major—”

“Fine arts,” she corrects him and then freezes. “Jesus Christ, what else do you think you know about me?”

“There’ll be time for all that,” he says. “C’mon in. I’ll make some coffee.”

Inside is beautiful and somehow cleaner than she expected. There’s a marble counter running the length of the diner and a half dozen mini-booths attached to the front wall. Above the counter hangs a mesh hammock strung from wall to wall and beyond it, in what was the open kitchen space, are crates and cartons of what must be supplies piled on top of grills and steam tables and cutting boards. Propp steers her to the first booth and clears clutter from the table by sweeping it to the side with his arm. Then he moves behind the counter and squats down till he’s out of sight and in a second she hears the soft machine-purr of an engine.

His head pops back into view and he says, “Portable generator. Makes all the difference. There are still a lot of gas lines running down here that I could tap into, but why worry.”

He starts to work at what it takes her a second to recognize as an espresso machine. And not one of those home models but a traditional, ornate, industrial job.

“I don’t believe this,” she mutters. She brings the camera up and pans around the place once, then puts it down on the table and stares at Propp.

With his back to her he says, “They don’t let you live in the Zone without an espresso machine. It’s a law.”

“How did you—”

“It nearly killed me, getting it down here. But it’s been worth it. Good espresso is such a small pleasure in the end, right?”

“How does the generator run?”

“Gasoline,” he says. “I do a little siphoning about once a week.”

“Siphoning?”

“Dupin Boulevard’s the best. I try to stay as far away from Bangkok as possible. But these days—”

“Wait a second. You steal the gas? Out of people’s cars?”

He turns around holding two coffee cups in his hands and with a smile on his face. “I’m sorry, Sylvia, does that offend you?”

“Forget it,” she says.

“I’m just curious,” he pushes. “My stealing a couple gallons of gas bothers you. But Hugo Schick and his vile little circus down on Watson Street give you no problem.”

She stares at him and when it’s clear he’s not going to continue, she tries to keep her voice even and says, “Okay. So you know everything about me. And I know nothing about you. Are you enjoying this?”

He gives her a slow shake of his head that says no, turns back to the espresso machine and says quietly, “Stay away from Schick, Sylvia. You have no idea what he can do to you.”

His words come out more as a plea than a threat and she stares at his back, unsure of what to say. But then her eyes drift to the stainless steel shelves above his head and she sees a line of ragged books. She reads some spines—The Phantom of the Poles. Soleri’s Arcology. The Journals of C. R. Teed. On the next shelf, she spots what look like old-time silver film canisters stacked side by side and bearing their titles in black ink on what looks like white adhesive tape. And she wants to laugh as she reads them off.

“Get out of here,” she says and he turns with a surprised look, then follows the focus of her eyes.

“Yes, of course,” he says, sort of relieved, “the film fanatic.”

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “There’s no way …”

He folds his arms over his chest and widens his eyes, then reaches up without looking, pulls down a canister about the size of a fat pancake and frisbees it to her. She grabs for it and makes an awkward catch, runs her finger over the tape that reads Greed — von Stroheim (1924).

“I’ve got all twelve hours,” he says.

“Ten,” she says. “It ran ten hours.”

“Trust me,” he says. “It’s twelve.”

“This is impossible. It doesn’t exist.”

“You’re holding it in your hand, Sylvia. ’Course it’s been reduced to sixteen millimeter.”

She’s just shaking her head and he clearly loves this reaction, so he throws another canister and she catches it and reads The Other Side of the Wind — Wells (1984).

She looks up. “But he never finished it—”

“He finished it, Sylvia.”

“—and what prints there were are in some bank vault in Iran.”

“Not anymore,” he says.

Sylvia is stunned. She looks up to the shelf and reads Further Ecstasy — Machaty, (1934), The Godless Girl’s Daddy — de Mille (1930), Berlin Melody of l936—Reifenstahl, Norma Jean & the Camelot Kids — Hoover (Compilation), The Day the Clown Cried II–Lewis (1972), Last Love Scenes from the Bunker — Braun (April, 1945).

She wants so much to believe this isn’t a prank. None of these films are supposed to exist. They’re all just wishful rumors, fever-dreams of movie nuts everywhere.

“How do you …” she says, “I mean do you ever …”

“Screen them?” he helps her out. “Of course. You know the old Ballard Theatre? The Loftus Brothers just bought it. They’re reopening next week as Impact: The Car Crash Cinema. But I know a way in. Would you like to—”

“Would I like to,” she says and Propp laughs.

“Calm down,” he says. “There’s time for everything.”

He brings their cups over and slides into the booth opposite her. They both take sips. She burns her tongue, ignores the sting and says, “You’re really Terrence Propp?”

He sits back. “Who else?”

“And you really live down here?”

“Where else?”

She sits back, matches his posture and says, “How’d you find this place?”

He shrugs. “Exactly how you’d think. I was out at night, prowling, looking for shots. I used to do that. Take some speed and just wander all night. Find a way into the old buildings. Shoot the old machines. Shoot angles. Abandoned cars. Then I started to get hooked on old furnaces. Old boilers. Peerlesses. American Standards. Even a few industrial Marville — Negres. The bigger and greasier and more sinister looking, the better.”

“When was this?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know anymore. No, really. You see any calendars hanging on the walls? Time gets fairly irrelevant down here.”

“I know that feeling,” she says.

“You do?”

“You were shooting furnaces,” she says.

He agrees to move on. “I discovered I had a talent for getting into any building. So I spent nights moving through every basement underneath Verlin and Aragon and Waldstein. Must’ve shot a thousand prints—”

“Could I see them?”

He just shakes his head no, without any emotion. “I destroyed them all. One big bonfire—”

“The negatives—”

“Of course, the negatives. That was the point.”

“It’s just—”

“Please, Sylvia, don’t say it. They were horrible. Agonizingly boring. Who wants to look at a thousand prints of heavy machinery? What kind of man would take a thousand shots of old furnaces? One night I just woke up and realized what I was doing. Got disgusted with myself. And just started walking.”

“Underground.”

“It was chance. I just kept moving. I simply didn’t care where I ended up or just how lost I got.”

“And you ended up here,” Sylvia says, looking around the diner again.

“It wasn’t in this condition, believe me. But the moment I came upon it, I knew it was the end of the line. I just knew, it, you understand, in that way we all hope to know something. With that kind of certainty.”

“Can I ask,” she asks, “where you lived before this?”

“No place dramatic,” he says. “I moved from rooming house to rooming house. The weekly hotels. One room. Pay as you go.”

She leans back in the booth and stares at him.

“What?” he says.

“It’s just …”

“Go ahead.”

She takes a breath and says, “Why?”

He stares back at her as if trying to decide which of several possible answers to give. As if his decision will be determined by the look on her face.

“I like my solitude,” he says.

“So join a monastery.”

“Too many monks. And they’ve got that awful requirement these days.”

She raises her eyebrows and says, “Celibacy?”

He picks up his cup, self-satisfied, and says, “Faith.”

“You’re not a believer?”

He puts the cup down, comes forward on his elbows and suddenly looks exhausted.

“I believe in a lot of things,” he says. “I believe in my own mortality. I believe in sleeping when I get tired—”

He’s getting cute and she hates it. “Why did you bring me down here, Mr. Propp?”

“God,” he says, “such formality. Propp will do, Sylvia. Just Propp.”

“Why am I here?”

He looks down at the table, lifts his cup almost absent-mindedly and throws the remains of his espresso out the window. He looks up at her and says, “I heard you had something that might belong to me.”

She doesn’t want to give anything away.

“Who did you hear that from?”

“Oh, Sylvia,” he says, “you know how the Zone is. You just hear things.”

“From Rory Gaston?”

“Gaston?” he says, amused. “I’ve never met the man but I’m told he’s an idiot.”

“He holds you in pretty high regard.”

“Case closed.”

“Was it Quevedo?”

“Who the hell is that,” he says.

“You don’t know Mr. Quevedo? From Brody’s?”

“Brody’s?”

She stares at him, annoyed. “Okay, fine. You never heard of Brody’s. Good.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult, Sylvia. I swear to you. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s very … it’s extremely difficult.”

“Maybe I should go,” she says.

“If you want to leave,” he says, now seeming to hold back a genuine agitation, “I’ll take you back up to the street. It’s possible, it’s entirely possible I’ve made an enormous mistake here.”

“Then maybe that would be best.”

He pulls his bottom lip in and chews on it. The action seems to calm him down. He says, “First just tell me. You’ve got something of mine, don’t you? What did you find, Sylvia?”

They stare at each other over the length of the table. Though they’re locked on each other’s eyes, Sylvia can see the fingers of his right hand flexing out and retracting, doing this awful, nervous fidget that Propp might not even be aware of. She should probably be terrified at this moment. She should probably be preparing herself to ward off some kind of attack, to defend herself in whatever manner she might find available. But she simply doesn’t feel any threat.

Instead, she senses a queasy desperation breaking over this man’s entire body, an engulfing wave of dread, as if he has a small window of opportunity to say and do the exactly correct things, to enact a specific response from her. Only she doesn’t know what that response should be. She doesn’t have any idea how she figures in this moment, in this bizarre life. But she does seem to matter here. Terrence Propp, reaching out now, taking her wrist in his hand, running his tongue over his lips as if he was about to propose marriage to her, as if he was completely unsure of her answer, Terrence Propp came looking for her. Was waiting for her. Knew an uncomfortable amount of information about her small life.

Clearly it’s not chance that brought her to this diner booth. It feels like forces are acting upon her. It feels like since the moment she took that camera, that Aquinas, Propp’s Aquinas, into her hands, coincidence and familiarity and boring routine have been vacuumed out of her life and replaced by things a lot less benign.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be down here, ten, fifteen feet below the surface of the street, in the ruins of St. Benedict’s Diner, the only human to have made recent contact with the myth of Terrence Propp.

She looks away from his face when she realizes that what she’s feeling isn’t shock or reverence or even fear. None of those things that would normally be accorded to myth. What she’s feeling is something like pity. And she doesn’t know why.

“I bought a camera,” she says, “in an old store down on Waldstein. An old Aquinas.”

He takes a long inhale. “Where is the camera now?”

“At home,” she says. “It’s safe.”

He nods.

“Someone,” he says, “told you it might be my camera.

She nods.

“What do you think?” he asks.

And she decides, at that moment, not to mention the seven prints she developed.

“I have no idea,” she says. “On Monday I walked into a camera store and brought home a camera. The store owner told me it was a consignment sale. He mentioned your name. He says you were losing your eyesight—”

He doesn’t raise his voice but he cuts her off and says, “That’s a lie, Sylvia. Jack Derry never mentioned my name.”

“Oh,” she says, “you know Mr. Deny? I could’ve sworn he mentioned your name. Would you know where he might be? I still owe him some money.”

“Deny never mentioned my name,” he repeats.

“I guess I’ve got it wrong then.”

He’s frustrated. He shifts in his seat and says, “Have you taken a look at the camera?”

“Not really. Been so damn busy—”

His head falls back, bumps the Naugahyde. He says, “Please, Sylvia. Don’t be this way.”

She shakes her head. “Look, I don’t know what you expect from me, but you’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve. You want something from me, fine. It’s possible I can help you, I don’t know. But stop jerking me around—”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do, Sylvia—”

“Good. Great. Then just start telling me how you know so much about me. How you know where I’ve been and what’s happened to me. Why you were watching me at the dance back therè—”

“Damn good thing I was—”

“You’re a hero, Propp,” she says, now furious. “So noble of you to stop a goddamn rape. How do I know that son of a bitch Zorro wasn’t working for you? Beautiful way to get me down here—”

He pounds down on the table. Her cup falls over and coffee spills and he yells, “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe you just said that.”

He slides out of the booth and exits the diner without looking back and Sylvia slumps and realizes she’s made a mistake. She lets a second go by for both of them to calm down, then she slides out and goes after him.

But he’s nowhere to be seen. She walks a full circle around St. Benedict’s but he’s not in the cavern. And then a thought hits her and before she even looks back inside through the windows, she knows it’s true — her camera is nowhere to be seen on the tabletop. Propp has taken it.

She stands still and listens but can’t hear any footsteps, any noise at all beyond the soft hum of the generator back inside. And the impact of where she is and the fact that she has no idea how to leave suddenly hits her and she wants to run but keeps herself from moving, stands still and calls for Propp.

But there’s no answer.

21

Sylvia retraces her steps. She moves through the opening to the diner’s cavern, squeezes down the narrow path. She starts down the gravel embankment, slips and slides to the rail bed on her behind. She’s back in the dark except for the red lantern glow that barely makes it around the bend of the tunnel. She knows the way back to the Zone is left, in the direction of the red light. She knows if she just follows the tracks, eventually she’ll come to the hatchway that leads up into the Canal cellars.

She also knows that if Propp was telling the truth, turning right and following the tracks that lead away from the Zone will bring her up into the remains of Gompers Station.

She stands in the middle of the rail bed for a second, trying to think. They took so many turns on the way down here that it’s doubtful she could remember them all. On the other hand, Gompers Station, with its packs of wild dogs and junkies and drunks and gangboys is not someplace you want to stroll through at night, especially when you’re wearing a shredded nightgown.

But she can find her way home from Gompers, so she turns right and starts walking. Within five minutes the track bed starts to incline upward and she climbs toward an arc of moonlight and emerges in a huge pavilion. The roof of the station is almost nonexistent and enough light is getting through to give her some bearings. She’s only been inside Gompers once and that was over a dozen years ago. She’d stayed too late at the Girls’ Club one Saturday and, afraid of missing the bus home, she took a shortcut through the station. It had already been closed down for a good ten years and natural erosion combined with perpetual vandalism had made some awful headway by then. She ran through this blighted, bombed-out temple as fast as she could, but the image of the place stayed with her for weeks.

And now, looking around in this weak moonlight, in these dim, soft beams of light that reveal all the dust and grit just hovering in the air, it’s like her childhood memory has come to life. But it’s more vivid and decayed than anything her imagination could have estimated and provided for. All she can think of is grainy black-and-white landscape shots she’s studied, the aftermath of world war bombings, pictures of places like Berlin and Dresden, the ground just a jumble of various-sized craters and mounds of earth and brick and stone, buildings half-slouched into each other, their walls knocked down, windowless, chimneys toppled into useless heaps, and everywhere these in-discriminate tangles of something like wire and iron and scraps of cloth and metallic shards, just clumps of recombinant junk whose origin is unknown, plunked down like a shower of meteorites from space and now sitting mute and useless like clusters of industrial weed.

This is the remains of Gompers Station. This is what’s left of one of the most stunning architectural wonders in New England. It’s now a monument to entropy, an embarrassing hulk whose only purpose is to admonish the ego of a community. It’s an arc of cracked and ash-caked vaulting walls, grand stairways that degenerate halfway to their destination into simple mountains of hacked-up bedrock, Greco-Roman columns that lie sideways in cinder beds and are covered with neon gang graffiti and now serve only as marble bull’s-eyes for the spray of dogs and forgotten reprobates.

Sylvia thinks there’s something wrong with her for looking on all this decay and thinking only I wish I had my camera.

Maybe that’s why she came this way. Because she thought Propp would come this way. And Propp has her camera.

She looks around the perimeter of the pavilion for movement, for some sign of another presence. She should be looking for exits, ways out to the street and out of downtown. But what her eyes settle on, across the hall, for some reason bathed in a brighter, more direct shower of moonlight, is what at first looks like a huge, white-ish boulder. As she moves across the hall toward it she realizes it’s the bottom half of a massive support column that’s been knocked down and broken at its base. The odd thing is that the main shaft of the column, the bulk of its mass, is gone, is nowhere in the vicinity. Someone must have hauled it away and she can’t begin to imagine how much the thing could have weighed. What’s left here is the base, about three feet tall and maybe three feet in diameter, this ribbed pillar that looks like solid marble, a creamy white-gone-yellow but shot through with dark veins that in a better light she’d take to be scarlet.

And as she comes to stop in front of it and puts her hand out to touch it, to take in the coldness that she imagines it retains, Sylvia is instantly struck by the fact, by her absolute surety of the fact, that she’s seen this broken column before, that this is the specific pedestal that the Madonna and her infant are posed on in the seven photographs she developed.

This is where Terrence Propp shot the series. This is the precise point where the shadowy mother with the achingly tender shoulder and her half-shrouded infant with its hungry mouth sat and were exposed, at least seven times, to the open eye of the camera.

She touches the pedestal, feels grit under her fingers.

A light flashes, strobes at her from above and she flinches.

Then comes Propp’s voice.

“Sit down, Sylvia.”

She looks up in the direction of the flash and is hit with another burst of light. He’s somewhere up in the balcony that rims the pavilion, up in the clubby loft where old men once drank brandy and smoked cigars while waiting for a train out of the city.

“That’s my camera,” she yells up.

Another flash.

“Yes,” he says, no yell, but his voice carries, “I seem to have misplaced mine.”

He’s moving around up there, probably on his knees, crawling under the cover of the balcony wall.

“I’m leaving,” she says, her voice slightly lower.

There’s a pause and then, “No, you’re not.”

She waits for a flash but nothing comes.

“I think,” he says, “you want to know who she is. I think you want that too badly to leave.”

They both know he’s right. She wants to know who the woman in the seven photos is. She wants to know what the woman was to Propp. She wants to know what the infant’s name was, what became of them. She needs to know why the pictures came into her life.

“Why don’t you sit down, Sylvia,” he says and she pivots to the left to follow the voice. “I want to take your picture. Do you know what some people would give to have me take their picture?”

She doesn’t like the arrogance and says, “I’m not a fan, Propp, Remember?”

He ignores her. “There are stunning similarities,” he says, almost a whisper that she has to strain to hear, “between you and she.”

This stops her and she hates the fact that he knows how to manipulate her with this kind of ease.

She says, “Similarities,” knowing, as the words come out, that he’ll let her hang. And he does.

So Sylvia does the only thing she can do. She climbs up on top of the pedestal and tries to arrange herself into the pose of the Madonna. She tilts her face upward and gives her profile to the direction of the last camera flash. She leans her body forward until half of it is cloaked in shadow. She doesn’t know what to do with her arms. There’s no baby to hold onto. So she puts her hands awkwardly on her knees and thinks, though she’s not sure, that she hears a whispered thank you from up above.

There’s a long wait and she begins to imagine that he’s gone, that simply getting her to assume the pose was enough to satisfy him. But then a single flash shoots down on her and she hears him bumping into something, the noise of clutter being scattered, a bottle rolling down an incline. She wants to squint and look up but she makes herelf stay still, wait for direction, instruction. Maybe some answers, some kind of story.

“Could I see the shoulder, Sylvia.”

She’s not sure what to do, but before she can think too much, she simply brings her hands up from the knees to the neck, unties the small silk bow and unfastens pearl buttons until she’s given herself enough room to slide the night-gown off her left shoulder — it was the Madonna’s left shoulder, wasn’t it — and bring her skin out into the cool air of the pavilion. And it feels odd but wonderful and immediately a series of flashes erupt, four or five or six in a row, and she tries to remember how many shots could be left in the camera.

“You’re perfect, Sylvia,” and flash, “You’re beautiful. You’re absolutely perfect.”

He’s moving up in the balcony. He’s jogging from spot to spot like a quirky, self-possessed dancer, dodging, with a semi-gracefulness, from one instinctual point to another, planting down, landing steady for a second, hitting the shutter, exposing a shot, taking in her body in this ragged gown, her face, her naked shoulder lit by the dusty light of the moon piercing through the gaps of the station’s roof. And he’s doing the standard, actually chichéd photographer’s patter, spieling away at her, a riff on David Hemmings in every photographer’s favorite movie. But Propp is wonderful at it and, incredibly, somehow sincere, somehow putting across to her the feeling that each moment that she sees the explosion of light that allows her image to be cemented onto film, that each of those microseconds, is inherently important to his life, to his reasons for being. His movements up in the balcony are beyond some idea of love of craft. They’re beyond any notions Sylvia’s ever had about art. It feels more like Propp is making a connection, with her and with himself, that few people ever get to live through.

“The shoulder, Sylvia, more shoulder,” and she unhitches two more buttons.

Another flash and another and suddenly Sylvia doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want to move off this pedestal. She doesn’t even want to talk, to ask any questions. She wants to pray he has pockets stuffed with film and enough energy to move until dawn.

Then there’s a noise, another din of junk clattering under a tripping foot. But it doesn’t come from the direction of the flash and suddenly it’s as if she senses Propp’s mood being shattered in the instant that the noise explodes into the air, a palpable flinch. And as the clatter echoes into silence, there’s this surge of ignited tension that blows down across the space between them and immediately infects her.

“All right, you little bastards,” she hears Propp say, his voice low and genuinely threatening, “I see you.”

There’s a rumble of incoherent whispering from halfway around the balcony area.

“You want to watch me work, fine. But any noise and I’ll shoot into the whole goddamn pack of you.”

She pulls the nightgown back up onto her shoulder and starts to climb down from the pedestal and Propp screams, “No, Sylvia, don’t.”

She looks up and tries to see who he was talking to but all she can make out is a cluster of shadows that wave in and out of visibility.

“They’re harmless,” Propp says, “I swear to you.”

She wants to run.

“They’re children, Sylvia,” his voice lowering but still fighting a panic. “They’re just lost children. They live here, Sylvia. We’re in their home.”

She turns her head to try and see Propp and he repeats, “They’re harmless. They only want to watch.”

And he lights them up with the beam from his penlight. Sylvia sees a dozen or more small faces, each spotlighted for a second or two, just long enough for her to realize that Propp has told the truth, that they’re exactly what he says, they’re children, ranging from maybe six years old up through the early teens. In the instant that each face is highlighted for her benefit, Sylvia can take in the horrible facts amended to their raw ages, the sunken eyes that result from too much fear and solitude, the grime-plastered hair that juts from or pastes down to the miniature skulls, the castoff, filthy, ill-fitting clothing, and more than anything else, the generic look of defeat from faces that should still be too young to know there’s a battle.

Has Propp brought her here on purpose for this singular reason? Has every other element of this nightmare — from taking the goddamn Aquinas to posing here as the stand-in Madonna — been subordinate to this image, this group portrait of inexcusable tragedy?

The children look down on her as if they were some nest of insects that share a single eye. None of them speak. None of them even move. Looking back up at them is like studying a haunting, inherently demented canvas, something slaved over by a tortured medieval monk with unlimited talent, a man whose life’s work was to depict the definition of abandonment. They’re a half-starved peasant choir, made mute by an endless destitution, angelic by way of a brutalized life rather than an unspoiled innocence.

And Sylvia thinks, in that moment, of her own childhood. And of her mother, of her mother’s face, of her smell, her entire presence. Of all the hours spent safely, securely, protected in the warmth of their small apartment.

And she lets the tears come to her eyes, come past her eyes, pour onto and then down the cheeks. But she doesn’t let any accompanying sound out and because of this she can hear Propp again. This time he’s speaking to the children, whispering, all threat and authority gone from his voice, replaced only by this fragile certainty.

He says to them, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

She doesn’t want to look up, but her head moves and the landscape is blurred and she wipes at her eyes and blinks until they clear. The children are moving off, disappearing through some small crevice in the balcony’s inner wall, until only one is left, maybe the smallest, a child of indeterminate sex, black hair matted, wearing something dark and muted. Propp keeps the light on the child and he or she lingers at the balcony’s edge, just staring at Sylvia, as if waiting for her to say something.

And when she doesn’t, the child turns and runs, follows the trail of the others like a small, nocturnal animal, something with skittish moves and small claws.

Sylvia brings her hands up to her head and when the camera flashes, she knows that she hates Propp even if she doesn’t know why.

22

Things are humming in the Henrik Galeen Memorial Studio at the top of the Skin Palace. The whole Schick company is present, filming what Hugo calls “vital stock,” footage of unscripted orgy scenes, graphic serial sex between multiple partners that the director keeps on hand at all times and edits into a film to break up what he calls “the necessary evil of the talking heads.”

Jakob Kinsky is both exhilarated and exhausted. Though he’d never admit it to any of his coworkers, he thinks he’s expending more energy than the intertwined throng rolling around on a mattress the size of a swimming pool for the benefit of two very old Panaflex cameras. Jakob hasn’t stopped moving since he arrived for his first day of work. Hugo keeps the new assistant director shooting around the studio like a pinball, positioning cameras and props, double-checking the sound, taking and retaking light readings, spraying the actors down with an atomizer full of oil and water, rummaging for a fresh can of Rigor mentholated balm, and bringing coffee, doughnuts, and carton after carton of amyl nitrite poppers.

Life is good.

He never thought he’d feel this kind of happiness again. He assumed he’d spend the balance of his life shambling after Papa and Felix and Weltsch, trying futilely to bury his grief over Felice in endless viewings of Black Angel and Touch of Evil and Edge of Doom. He wishes Felice could see him now — eighteen years old, maybe the youngest A.D. working a hot set. So it’s three thousand miles from Hollywood, but it’s four thousand miles from Maisel. He’s getting closer all the time. And if Felice couldn’t have appreciated the genre he’s found himself apprenticing within, she’d at least have to see how much more satisfied he is. How just the proximity to the cameras, the lights, the boom mikes give him a reason to want more.

What would Felice make of the actresses spread out now before him, not a trace of self-consciousness as they drop robes to the floor first thing in the morning and begin to move through a series of carnal encounters that exceed the average imagination? There’s Coco Bing, with her odd, unplaceable accent and Garbo-like aura, asking Jakob in an emotionless voice to wipe her down with a bath towel. There’s Miriam Persons, a peerless African queen who accepted the jelly Danish Jakob brought like it was the head of a weak rival. There’s China Wiene, always joking, distracted, vulnerable, huddling in her terry robe as if the overheated loft was an icehouse.

And then there’s Leni Pauline, who stands apart from everyone, as if she knew the central secret of every life in the Skin Palace, as if she’d found a way in childhood to boost her intelligence to the point where all matter of human concern was little more than a semi-funny joke. The only time Jakob feels nervous is around Leni Pauline. There’s something about the woman that makes him want to cultivate her approval. When she asked him to help her with a series of stretching exercises, he thought he’d lose the ability to speak for the rest of the day.

The men are different. Just as each actress seems a specific individual, the men seem interchangeable. They walk around as if the set were a locker room in a high school they’ll never graduate from. They never seem to put on their robes, even when shooting ends. Their demeanor gives the impression that there’s only one thing in this life that a man should either be proud or ashamed of and it’s dangling forever between their legs. Jakob wants to laugh every time he thinks of their names — Herbie Warm, Demetrie Green, Pedro Gallagher, and, the best and funniest man on the set, with his chronically sashaying hips and thrusting chin, a kind of pornographic idiot savant, telling everyone who’ll listen that he has an upcoming appointment with the Guinness Book of Records people, Udolpho Phist. Udolpho insists that Hugo bill him on the film posters as Phist, The Gargantuan Freak of Human Nature.

In a single morning, Jakob has learned film terms that he never knew existed. Things like the money shot, the two-for-six splice, the Singapore pan, and the Krakatoa dissolve. He’s studied camera angles that were never covered in any of the standard texts. He’s followed script structures that go against all the dynamics he’s worked so hard to make reflexive. And he’s seen actors and actresses do things that not one of the performers that ever appeared on the ripped and patched screen of the old Kierling Theatre in Loew Square back home ever even hinted at.

By midday, the couplings in front of him became like some sort of dizzying geometry problem in the most baffling math class on earth. Angles dissolved into angles that rounded into shimmying circumferences that mutated into flesh-tones fractals of explosive significance. Sounds reduced themselves to an experiment in moaning dissonance and then pivoted and somehow became perfect choruses of melodious, if otherworldly, noises. The loft filled up with a pervasive, alien smell, the stuff of car crashes, old farms, stale candy, talcum, blood, and a hundred other fragrances too strange to name.

In the end, the only way to make any sense of the spectacle was the oldest way Jakob knew — through the lens of a camera. Hugo not only let him man the second Panaflex, but encouraged it, stood over his shoulder as Jakob peered one-eyed into the tube of black metal and glass. Schick whispered, light and motion, my boy, that’s all it is.

And in that moment, staring at this scene, this tangle of human limbs flailing like the branches of a willow tree caught in an unexpected gale, this chambered nautilus of supple coral spiraling itself to death, Jakob thought this man may well be a genius, and then, my father is about to destroy him.

Jakob sits in the front row of the theatre in the aisle seat. Something is wrong with the sound system and Hugo’s had to close the box office for the night. The cast and the crew are all on supper break so Jakob has an hour to himself. He opens his work notebook, squints in the dim light and flips pages until he finds the strip of photos pasted into the rear cover. Four tiny black-and-white pictures. Two-inch-square head shots from the arcade machine in the lobby of the Kierling. Jakob and Felice, faces pressed together. A happiness that stretched beyond the province of imagination.

“Not hungry tonight, son?”

He slaps the notebook closed and looks up at Hugo, not knowing what to say, feeling like he’s been caught doing something embarrassing if not necessarily wrong.

Hugo slides into the first seat on the opposite aisle and says, “Neither am I,” then he tilts his head back and rubs his eyes for a time, opens them and stares up at the enormous white of the screen.

“This is church for people like us, Jakob,” Hugo says. “I find the blank screen relaxing. It eases the mind. It slows down the images.”

Jakob’s not sure if he should answer. He’s a little uneasy, worried that Hugo will try to pump him about Papa’s motives and methods.

Hugo takes a handkerchief from his coat pocket and pats at the top of his head.

“It’s shocking,” he says.

“Sir?”

“How well you know your way around. You’d think you grew up on a soundstage.”

Jakob shakes his head. “If only,” he says.

“Clearly,” Hugo says, “you have the passion. And the talent. This is to be your life’s calling, I take it?”

“I just love movies, Mr. Schick,” Jakob says. “I always have. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”

“It frightens me a bit,” Hugo says. “How common that is, I mean. Cinema has taken over in a way I never quite thought it would.”

Jakob stays quiet but nods.

“Did your mother love the movies?”

“I never knew my mother, Mr. Schick. She died soon after I was born.”

“I’m very sorry, Jakob. Your father then. Did he instill the passion for film?”

Jakob’s laugh fills the room.

“My father never went to the movies. He was busy. Working. It was very difficult in Maisel.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I had a,” the boy pauses for just a second, “governess. A kind of nanny. She took me every day and night. The Kierling Theatre. A beautiful building, even in its decay. Most of the movies were in English. Subtitled. We went until I began to learn the language. Then we kept going.”

“Is she still back in Maisel? The nanny?”

“She’s dead also,” Jakob says. “Maisel has a very high mortality rate.”

“Apparently,” Hugo says, repocketing his handkerchief.

There’s a few minutes of silence until Jakob gathers the nerve to say, “Ms. Persons says you worked with Fritz Lang?”

“Ms. Persons,” Hugo repeats. “How precious of you.”

“Is it true?”

“What do you think?”

“Coco says you were second-unit camera for von Stroheim.”

Schick likes this one.

“My children,” he says, “love to tease.”

“Miss Wiene says you ghostwrote part of Citizen Kane.”

“This one I had not heard.”

“And Leni—”

“Yes?” Hugo says, grimacing a bit. “What does Ms. Pauline say?”

“She says you did surveillance work for some government man named Mr. Cohn. She says you secretly filmed some meetings.”

“One day, Jakob, I will kill that woman.”

Jakob wants to bite his own tongue out of his mouth. Hugo senses the explosion of regret and says, “Relax, son, Schick is only joking.”

Jakob mutters, “She’s amazing.”

Hugo nods and says, “Unfortunately, she is,” then he gets up out of his seat and walks to the right, climbs the stairs to the stage and comes to the lip in front of Jakob. “But never forget, son, she is just another actor. My good friend Hitch called them all cattle. But I think they are more like a common venereal disease. You can always pick one up without very much effort. So sad really, that this is who will carry on my gospel once I’ve exited the stage.”

He stares down at the boy, expressionless, hands clasped behind his back, his safari jacket straining over his belly. He leans his head forward a bit, smiles slightly, and says, “So, when are you going to show it to me?”

“Show it to you, sir?”

Hugo nods.

Jakob tried to think what he could mean and comes up empty.

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“The script,” Hugo explodes, his voice booming through the cavern of the theatre and echoing back.

“The script,” Jakob repeats.

Hugo sighs, arches his back, says to the ceiling, “You know, at some point, coyness becomes an insult.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Schick, I don’t—”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t have a screenplay, son? Is this what you would ask an old man to believe? Please, Jakob, think about how long I’ve been around this industry. I’ve seen the prodigies come and go and end up schlepping industrial training strips in Newark. Please, don’t presume to tell Hugo that you haven’t written a script. That you don’t think it is the greatest thing since Chinatown. That you never for a moment considered using your father’s influence to foist it on me.”

“My father,” Jakob yells, coming to his feet, “has nothing to do with my screenplay.”

A huge, smug smile fades into Hugo’s face. He folds his arms across his chest and says, “So there is a screenplay.”

Jakob wants to leave, wants to be back upstairs trying to find a tape measure for Udolpho Phist.

“Would you at least tell me the title?” Hugo asks, now sounding apologetic.

Jakob looks down at his feet, sniffles, mumbles, “It’s called Little Girl Lost.”

“I like it,” Hugo says.

“That’s just a working title for now.”

“Of course,” Hugo says.

They both let a minute pass.

“I never intended to give it to you,” Jakob says, knowing how false this will sound before the words leave his lips.

“I would be delighted,” Hugo says, “no, honored. I would be honored to read this Little Girl Lost.”

“It’s not really done yet.”

“They’re never done, Jakob.”

Jakob shakes his head.

“I swear to you, Mr. Schick, my father doesn’t even know I’ve written a film.”

“Jakob, relax, please, Hermann is my banker now. If he wants us to make your movie, I’m sure we can find—”

“My father,” Jakob yells, “doesn’t know I wrote a movie.”

Hugo is taken back. He sits down on the stage between the break in the gold railing and lets his legs hang toward the floor.

“All right, calm now,” he says. “There’s no need to be angry.”

“I do not need nor want,” Jakob says, “my father’s help to make my film.”

“This is good, Jakob. This is wonderful. You surprise and delight me. Upon this rock, eh son? You have the talent and you have the passion. And now I know you have the anger. No one realizes how much anger you need to make a picture. You treasure that anger, my boy. You nourish it until you can channel it into the camera.”

Jakob doesn’t want to hear any more. He steps into the aisle and Hugo says, “Sit down, boy.”

Jakob freezes.

“You still work for me. Now sit down.”

There’s no threat to Hugo’s voice, but a palpable seriousness. Jakob slides back into the seat.

“Now, you tell Schick, who is it you emulate?”

Jakob looks up, confused.

“Who is it you want to be? Tell me. Is it Lang? You mentioned Lang, yes? Kurosawa? Bergman? Reifenstahl, perhaps?”

“I don’t—”

“No, of course not. You love the Americans. It’s obvious. It’s how you learned the language, as you say. Yes, it’s got to be Joseph H. Lewis? Or F. E. Feist? Maybe Phil Karlson? Tony Mann? Sam Fuller? Fuller was a local boy, you know.”

“Stop,” Jakob says. “I don’t want to be any of them.”

“Who am I missing?” Hugo asks.

“I want to be Kinsky. I want to be an original.”

Hugo takes a long and deep breath and manages to suppress the laughter.

“An original, is that right?” he says. “And what does this original want to do?”

Jakob knows he’s shown too much of his hand. He can’t believe he’s done this. It’s always been so easy to keep the film-talk inside. He must have inhaled some of the amyl nitrite floating through the studio. He must still be punchdrunk with the sight of Leni Pauline taking an endless shower with Coco Bing and Herbie Warm.

“I want,” Jakob says slowly, “to give them the primal image.”

“Ah,” says Hugo, closing his eyes and nodding, “of course, the primal image.”

Jakob isn’t sure if he’s being mocked.

“And how will you go about that?” Hugo asks.

“If I knew, do you think I’d tell you?”

“Very good, son, I’d certainly steal the technique immediately.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Hush, Jakob. Keep still and listen to an old man for just a moment. Indulge me, yes?”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

Hugo brings a finger up to his lips, lets out a long shush that in the hollow of the theatre takes on a life of its own. Then, after a testing moment of quiet, Hugo says, “It is not that your primal image doesn’t exist. It very much does. I suspect it has since the dawn of consciousness. But hear me now, please Jakob, because I can save you decades of futile and agonizing work. I can save you public failure and a very personal, lingering humiliation. The primal image you want to badly to capture, it is different for every set of eyes. Image is ambiguous. We invest it with all its power. We determine whether it will bring us the greater truth or the more shielding lie.”

Jakob shifts in his seat.

“Film,” Hugo says, “is a collaborative art. No matter what anyone will tell you, son, film is always a collaboration. Beyond this, and I’m sorry, Jakob, I know this is the last thing you wish to hear today, but film is a business. It is a product. It is a commodity to be marketed wisely and often.”

Jakob lets loose a condescending sniffle that Hugo ignores.

“The primal image is unique to every eyeball on this planet, Jakob. You can’t get around that. It’s like knowing about our own death. Facing that fact is part of becoming an adult. And for the filmmaker, facing that fact and continuing to work, that is about becoming an artist.”

They stare at each other.

“Let us make this a mutual confession, my boy. Let me tell you what I strive for, what I would hope to realize before the end of this lifetime of work. I tell you this knowing that it will never happen, that my time grows more limited each day, each film.”

Jakob is suddenly intrigued.

“Someday it may be possible. We see the first steps already — the morphing, the computer modeling. Someday, the cinema as we know it will be as obsolete as the printed page. A historical curiosity. Eventually, I’m sure there’ll be no need for the human actor, not as we know them today. We’ll store hundreds of millions of sequences of their movements and mold them together as is necessary. But this hocus-pocus, this nonsense really, isn’t what possesses me.”

A deep breath, making the boy wait.

“I want the day, the method, the impossible ability to throw each individual’s unique movie, their own primal image, as you say, up on the screen. I want the very synapses of the human brain to be accessible as my own editing board, the ultimate Moviola. I want a way of establishing a pool of sorts, a floating and infinite library of every imagistic instant ever exposed to light. More images, faster images, all the time. I want a way of tapping into each memory that each nanosecond of celluloid they’ve ever opened their eyes to. And finally, I want a way of editing any and all of this goulash together — life image, dream image, movie image — and all the cutting choices are mine. What stays and what goes and in what sequence it unravels.

“From the start, reality has had its way with us. Reality has constantly raped us. Attacked us daily and molested us mercilessly. But soon, Jakob, we will rape reality. We will fuck with reality in ways too monstrous to imagine. Won’t it be wonderful?”

Another aborted laugh.

“I would call it a Hyperflix of the mind. Hyperflix. Incorporated.”

Jakob stands up and walks to the stage, his eyes almost parallel with Schick’s dangling knees.

“And they have the nerve,” Hugo says, “to say I have a psychotic ego. It goes so far beyond ego. You do see that, don’t you, Jakob?”

The boy smiles and nods in the darkness.

“Clear as can be, Mr. Schick.”

23

Outside, they meet on the remains of the stairway that leads to the station’s main entrance. Propp is walking, holding the camera in front of him and twisting the rewind crank, spooling all the exposed film back into its metal canister. Over his shoulder, he’s carrying a canvas satchel, an old, scarred-up duffel embroidered with a line drawing of what looks like some deformed version of Diane Arbus’s face.

Sylvia is sitting hunched over, hugging her knees and looking out at the Bishop Square rotary where a body is lying facedown. She’s watching for signs of movement, any kind of drunken twitch or shake. But so far there haven’t been any.

Propp comes to a stop next to her and when she shifts her focus to his face, he pops open the back of the camera, tosses the roll of film into his palm and pockets it, then places the camera on the ground between them.

“The film was mine,” Sylvia says.

Propp lowers himself down next to her, mimics her posture, cracks his knuckles elaborately and says, “But the image is mine.”

For a number of reasons, she’s galled by the remark.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“It’s an old argument,” Propp says. “You want to waste the rest of the night replaying it?”

“The night,” she says, “is over.”

“Is it?” he says, overtly patronizing. “And why is that, Sylvia?”

“Because I’m tired and I’m cold and I want to go home.”

“Is Perry waiting?”

“You don’t know Perry,” Sylvia yells and now the body across the street in the rotary stirs, looks up for a second, then lowers its head again.

“Why did the children bother you so much, Sylvia.”

She just looks at him.

“The kids. The kids who live inside. The sight of them really got to you.”

She gives him the sign he wants and says, “One of those elemental images, I guess,” borrowing the phrase from Mr. Quevedo.

He shakes his head, tremendously pleased, as if she’s made his night with her answer.

“That’s exactly correct,” he says. “What shall we name it?”

She squints at him.

“The image,” he says. “The archetype, back in there,” gesturing to the station, “the image that just invaded us.”

“I thought you said we invaded them.”

He ignores the comment and says, “Can we call it The Persecution of the Innocent? Or is that too melodramatic? Help me out now, Sylvia.”

She doesn’t want to indulge him. She wants to walk away. Instead she says, “It’s not exactly persecution, is it?”

He shifts on his ass, clasps his hands and brings them up to his mouth and says, “No, I see what you’re saying. It’s more like they were forgotten—”

“Abandoned.”

“Exactly,” he says. “Just abandoned.”

Sylvia stands up and Propp says, “Don’t abandon me, Sylvia.”

He wants to get her furious and she fights it. She just turns and says, “Why would you want to triviliaze those children in there?”

“Trivialize?”

She holds his stare.

“I think,” Propp says, “it’s almost impossible to trivialize anything anymore. That implies differentiating, giving greater weight and concern to one thing over another. I think we’re losing the ability to do that. I think everything’s evening out. We’ve been assaulted for so long now. Imagery just hitting us over and over. More images. Faster images. All the time. It’s a kind of media overfarming. It’s the most addictive narcotic in the world. We’re choking on images. Our vision has grown toxic with an overabundance. The input is erasing our capacity for judgment. And for empathy.

“It’s funny, Sylvia,” he takes a breath. “But until ten minutes ago, you didn’t know those kids back inside really existed, did you? And for eighteen months I’ve been the one leaving them food and clothing,” now he stands up, his voice rising with the movement, “so before you start to lecture to me, maybe you better run home to the little love nest you and wunderkind Perry—”

“What,” she yells, her voice echoing through Bishop Square, “do you want from me?”

Propp folds his arms across his chest, pleased, as if he has willed all their words to this specific point.

“I want,” he says, “for you to spend the rest of the night with me. I want you to reload your camera. I want you to see the world underneath Quinsigamond. The other place. At least once.”

There’s a pocket of silence that builds as they stare at each other. He unzips and slides out of his coat, hands it to her and says, “It’s getting cold. Put that on.”

And she does. She puts her hand in the pockets and touches canisters of film.

They walk down Voegelin Avenue, straight into the heart of Bangkok Park. She may be a tourist in the Canal Zone, but in Bangkok she’s an absolute alien. Except for that one mistaken wrong turn that brought her down here fifteen years ago, she’s never ventured into the Park. It’s a part of the city that’s turned into more of a dark myth than a genuine location, a tenderloin only mapped by fearful rumor and bad-tasting jokes.

But Propp seems to know where he’s going and she follows, her camera tucked inside the jacket, making her look pregnant with some harshly angled fetus.

They walk on the Little Asia side of the street, the frontier where the Latinotown border ends. The storefronts are all tiny noodle joints, mini counter-service galleys where maybe ten people can squeeze shoulder to shoulder and eat a soy-based goulash under the blue glow of a wallmounted television. She doesn’t hear a word of English. Propp links his arm through hers like an attentive father.

“Aren’t you afraid you might be recognized?” she says.

He laughs, picks up the pace. “Down here? You kidding me?”

“There could be some Proppists, you know, touring the Park—”

He shakes his head. “They don’t have a clue what I look like. Even the ones who think they do are wrong. Ridiculous bastards.”

“You’re so harsh,” she says. “These people revere you. They love your work.”

They come to a stop at a small booth-like store just crammed from floor to ceiling with electronic gadgets, mostly camera and video equipment. Propp pulls them inside and the guy behind the register nods to him. The clerk is Asian, old and bony and with a crew-cut cover of white stubble on his skull and a large-handled pistol protruding from the elastic waistband of his loose, black, silk pants. He’s wearing a red T-shirt with Peter Lorre’s face silkscreened on the front and Sylvia wants to ask if there’s some connection with the film festival that’s on TV all week. But she keeps quiet and Propp takes a twenty from his pants pocket and slides it onto the counter.

“I think we’ve got enough film,” Sylvia says, but they both ignore her.

“Where’s Johnny Yew?” Propp says to the clerk who just stares at him and shrugs, rings in the purchase on an old tin register, then tears what look like two green movie tickets from a roll mounted beneath the counter, rips them in half, hands the stubs to Propp, and presses a buzzer mounted under the lip of the register.

Propp bows his head to the man and instead of exiting, leads Sylvia to the red-metal fire exit door at the rear of the shop. He pushes the door open and they walk through to an empty foyer, a cubbyhole of four blank brick walls and another metal fire door, this one painted green. There’s a small closed-circuit security camera hanging from the ceiling and it pivots in their direction as Sylvia watches it. Propp holds the ticket stubs up near the camera’s lens and another buzzer sounds and they push through the green door.

And out onto a narrow wooden catwalk that looks down on what appears to be a massive warehouse, a huge brick windowless loft area, as big as an airplane hangar. The ceiling must be twenty, maybe thirty feet high and lined with rows of hanging fluorescent tube lighting that gives the whole room this pale white, blanched-out cast like the interior of an alien rocket ship in a bad movie. The floor of the place is divided into a dozen aisles by rows of plywood booths and long picnic-style tables. Behind the tables and booths are people in canvas aprons and kelly green baseball caps. They seem to be salespeople and they’re all in varying speeds of motion, using exaggerated hand gestures, explaining and cajoling, bartering and hawking whatever their individual product might be.

The catwalk runs all the way around the interior of the building and at each corner there’s a man sipping something from a white Styrofoam cup, looking over the rim of the cup down to the sales floor. They all wear nylon wind-breakers and Sylvia would bet that each has a pistol underneath like the Oriental clerk out front.

“Welcome to the flea market,” Propp whispers in her ear.

She follows him down a stairway to the floor. There’s no way to tell without windows, but since they entered the electronics shop at street level, half the flea market must sit underground.

Propp takes her arm again and they start to stroll down the first aisle they come to.

“I’ll tell you what I feel for the Proppists,” he says, continuing the discussion from the street as if there’d been no interruption and saying the last word with a touch of disgust.

“What’s that?” Sylvia asks, turning to avoid bumping into a woman carrying cardboard cartons upon her shoulder.

“Pity,” Propp says.

“Pity,” she repeats.

He shakes his head yes and says, “Would you like some cotton candy?”

She shakes her head no.

“It’s a shame,” he says, “that they don’t have lives of their own. Because why else would they insist on trying to turn me into something I’m not. Jesus. They run around to their ridiculous little pajama parties. All their semantic bullshit about separating the erotic from the pornographic. That pathetic willed innocence.”

She stops him from walking on.

“First of all, by insisting on being the invisible man, you had a big hand in turning yourself into their legend—”

“I resent that,” he interrupts.

“And second, I met one of the people, and I may not agree with his mythmaking, but it goes way beyond you, Propp. It’s about something they think you represent.”

“Which is?” with this self-indulgent smirk on his lips.

“The erotic impulse.”

“The erotic impulse,” he repeats, about to break into an insulting laugh.

“That’s right,” she says, for some reason wanting to defend Rory Gaston and company.

“That’s catchy,” Propp says.

He turns and releases her arm, reaches down to the table they’re standing next to, picks up a figurine and tosses it into the air in front of her face. He moves off down the aisle and she bucks and catches this little sculpted figure, this little knicknack, and looks at it. It’s made of some kind of black enamel cut into a human shape. It’s male and completely, stunningly, anatomically correct. It’s some kind of fertility totem, like a peasant deity with genitalia whose size is almost equal to the mass of the entire body.

“That’ll be ten ninety-nine,” a woman’s voice sounds from behind her. “Or I can let you have three of them for twenty-five.”

Sylvia turns to her, a big bruiser of a woman, arms like a linebacker, her green baseball cap pulled way down to the line of her eyes, the smoldering stub of a thin cigar dangling at the edge of her mouth, the head of ash bouncing as she speaks. She waves her hand out and Sylvia looks to see an entire table of these figures, a crowded buffet of fertility Hummels stacked side by side like an army of erect soldiers ready to impregnate some huge village.

“If you can pay in yen,” the woman says, leaning across her wares and lowering her voice a bit, “I can work you an even sweeter deal.”

Sylvia puts down the statue and walks away without saying a thing. She studies each booth and table she passes and begins to realize that this entire warehouse, this entire flea market, is exclusively selling items of the sexual variety. This is a clearinghouse for libido tools, a discount department store for all things carnal or erotic. She sees marital aids and lingerie, lotions and balms and ointments, something called the booth of dancing eggs, something called The French Tickler Showroom, a Peg-Board displaying thirty different brands of handcuffs. There are blow-up plastic dolls whose polyurethane skin can be selected in a variety of pigment hues. There are demonstrations for the Waxman Vibrating Bed, available in twin to king sizes. There are brochures for institutes of sensual massage and Kama Sutra academies.

And there are the books. Everything from the pulpiest of magazines that look, even from a distance, as if they’d dissolve in your hands after the first reading, to thick and encyclopedic texts with color Mylar illustrations and cross-referenced indexes. Paperback novels. Coffee table art volumes. Erotic comic books. Works customized for the motorcycle enthusiast and the bank clerk and the S&M housewife. Tomes for the gay and the straight and the confused. Bibles of the sensuous for the timid and for the crazed. And hundreds of self-help manuals. A banner hanging above one book booth seems to say it all: There isn’t a variation we don’t carry.

Then, of course, there are the films. Stockpiles of the oldest smokers, grainy black-and-white reels shown at carnivals and men’s clubs decades ago. There are bootleg 16 mm spools that purport to hold lewd images of hundreds of your favorite celebrities. There are homemade efforts, husband and wife teams from the heartland whose crude technical skills are promised to be overshadowed by the genuine depths of their passion. There are expensive laser disc spectacles worthy of some sex-obsessed MGM, with big casts, special effects, lush sound tracks, and state-of-the-art decadence. But most of all there are videocassettes, an endless supply whose diversity seems to surpass even that of the book section. The video hawkers all have TV monitors set up on their counters and tabletops, showing a taste of some of their offerings.

Sylvia stops for a second at a half dozen screens and watches a multiplicity of couplings and gropings and longings, combinations and recombinations that go so far beyond her paltry imagination that she’s forced to wonder if she’s defective in some way, if the world is really just some seething, teeming throng of frenetic and ever sweating partners, engorging and releasing twenty-four hours a day, never tiring, perpetually hungry. And if she’s gone unaware of this dripping world since day one.

She looks up from a flickering screen filled with naked sky divers reaching across blue air for their partners and sees Propp munching on a Sno-Kone in the corner and staring at her. He raises his brows theatrically when their eyes meet and, ridiculously, she’s embarrassed.

Sylvia walks over to him and he extends the Sno-Kone in her direction. The shaved ice is dyed a deep purple color and she shakes him off and says, “You come here a lot?”

He shrugs, swallows some ice and says, “What do you mean by a lot?”

“The police know about this place?”

“He gives an indulgent smile: isn’t this provincial child amusing.”

“And they never bust the place?”

Propp looks out at the room in general and says, “The place is sort of a co-op. Every merchant pays a booth fee. Some percentage of the gross goes in the right pocket every month.” He looks back at her and says, “Besides, Sylvia, fifty percent of what’s in here is legal.”

“And what about the other fifty percent?”

“What about it?” he says. “That’s not my judgment to make.”

She shakes her head, looks at the floor, tries to let him know she expected a better answer from a myth-figure.

“What?” he says. “You want to have the standard debate? You want to take positions here? Spend the night making points? Or do you want to see things you’ve never seen before?”

“Maybe,” she says, looking back up at him, “this subject doesn’t interest me the way it does the rest of this room. Or the way it does you.”

“Could be,” he says, staying loose, possibly trying to bait her. And possibly not. “Interest in sex is a brain function like anything else. Could be some people get too much. And some get too little.”

“And,” she says, “could be that kind of labeling is both useless and insulting.”

“I’m not trying to insult anyone, Sylvia.”

“I don’t get you. Back at the diner you were warning me away from Hugo Schick and the Skin Palace—”

His tone changes immediately and he snaps, “That’s different,” and then he realizes he’s going to have to explain himself.

“I mean,” he says, “Schick, as an individual, is different. Schick doesn’t give a goddamn about anything erotic. He cares about money and manipulation. And his own ego.”

Sylvia stares at him, shocked, and she gives him a second to turn what he’s just said into a joke. But Propp doesn’t take the opportunity and Sylvia can’t help putting her hand on his shoulder, giving him a patronizing pat and squeeze.

“Money and manipulation and ego,” she says. “Yeah, there’s none of that sitting in this room.”

“You don’t know Schick—” he starts.

“Is that right?” she says, wanting to capitalize on his mistake. “And you’re the guy who called the Proppists fools because of their willed innocence.”

“I didn’t—”

“So what’s the truth, Propp? Is there a difference between the erotic and the pornographic?”

He calms down, looks behind him and throws the SnoKone into a trash barrel.

“There probably is,” he says. “And it’s probably different for every individual.”

“Right. Except some individual’s judgment is less valid than others. Like the Proppists. And like Hugo Schick. And like me.”

“Maybe,” he says, “the Proppists haven’t earned their judgment.”

“Earned?” she says, really stunned by the road he’s heading down. “Earned their judgment? Could you just tell me who makes that determination? Is this what happens to someone when they become a hermit?”

“I’m no hermit, Sylvia.”

She can’t help smiling at how self-deceived this man is. “You know, my boyfriend has some new associates you should meet. You’d really get on.”

“You’re misinterpreting everything I’ve said.”

“Just tell me how, exactly, you earned these critical skills that everyone around you seems to be lacking. For God sake, you say Schick has an ego.”

“You don’t know me, Sylvia,” getting angry now, the comparison with Schick pushing his button. “You don’t know where I’ve been, the things that have happened …”

“That’s right,” she says. “That’s completely correct. And no matter what you think, you don’t know me either. No matter what sources you have. No matter how much you’ve spied on me or tried to look into my life, you know nothing about me.”

A naked, heavily tattooed woman with snakes coiled around her neck walks up to them and starts to display her product, which Sylvia guesses to be the snakes. Propp runs a hand over his face and moves brusquely to the other side of the room and Sylvia follows.

“Have you ever been to Bangkok, Sylvia?” he says, staring ahead as they walk. “The real Bangkok. The city in Thailand, you know, that this neighborhood is named after.”

Before she can answer he says, “You haven’t. I know you haven’t. Except for college, you’ve never lived outside of Quinsigamond.”

They come to a stop next to a booth where a small, professorial-looking man in a white lab coat is distributing leaflets on something called the Dillinger & Hindenmacher Miracle Implant Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. On a rickety wooden easel next to the booth is a poster showing what looks like a technical blueprint for a zeppelin.

“I lived in Bangkok for three years. I lived in one room in the heart of Patpong Road. I had one change of clothes, a Nikon, and a Polaroid passport camera. For three hours every morning I shot Polaroids. Visa shots. Immigration shots. Rest of the day and night I shot for myself.”

“Look, Propp,” Sylvia says, “I’ve read stories about Bangkok—”

“Listen to yourself. Read stories.”

“Fine. It’s secondary. It’s worse than secondary. It’s nothing. I’m carnally illiterate. And you’ve been around. You’ve taken the big trip upriver to the core of all desire. You saw the best and worst of it. And now you’re enlightened. You’re the maven of all things sexual. And the rest of the world just can’t keep up. The Proppists are spoiled children with some storybook dream of this romantic, dewy sensuality. And Hugo Schick is just a cold businessman who knows how to exploit a raw image until it makes a respectable profit. And I guess I’m just a blank slate who hasn’t even considered the possibilities. So we’ve got no right to an opinion, because they’re all going to be uninformed.”

He rubs at his eyes, looks at his feet. “That’s not it at all. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Bangkok has no corner on carnality or lust or lasciviousness or whatever. Neither does Amsterdam. Or Forty-second Street. Or this flea market.”

“Okay,” Sylvia says. “Agreed.”

His voice changes slightly, gets huskier, a little tired. “I’ve spent large chunks of my adult life studying and capturing images, Sylvia. I’ve lived as a photographer. You know what that is. You know what that does to your eye, how it affects the way you view the world in every second you’re awake. And maybe when you’re asleep. You frame everything. You weigh every visual against an approaching better one. You do that over a number of years and it changes you. It makes you a mutant. But it happens so subtly that you might not even be aware of your own transformation.”

She looks at him and his face seems to be losing color, as if pigment is draining away as he speaks.

“When I became aware of what had happened to me, to my sensibility, I went, very literally after a time, underground. I’ve been around, as you sarcastically say. And you want to call the results of my experiences ego. That’s fine. But I know it has nothing to do with ego. And I’ll stand here and judge the Proppists. And I’ll judge Hugo Schick and the Skin Palace people. Because I know how wrong they both are. How ignorant. They don’t have any idea how deep it goes inside us. They approach image as if it were a theory. Or a commodity. They’re on opposite sides of a ridiculous fence, but both groups are fools. I know it, Sylvia. That makes me a fanatic. I don’t care.”

She takes a breath and says, “What about me?”

“I came for you, didn’t I?”

“Why?”

“Because I owe you, Sylvia.”

And she doesn’t want to ask what he owes her. Why he owes her. She stares at him and she thinks of Hugo Schick’s face. And then of Perry’s face. Propp steps up to her, leans in and kisses her, so softly, on the forehead. He puts his hands on her shoulders and turns her until her back is to him and she’s staring across the aisle at a display for self-adhesive mirrored ceiling tiles. Sylvia looks into the mirrors, sees the quilted jacket zipped over the remains of her Victorian nightgown, sees the white-gone-black slippers still on her feet. And then she looks into her own face, smudges of ash on her left cheek, her eyes bloodshot, dark circles underneath. She knows she looks horrible.

There are similarities between you and she, Propp had said back in the station. Similarities between Sylvia and the Madonna. Was he lying or was that genuinely his view of how Sylvia looked through the camera lens? You’re beautiful, he said.

Could what they see possibly be this different?

She looks from her reflection to Propp’s, his face behind her, back over her left shoulder. He looks equally haggard. Then there’s another face next to Propp’s and they both turn around to the smile of this old butterball, this pasty-skinned man who looks like a boozy ad man who’s finally gone to ruin. He’s got jowls and a head of bristly, pepper-colored hair and a brown suit with stained lapels. The fat man nods his head as he smiles and the jowls swing and Sylvia has to look down at the floor.

“Mr. Smith,” he says to Propp in this high-pitched voice like a muted horn, “could I have a word?”

Propp gets a little distracted. He looks from the man to Sylvia and back to the man, then says, “Sure, fine, just a second,” then pulls Sylvia out of earshot and says, “I’ve got to talk to this guy for a second.”

“Mr. Smith?” she says.

He shrugs. “It’s a joke around here. Everyone’s Mr. Smith.”

“You do business down here, Propp?”

“It’s not what you think, Sylvia. Could you just wait for me down in back and I’ll be there in five minutes.”

And he turns back to the fat man who huddles down and starts to talk fast. Sylvia moves past them and hears the words credit and fraud. She walks all the way to the rear of the building and comes to a row of what look like glossy, wooden confessionals or maybe those old arcade photo booths where you cram inside on a stool and they spit out four black-and-white head shots on a long, single print-strip. There’s a security guard sitting on a stool looking bored next to one of those velvet partitioning ropes that blocks entrance to the booths. He stares at her with his arms locked across his chest. She nods to him but he doesn’t move a muscle. She turns to walk away and the guard says, “You Sylvia?”

She turns back and stares at him and he lets a little smile break and says, “Yeah, you’re Sylvia,” and unhooks one end of the velvet rope to let her through.

She doesn’t move and he says, “Booth number seven.”

She looks down the rows of booths, finds the one marked 7 and, of course, there’s a hand-lettered Out of Order sign pinned to its curtain. She moves past the guard to the booth, pulls back the curtain and enters, ten years old again and trying to remember her sins. The booth is pretty stark. There’s a wooden stool to sit on, a metal coin box that reads quarters only and a mesh speaker set in the paneling next to a plate glass window that’s shuttered with what looks like corrugated metal. Sylvia resecures the curtain behind her and stands still in the dark.

There’s a second of motor noise as the metal shutter slides up and reveals a darkened, matching, booth-like room on the other side of a thick-glass window. Then blue and red ceiling spotlights click on and Leni Pauline is standing in front of her.

She’s dressed in this extremely short, black, see-through robe that she has barely belted around her waist. The floors and walls and ceiling of the booth surrounding her are carpeted in what looks like unusually plush bearskin. Leni clasps her hands behind her neck and does these back arches as if she were about to start into an aerobics routine. Then she bows toward Sylvia and says, “This is a freebie so don’t expect the full five minutes.”

“Where the hell did you go?” is all Sylvia can think to say.

“Where did I go?” Leni says and starts to laugh.

“Does Hugo know you moonlight here?”

The laughter stops and Leni says, “Hugo forgot to renew his Leni license. I’m a ward of the state now.”

Sylvia doesn’t want to fight. “I turned around for a second,” she says, “and you were gone.”

“Yeah,” Leni says, “That’s my story too. So how’d the night go? Get anything good?”

Sylvia squints at her and Leni makes a face and says, “Pictures, Sylvie. You take any good pictures?”

“Yeah. I think I did.”

“Where’d you get the jacket?”

“Long story,” Sylvia says. “What the hell are you doing in there?”

“What do you think. It’s a peep booth, you know. People get to peep at me.”

“No, no. I mean, how did you know I was out there? How did you know I was at the flea market?”

“The flea market?” Leni says.

“Isn’t that what they call this place?”

“Not that I know of. And I didn’t know you were here. I thought you saw me come in or something.”

Sylvia gives her a disgusted look. “Leni, the guy out front called me by name and told me to go to booth seven.”

Leni screws up her face as if to say this is ridiculous. “Hey, Sylvia, I make it a rule that I don’t talk to the greaseball toy cops at this hole, okay?”

“Then who—”

“Look, you got about a minute before the window closes, all right? And I’ve got to tell you something.”

“Wait a minute,” Sylvia says.

“You need to be at the Skin Palace,” Leni interrupts, putting both her palms flat against the window and leaning forward, “at midnight tomorrow. I’ll have something to show you that’ll clear everything up.”

“What is it?” Sylvia says as the window partition starts to roll down.

“Midnight, tomorrow,” are Leni’s last words before the window is completely blocked and the booth is in darkness again. Sylvia reaches out and touches the coin box and then, without thinking, she starts banging on it with her fist and to her shock the partition begins to roll back up.

But when the window comes clear again and the red and blue lights go on, Leni is gone and the viewing room is empty.

24

Sylvia stays in the peep booth for what seems like a long time. She sits on the wooden stool, leans down on her thighs. She stares out into the viewing room and hopes that someone will walk in and start to talk to her through the speaker, start to explain the last three days as a practical joke or a punishment for sins she doesn’t remember committing.

But no one comes in and no one comes to call her out and she just continues to look into this square box, this vault of soft white walls. It reminds her of a school trip she took as a child, maybe twelve years old, when she went to a pathetic zoo about fifteen miles outside the city. The class walked through a nature trail and, except for a timber wolf who was kept chained to a tree, all they saw were signs hanging on fences and nailed to posts that said the animals had been temporarily vacated. She wondered all day what that meant. The words carried this vague but definitely threatening aura until she began to think all the animals had been sacrificed in some kind of terrible ritual. And at the end of the trip they visited the reptile house which was steamy and dank and muggy. And the whole class walked single file through a corridor that twisted every few feet and on either side the walls were fitted with glass windows, like in an aquarium, only these windows were all streaked and smudged and you looked in on rocks and dirt and broken-off tree branches. And you tried to find the snakes or toads or lizards that were trying to hide inside their tank, under fluorescent lights, trying to blend their colors with this shabby environment they’d woken up and found themselves in one morning.

That zoo trip still makes her shiver and she blocks it out of her mind and tries to imagine lying down on the viewing room floor, just stretching out on that bearskin and falling into a long and dreamless sleep.

But she can’t fully conceive of the sleep. She can only imagine waking up naked and having the peep booth crammed with voyeurs who are gawking at her the way she gawked at those snakes and lizards. Wondering how the hell did she end up in this position?

When her legs start to cramp, she gets off the stool and stretches. She turns to leave and hears the metal shutter roll down behind her.

She walks out a rear exit of the flea market into an alley and finds Propp sitting on the ground, leaning against the bricks. She moves over to him, looks down on him. She won’t even ask if he knows Leni. If he set up their meeting in the booth. She doesn’t want any more denial tonight. She doesn’t want any more sentences that turn the facts around and make her question herself and everything that seemed to be true.

“You finish up your business?” she asks.

He shakes his head and puts out his hand and she pulls him up to standing.

“Things didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped,” he says.

He starts to walk and Sylvia follows and says, “You know, you really shouldn’t slag Hugo Schick the way you do. You two being in the same union and all.”

“I knew you’d think that,” he says, “but I’m not a pornographer, Sylvia.”

“So what is it you sell to these guys, Mr. Smith?” sarcastic on the last two words. “Tours of the underworld?”

He stops walking and says, “I sell them Terrence Propp prints.”

She looks at him, confused, and he just smiles and starts walking again.

“I was supposed to be a dealer with some connections to the mystery man. Only nobody’s buying these days. They suddenly think I’m a fraud. They think Propp is dead and I’m trafficking in second-rate imitations.”

“That’s hysterical,” she says.

“Not when you’re trying to buy film on your good looks.”

“This is going to sound a little cruel, but don’t you find it just a bit ironic?”

He lets out an annoyed sigh and says, “Irony is a constant once you reach my age.” Then he just stares at her and when he speaks again the tone of his voice is completely different.

“Don’t you wonder why I brought you here tonight, Sylvia?”

Now it’s her turn to give a stare. “You live underneath the streets in an old diner, hiding from everyone. I should try and figure out your motives?”

“I brought you here,” he says, unchallenged, “for two reasons. The first was simply to show another world, another dimension, that’s operating, at all times, separate from your world—”

“You know so much about my world—”

“—It’s dark and it’s hidden. And for a stranger it can seem obsessive. Insular. Unsettling and alienating. Parts of it might even seem brutal and perverse. To someone like you, Sylvia, everything would look angled and shadowed and haunted.”

“What’s the second reason?” she says.

“That’s a little harder. I wanted to show you that within those shadows, inside the brutality and perversion, you can find moments of humanity if you train yourself to look closely enough,” he reaches out and touches her camera, “and you can capture them. You can hold them. You can make a rosary of these images.”

“A rosary?”

He nods.

Sylvia shrugs, “Why should I want to?”

Propp squints at her like the answer should be obvious.

“To gain grace,” he says.

“Grace?”

He makes a kind of awkward, noncommittal shake of his head, pushes his hands in his pockets and takes a step toward the mouth of the alley. Then he turns back and like a teenager impulsively asking for a date he says, “You want to go to the movies?”

She keeps herself from blurting out the immediate yes that’s answered that question her entire life. She says, “What’s playing?”

He holds up his satchel and says, “How about the suppressed cut of The Wizard of Oz”?

She stops walking and Propp smiles and looks at her with raised eyebrows, a kind of challange, an invitation to doubt him.

“Give me a break,” she says.

He takes a few steps back, opens the satchel and pulls up a dull silver film canister, just a flash of it, then drops it back down into the bag.

“Suppressed?”

“You never heard of this?” he says. “What kind of film animal are you?”

“The Wizard of Oz?”

His shoulders slump, he swings his head in the direction of the alley’s mouth and they start walking again, more quickly this time.

“It was the first week of November, 1938. There was some unspoken tension on the set, you know, with Victor Fleming taking over for George Cukor. And this was after Cukor had already replaced Richard Thorpe. You add to that the concern about the aluminum powder—”

“Aluminum powder?”

“They’d had to rush Buddy Ebsen to the hospital. Found out he was having allergic reactions to the Tin Man makeup. They had to replace him with Jack Haley. C’mon, Sylvia, you know all this, right?”

She just gives him a blank stare.

“Anyway, the first scene Fleming shoots is the yellow brick crossroad bit where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow. Only the raven they had sitting on Bolger’s shoulder got loose and started flying around the studio. Bergswich, the unofficial MGM animal expert — he was really just an assistant electrician — he wasted a whole day trying to catch the damn bird. So, you can imagine, right, when they finally get down to filming that scene the actors are a little tense, okay? And things got a little out of hand at one point.”

“What do you mean?” she can’t help asking.

He lifts the satchel up in the air.

“Supposedly,” he says, “they burn the offensive scenes. Only somebody, maybe Mervyn LeRoy, maybe Louis Mayer himself, pockets the cut stock and it sits for years in some Beverly Hills vault. But like everything else, Sylvia, eventually it surfaces again. Makes it out onto the gray market. I’ve had my reel for over a decade now.”

This one she just can’t believe. “What could possibly be offensive about The Wizard of Oz?”

“Any number of things. But this had to do with Dorothy’s relationship with the Scarecrow. Wait till you see what was cut from the dance scene. That yellow brick road was on fire. They—”

“No,” she says and stops as they emerge back out on Voegelin.

“What?”

“You’ve gone too far, Propp. There was nothing erotic or sensual or in any way sexual about Judy Garland’s dance with Ray Bolger. There just wasn’t.”

“Not in the print you’ve seen, no.”

“Not in any print.”

He waits a few seconds, biting off a smile, seeming to study her face, the ever patient patriarch.

“Why, Sylvia?” he finally says. “Because you don’t want it to be? Because you’ve always looked at that moment in that movie, that dance, that image,” emphasizing the syllables until they sound foreign, “in a very specific way. And you don’t want to believe there could be another way to look.”

“That’s not it at all,” she says. “It’s because your story isn’t rational. It doesn’t fit the context of the movie. There’s no reason why they would have filmed that kind of thing. It just didn’t happen.”

“But it did, Sylvia,” Propp says. “And if you want to come to the Ballard with me, they’ve got a sixteen millimeter projector just waiting to be used.”

They stare at each other until Sylvia says, “All right, Propp. You show me,” and they turn left down Voegelin and head toward the Canal Zone.

The old Ballard Theatre sits down on Bonnefoy Drive sandwiched betweeen a former paper mill and a nonfunctioning electric company transformer station. It’s always been one of the smaller cinemas in town, with less than a hundred seats, but from the start it had a subtle elegance to it. Nothing overwhelming like the Skin Palace. More a quiet charm, an unspoken confidence and a discreet style, from the amber glow of the wooden walls to the coziness of its mini-balcony. There was something about the way the Ballard offered homemade quilts to every customer when the quirky heating system failed every January. But most of all there was the silent and graceful demeanor of the eternal usher, a small, ghost-faced, foreign-looking man in a black suit who remained at the Ballard no matter how often it was bought and sold. The rumor has always been that he lived in the theatre and never went outside. He reminded some patrons of a refugee funeral director, but Sylvia always thought of him as more of a secular monk in the celluloid faith.

The Ballard has changed hands half a dozen times in the last twenty years. Something about the building seems to attract dedicated film specialists whose business acumen is eccentric at best. In the past decade the theatre has been known by a variety of names. There was The Kinetoscope, which revived an endless number of pre-talkies until the IRS rode into town and padlocked all the doors. There was Dragonsbreath, which was dedicated to the martial arts film in all its cheesy glory and blew most of its receipts on a ridiculously expensive, life-size, full-body sculpture of Bruce Lee in a midair assault. There was a single summer of Ciné Flesheater that almost managed to display every variation of the B-budget zombie flick, but tended to dwell on the Spanish-Italian subgenre. And there was The Jerry Lewis House of Mirth which was able to roll everything from My Friend Irma through The King of Comedy before the proprietor retired to France, a happy, if bankrupt man.

The Ballard’s last incarnation was as The Anne Frank Cinema. And the ’59 version of The Diary of Anne Frank was the first in a series of holocaust movies Sylvia watched down here, followed by Genocide, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Sophie’s Choice, The Night Porter, Playing For Time, The Last Metro, Kapo, Diamonds of the Night, The Wannsee Conference, Judgment At Nuremberg, In a Glass Cage, Shoah and Hotel Terminus. She doesn’t know exactly what did in the Anne Frank, but at the final screening, a double bill featuring The Sorrow and the Pity and Night and Fog, the only two people in the place were she and Shel Singer, the neighborhood mayor of the Jews. At intermission, Mr. Singer got up from his seat in the last row and sat next to Sylvia, brought her a box of popcorn. For the last hour of the Anne Frank Cinema’s life, Shel held Sylvia’s butter-streaked hand, nothing erotic in the act, just a touch, human flesh brought together for a short time. Then as the credits rolled, Mr. Singer got up and left without a word. And that night they bolted the doors of the Ballard and cleared the marquee.

Now, six months later, the Loftus Brothers have decided to take a stab at the movie business. Tonight, the front of the Ballard sports a new, pricey sign made up of hundreds of blinking lightbulbs that are patterned to read Impact: The Car Crash Cinema.

“I guess the idea,” says Propp from the roof of the building looking down over the transformer lot next door, “is they’ll edit out everything but the crash scenes. They’ll dump the rest of the movie and just leave the smashups. If there’s a good chase scene preceding the crash, they might leave it in. But if a chase doesn’t end in a crash, no good.”

“They’ve got a lot of material to work with,” Sylvia says.

Propp nods, kneels down and starts to open a skylight. “And you’re probably just thinking of theatrical releases, right?”

“I’m thinking H. B. Halicki,” Sylvia says.

“Very good,” Propp says.”I’m impressed. Halicki, the Patron Saint.”

“Gone in 60 Seconds,” Sylvia says. “Ninety-three cars destroyed in forty minutes.”

“How about Grand Theft Auto?” Propp says.

“Eat My Dust!” Sylvia says. “Smash-Up on Interstate 5.”

“The Seven-Ups. Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry.”

“White Line Fever. Freebie and the Bean. Le Mans.”

“The Cannonball Run series,” Propp says. “My God, you could get through the first three months on Burt Reynold’s oeuvre alone. But the rumor is they’re going to use industrial films as well. Stuff out of these Detroit labs where they test cars. And underground video stuff borrowed from state police files. There’s supposed to be some Autobahn footage where you can see a head come right through a windshield.”

“You think they’ve got a shot?” she says.

Propp smiles at her and says, “I don’t see how they can miss.”

He opens the skylight back on its hinges and gestures for her to climb in.

“No alarms?”

“Not that I know of.”

Sylvia moves into the opening and lowers herself, then lets go and drops down to the floor in a squat. She gets up and steps back and Propp joins her, agile for his age and looking like he’s done this a lot in the past.

They’re in the balcony of the theatre, about a dozen rows pitched at a steep angle. Sylvia’s always loved the seats in the Ballard, old-time rockers covered in plush maroon velour and plenty of arm room so you’re not in constant battle with the person next door. Sylvia and her mother used to come to the Ballard a lot when Sylvia was young. They saw a lot of Disney stuff here, a lot of movies starring Kurt Russell. Sylvia hoped her first boyfriend would be like Kurt Russell — clean-cut, square jaw, well intentioned.

“You pick the seats,” Propp says, “and I’ll go fire up the projector.”

He climbs back to the projection booth and she surveys her choices and settles on the front row center where they can put their feet up on the railing. She sits down and gets comfortable and looks around at the decor, all natural wood and soft velour. And the sight of it all makes her hate the mall theatres even more — the little bowling alleys with their back-ache chairs and tiny screens and bad sound systems.

Last year Perry and she went to a Friday night late show of Castle Oswald and when the lights went down and the previews came on they thought there was something wrong with their eyes. The people on the screen were just ghost-images. If you squinted hard, you could barely see a man and a woman running through a park. They waited for someone else to get out of their seat and find an usher but no one did. So Sylvia got up and went out to the concession stand where all these teenagers in polyester jackets were busy trying to pick each other up. And she asked them if there was a problem with the movie. The assistant manager put down his massive tumbler of soda and explained with strained politeness that, in fact, one of the bulbs in the projector had burned out and that she could get her money back at the box office if she wanted. He turned back to the popcorn girl and Sylvia asked why they didn’t just change the bulb. The boy’s patience edging toward rupture, he told her the bulb was too hot to be changed now, that it would be changed tomorrow morning. Then he pursed his lips and breathed through his nose waiting to see if there was anything else she needed. Sylvia asked him if anyone else had requested their money back and he seemed pleased to tell her she was the first one. On the drive home she can remember Perry saying, “It’s no big deal, Sylvia. I’m not crazy about the movies anyway.”

And now she stares out at the huge old screen in front of her as the heavy blue curtain starts to roll back and she wonders how could I end up with a guy who isn’t crazy about the movies?

Propp does a fast trot down the inclined aisle, braking against gravity, slides in next to her and says, “Exactly where I’d have sat.”

“Glad you approve.”

They watch leader strip fill up the screen, a scratchy-looking test pattern that shows a color spectrum.

Propp leans into her shoulder and whispers, as if the theatre were filled and they might disturb someone. “Remember, the reduction to sixteen millimeter is going to be painful. I’m pretty sure this was done on the run. And the sound track isn’t quite in sync.”

“Please,” Sylvia says, “don’t build my expectations so high.”

He gives her elbow a playful shove off the armrest and they turn their attention to the screen. An old-time clap-board comes up that reads 11/5/38, then the marker is pulled down out of the shot and they’re watching Judy Garland looking beautiful in spite of the start of all the diet pills and bad advice.

The sound track is a mess. Ray Bolger walks into view done up in full Scarecrow costume. As a child, Sylvia’s favorite of the three traveling companions was Bolger and at the end of the movie, when Dorothy tells him she’s going to miss him the most, Sylvia instantly wanted her to stay in Oz. Forget Auntie Em. Forget Kansas. And now, watching the Scarecrow lean over and whisper in Garland’s ear, making her laugh with some secret no one will ever know, she feels Dorothy’s making a huge mistake all over again. You can’t go home again, girlfriend. So bag the thought of a dicey balloon trip with the faux wizard. And forget the heel-clicking mantra of Glinda, the little overachieving cheerleader. Hit the road with the Scarecrow and go assume the mortgage on the Witch’s castle. You can train those flying monkeys to keep house and do the cooking. And you and strawboy can head out every night, dance and get weird in the deepest part of that haunted forest.

There’s an awkward cut and the film goes dark for a second and when the light comes back, the Scarecrow is up on his post at the fork in the yellow brick road. His voice gives Dorothy confusing directions a few seconds after his hands point down the proposed path she should walk. It’s unsettling watching this — the images mimic, almost perfectly, the images that Sylvia’s known from this film most of her life. But almost is a crucial word. There’s something just a hair off at all times, something that doesn’t exactly line up. Something beyond the out-of-sync sound track.

Sylvia has watched this movie at least once a year since she was five or six years old. More, once it was released on video. That means she’s seen it over twenty-five times, enough to have the nuances, the inflections of voice, the exact manner of movements, down to a reflexive memory. It’s akin to that instinctual, really helpless way you know a pop song note for note after you’ve heard it a hundred times. You sing along in your head and you know, without thinking, without even being aware that you know, when the singer’s voice is going to alter, to drop or rise or quiver. It’s a buried surety, a certainty that’s grown so innate it’s like breathing air.

And now, watching Bolger and Garland, Scarecrow and Dorothy, play out movements that almost match up to what she knows should be happening, but don’t quite, it’s akin to hyperventilating. It’s an awful confusion. Because she can’t even identify what’s wrong. She just knows something is off. Scarecrow’s arm might move an inch beyond the length it extended in the standard version of the movie. Dorothy’s voice might rise just a bit higher. The choreography is the same. The words are the same. But their presentation is just a millimeter away from what she’s come to memorize. And as the differences continue between what she sees each moment and what she expects to see, she begins to feel a kind of vertigo, a dizziness, a sense of displacement, an apprehension that the whole world has just slipped out of a balance that she thought was inviolable. If the Scarecrow can act in a different way than he’s always acted, then science and religion are destroyed. Then anything can happen to her life.

And yet she can’t take her eyes off the screen. She watches as Dorothy bends the nail that has trapped the Scarecrow on his post in the cornfield for an eternity. She watches as the Scarecrow slides to the ground, tries to stand on rubbery legs, slides into “If I Only Had a Brain.”

She stares at the screen as Dorothy tells him her hopes for salvation in the Emerald City. And she focuses in tight as these two innocents join forces and break into this skipping promenade down their chosen pathway while reprising “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”

It’s possible that some offscreen voice, maybe even Victor Fleming’s, calls, “Cut,” but Sylvia doesn’t hear it. She knows for certain that the next scene should be the bullying apple trees. But Garland and Bolger are still in front of the cornfield. The music crashes into this dissonant confusion for a second or two, then returns in another form, something far removed from the light innocence of “If I Only Had a Brain.” Now they’re hearing a king of jazzy swing, but there’s no way to tell is this is part of the original sound track or was dubbed in at some later date. The music seems to fit the movements of the two figures on the screen, but it deviates enough for doubt.

The Scarecrow has taken Dorothy’s hand and is whirling her in and out of his arms, spinning her outward and retracting her into his straw-stuffed chest like a yo-yo. He catches her in an aggressive embrace and they start a polka-ish hoedown trot, circling around the perimeter of the yellow-brick dance area. Clearly, the film has broken free of any connection to the images of Sylvia’s memory. It’s a brand new world now, a place where she has no idea what’s coming. And she likes it a lot better. The vertigo, the inconsistency between what should be and what is, has vanished and all she wants to do is watch.

She gets a good look at Dorothy’s face as the screen dancers loop by their closest point to the camera. The girl from Kansas is howling, loving this moment, seemingly set free and basking in the spontaneity, the unscripted abandon of the Scarecrow’s improvisation. Here, in this moment of deviation, there’s no worry about budget or time schedules. There’s no fat-faced studio boss hollering about gained weight or contract clauses. There’s only the Scarecrow’s flying, steering arms and their intermingled, convulsing laughter.

They mutate their form into a tango, pivot at the far point from the lens and stomp back, cheek to cheek. Dorothy’s eyes closed up with laughter, until they’re grotesquely close to the screen and someone yells, “watch the camera” over the music. Scarecrow does a slapstick pratfall as if tripping over some unseen equipment and laughter erupts everywhere. He pretends to drop unconscious on the bricks and Dorothy stands over him for a minute, arms across her stomach, then hand up to her mouth to cover the uncontrollable laughter. With her back to the camera she steps over him, straddles the prone straw body and bends down, the pleats of the farm dress spreading across her rear. She begins to help the recovering Scarecrow up and he suddenly springs back to full-bodied life, bounds to his feet, sweeps Dorothy into the air. She lets her head fall back, her hair swinging in the rush, new waves of hilarity playing over her mouth.

Then Scarecrow goes into her neck, his floppy hat sailing away to the ground, a vampire-like flourish to his maneuver. The offscreen noise turns to hoots and whistles and the music shuts down. But a curious thing occurs, totally unexpected from the context of everything that’s led to this moment. Dorothy’s arms, limp in the air behind her one second, swing up and forward and wrap themselves around Scarecrow’s neck. And the strawman’s lips move and find the farm girl’s. And suddenly, instantly, in one bolt of adrenal fluid and muscular expansion, startling as the change from black-and-white to color, the playacting is over.

Sylvia is removed from the image before her by over half a century. But she’s absolutely certain that a change has taken place. The Scarecrow and Dorothy are French-kissing and the joker running the camera pulls in for a tight close-up and there’s a shocked electricity that passes from the now probably dead movie crew through the screen and into the Ballard Theatre and into Propp and Sylvia. The unmistakable charge of sexuality has exploded unexpectedly between the eternally virginal Kansas schoolgirl and the man made of straw and cloth. Mouth on mouth and eyes closed, their heads twist and the audience of two can feel the warmth that has to be expanding beneath the skin of the actors, inside their legs and stomachs, making their breath come faster and harder. And in that moment, Sylvia lets herself act without thought or preparation, totally and completely on instinct and impulse. She reaches down and puts her hand on Propp’s leg.

And without a word, he bolts out of his seat and races up the aisle stairs until he disppears into the projection room.

Sylvia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and hates herslf for her stupidity.

She opens her eyes and on the screen the kiss is over and Dorothy pushes out of the Scarecrow’s arms, almost falls to the bricks and then runs out of screen view. And the Scarecrow is left embarrassed, staring at the camera without anything to say, without an explanation, until he too runs off in another direction, leaving wisps of straw drifting in the air behind him.

Oz vanishes and the screen is filled with black leader that has huge white letters and numbers written on it. Sylvia gets out of her seat and walks up to the projection booth. The door is open and the projector is still humming and cranking, but Propp, of course, is nowhere to be seen. There’s a square opening in the floor at the rear of the booth. She steps inside and looks to see a spiral staircase which she climbs down into a closet that leads out to the concession stand.

She leans on the candy counter and looks forward at the main entrance of the theatre. The double glass doors are pushed wide open, a set of keys hanging from an interior lock.

Sylvia stands still until her breathing calms and all she can hear is the slap-and-purr sound of the movie reel upstairs, the tail end of the film perpetually revolving on the take-up arm of the projector. She listens until she decides not to turn it off. She pushes her hands into the pockets of her coat to confirm what she already suspects. The film canisters are gone.

Then she moves out the front door and starts to walk home.

25

Jakob loves scouting locations. If some quirk of nature or God were to prevent him from being an auteur, he thinks he could still find a reasonable percentage of happiness as a set scout. He’s convinced he could be dropped from a plane into any locale on the planet — urban, suburban, full-blown rural — and he’d be able to find the exactly correct visuals for any hypothetical film in development. And in any art form so dependent on collaboration, scouting requires no interaction beyond that of his inner-eye and his outer eye.

It’s a question of determining coordinates, of uncovering real world field-sites that agree with the images already screened in the skull-cinema. You look at the printed page where the screenwriter has written.

EXT. TRAIN STATION — NIGHT

and you know, from the context of the narrative, from the endless number of movies you’ve seen in your life, from the specific throb in the center of your bone marrow, you know what this train station must look like.

It must look like this.

Like Gompers Station, Jakob decides, exactly like Gompers Station once the correct angles are established and the lighting is battled out and the dry-ice machine has pumped the perfect balance of smoke and water into the air.

Jakob is sitting fifty feet above the ground, his legs dangling toward the fastest lane of the interstate. He’s perched on the small lip of steel staging that supports an enormous billboard that reads

Aldrich Brothers Opticians

in the lobby of the Justman Building

“Because We’ll See You Through”

From this height and distance, he can get a beautiful wide-angle of Gompers and he knows, if he can make it haunting enough, this is the shot he’ll use to both open and close his film.

Jakob has been sitting up on the billboard lip for almost an hour. He keeps staring out over the train station with his bare eyes, then lifting the Seitz and staring all over again through the camera’s eye. Something is troubling him, but he’s yet to discover what it is. It’s an absence of some sort, a missing component to the total picture. It’s something he knows, instinctively, in his gut, that he can correct. It’s a hole that needs to be filled, some kind of minor element like a truant wine bottle that should be in the rail bed, a pane of glass that needs to be broken. If he’s patient and sits long enough, the gap will reveal itself. Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do.

It would have been easier in Maisel, he thinks, but ease is not what makes a great film. Quinsigamond is a deranged stepmother with very sharp claws. But this is why it’s the perfect place, the only place, to film Little Girl Lost.

He takes in the night air, thick with the rain that keeps threatening to fall, arches his shoulders backwards and wonders how Felix will dispose of Jiri Fric’s body. Then he pushes the thought away and lifts the Seitz back to his eye, peers through, aiming down at the station. And, for the first time all night, he sees movement.

He zooms in and adjusts his focus manually. There, poking out of one of the Saville Co. Storage cars. And she’s gone before he can shoot any film. He shifts the camera up on his shoulder, points it skyward, looks over the whole of the lot. He brings the camera back, aims at the storage car, waits ten seconds. Waits another twenty. There, again, the head edges out beyond the door, furtive, like an animal aware of an unseen predator.

The head lingers this time. It’s a young girl, preteen. She takes another look around the yard, then shifts her body, throws her legs out the door and eases herself down to the ground, in an anticipatory crouch. Then, as if a switch is thrown, she bolts toward a waste Dumpster across the yard, hauls herself up by climbing a pile of scrap metal next to the bin, and rolls like a gymnast down into the trash, disappearing from the frame completely.

Jakob’s heart is racing with epiphany. This is the face he has been looking for, the saint that will bless his film. This is, without doubt, without any equivocation, the face that will fuel every inch of celluloid he’ll expose. This is the Little Girl Lost.

All he’ll need is a single, perfect, still shot. Something he can blow up to wall-size for the chancellery interrogation scene and integrate into the newspaper mock-ups. Something he can transpose, full-screen, a ghost-image, over the anti-hero’s final moments.

And then he’s climbing, racing down the struts of the billboard like some arrogant prince of a traveling circus who has nothing but contempt for gravity. He leaps the last five feet to the breakdown lane of the highway, cradling the Seitz like a baby pulled from a burning tenement. He dashes across the interstate, ignoring the awful horn blast of the refrigeration trucks barreling down on him. He jumps over the guardrail, does a graceless, full-speed dance down the embankment that rolls into the perimeter of Gompers. And then he freezes, not sure how to proceed. If he rushes her, he’ll panic her back into hiding and lose his central image forever. But if he calls out to her, gives her warning, she’ll have even more time to cut and run. So he decides the best thing to do is probably keep his distance, but follow her, wait for her to appear in some random shaft of light, and shoot as much film as he can without her ever knowing,

He moves as quietly as possible, positions himself behind an Elias Freight boxcar. He gets on one knee, brings up the Seitz and finds his focus. And then he finds the girl. Incredibly, she’s even better in closer proximity, matching, almost too well, the rough sketches he made in the back of his notebook. She has the kind of eyes that make dialogue irrelevant. The flowing blonde hair, matted now in places, that gives her a vulnerable but feral look. She’s dressed in filthy clothing that looks like cast-off rags.

Jakob watches as she begins to chew on something found in the Dumpster, maybe a crust of bread. She tears into it with her teeth, pushing it into her mouth until the cheeks bulge like those of a squirrel. Her skin is smudged with ash and dirt and Jakob thinks it could be deliberate, a crude camouflage or war paint.

The girl makes a hard swallow, stuffs a pocket with something unrecognizable. Then she climbs back to the ground, stunningly agile, and makes a beeline for the interior of Gompers. She enters through a low window hole that’s been halfheartedly boarded over. Jakob gives her a few seconds’ head start, then follows.

But he finds he can’t fit through the gaps in the plywood, so he circles around the side of the station and finds a hole that’s been smashed through the marble wall. He gets down on his knees, blankets the camera inside his jacket, and climbs through.

Jakob enters the main chamber of the station and stops, stays motionless and tries to get a fix on where the girl has gone. He smells smoke, hears the sound of running feet from above. He sees the remains of a huge support column to his right and crawls toward it on all fours, then eases himself into sitting and withdraws the Seitz from the fold of his coat. He brings the camera to his eye and pulls back to a medium shot, then begins to scan the balconies that rim the main chamber.

At the far end of the hall, he fixes on a small bonfire. He pulls in slightly, finds faces illuminated in the glow of the fire’s light. They’re all children, both girls and boys. In the center of the group is his star, the engine of his movie, the face that will only appear in reproduction, a still, fixed image. But, Jakob knows, even in this ridiculous dimness, that the power of this child’s face will certainly outshine every scenery-chewer slated to walk across the screen.

The little girl is handing out to her compatriots whatever she scavenged from the Dumpster outside. She works deliberately, with a seriousness of purpose far beyond what her age should allow. Every now and then, she stops to rub her eyes or bring the back of her hand across her nose.

This lighting isn’t going to work, Jakob thinks. And the distance is too great.

He’s going to need to shoot her during the day somehow. And to do that, sooner or later, he’s going to have to approach her. He comes back up onto his knees and starts to move for a closer column, but his hand hits something cold and metal and sends the object rolling down a slope of broken concrete. The noise echoes through the chamber and the children up in the balcony immediately scatter, one of them dousing the fire with tossed liquid.

Jakob cringes and curses himself. He stands up, shoulders the Seitz, looks through the lens and sweeps across the balconies. And he’s shocked to find himself staring up at a young boy, barely a teen. But as Jakob starts to sharpen his focus, the kid pitches a rock. The stone impacts at Jakob’s feet, but it’s just the initial assault in what suddenly becomes a barrage. From every angle above, rocks and bottles and lengths of pipe come hurling through the air down around Jakob. An old boot catches him across the forehead and he falls intentionally to the ground and starts to crawl for shelter.

But there’s no safe place to run. The children are fanned out and seem to have the whole of the main hall covered from every direction. They make no noise beyond the striking of their missiles. They appear to have an endless supply of rubble to use as ammunition.

Jakob tries a crawling run from column to column. Scrap metal and stones and rail spikes and small shafts of wood rain down around him. He flinches, takes a hard blow to the shoulder and sees he’s been hit by an unopened soup can. He rolls to the side, still trying to shield the Seitz, and a chuck of marble falls inches from his head.

“Please,” he tries to yell. “I’ll leave you alone.”

There’s a moment of amnesty and he takes it, climbs to his feet and starts to run for the hole he used to enter the station. As he approaches his exit, the attack begins again and as he squeezes through to the yard outside, he takes several blows to his back and head.

He falls outside bleeding, but he thinks the Seitz is unharmed. He gets up, starts to run toward Ivano Ave. He makes it a block, to the intersection of Polito, then lets himself slump against a street lamp and catch his breath.

Across the block, a crowd of hookers loitering in front of the Occidental Lounge seem to turn their collective attention his way. He tries to think of the fastest way back to the St. Vitus. Then he hears the screaming from behind.

Kidnapper. Murderer. Child Killer.

He turns back to Gompers Station, sees a small figure at the edge of the station’s roof. It’s pointing down in his direction, the voice so much larger than the stature should indicate. It’s the little girl from the Dumpster.

It’s him. He took Jenny Ellis. He killed Jenny Ellis.

A crowd starts to empty into the street from the Bangkok clubs and alleyways. And Jakob realizes what is about to happen.

He killed her. He killed the little girl.

He straightens up, hears voices being raised. One of the hookers starts pointing across the intersection toward him, yelling, “That’s him. That’s the son of a bitch who grabbed that little girl.”

He doesn’t wait for another word. He turns and bolts back down Ivano and knows the crowd is going to follow.

And they do. This drug-steamed parish of the night instantly transforms itself into the classic angry village and begins its pursuit. Jakob knows he could run faster if he dropped the Seitz, but that just isn’t a possibility. From the sky behind him, from the rooftop of Gompers Station, a child’s voice of unthinkable power explodes, an alarm bell ringing into consciousness an instantaneous mob mentality. And this mob is comprised of the citizens of the meanest tenderloin imaginable.

The babykiller. The babykiller is here.

Jakob runs across Haller Road, hangs a left onto Mac-Donald. The noise behind him is increasing and drawing nearer. There’s an awful taunting quality to it. He can’t make out any words, only a threatening babble. The sound track to a brutal demise born of blood-lust and a chronic, indiscriminate rage. He throws himself through a series of interconnecting alleyways and comes out on Polito. He’s run a full circle. Across the street is the opposite border of Gompers Station.

He starts to hesitate, but the sound of barking dogs drives him across the road and through a gap torn into some rusted cyclone fencing. He picks the first open boxcar he sees and climbs inside it. And only then does he realize how badly his head is pounding. His lungs begin to seize up on him and he claws at his pockets for his medication, but comes up empty.

He rolls onto his stomach, lets his head rest against the floor of the boxcar, thinks he might be able to pass out. He can no longer tell if the noise of the mob is growing fainter or drawing nearer. He touches the Seitz, strokes it, keeps his hand on the grip.

Some time passes. A series of minutes filled only with the sound of his decayed lung expanding and contracting like a sputtering motor consuming its last drops of fuel.

And suddenly Jakob realizes that he’s lying on a blanket of white paper. The entire floor of the train car, every inch, is carpeted with “Missing” flyers.

He rises up on his elbows, lifts his head, blinks to clear his vision. He looks down to the floor of the train car and reads

Have You Seen This Child?

He stares at the words as if they might mutate into a parade of insects and march off the page. He stares until the words lose their meaning.

And only then does he let himself look at the photo beneath the words. The picture of Jenny Ellis. The picture of the little girl from the Dumpster.

You escaped, he thinks, shocked at his envy as much as his discovery. You escaped as I wish to escape.

He gets up on his knees, picks up one of the flyers, runs a hand over the photocopied visage.

I would never have told them, Jenny. I understand completely. As only I can understand I only wanted your face.

He folds the flyer and slides it into the inner pocket of his coat.

There is no need to fear me, Jenny. I only wanted your picture.

26

Walking through the city at night, this night, is like walking through a serial dream, a slightly gauzy mirage where, though specific images repeat on a regular basis, the whole of the landscape never gets very clear or recognizable.

The apartment is about five miles from the theatre and it’s after four in the morning when Sylvia finally walks up the back stairs, still dressed in the remains of the Berkshires nightgown and Propp’s coat. Her hand on the back door, she pictures Perry sitting at the kitchen table, still in his suit though the tie will be pulled loose from his throat and the top button may be undone. Will she even try to offer some explanation? Or will she just stand still and wait for the yelling to dwindle so she can crawl into bed and try hard to fall asleep and pray that there’s some way to go back to the day before the Aquinas, before the seven pictures that have melted her life into this unrestricted chaos?

She takes the key from the molding lip, unlocks the door, replaces the key and heads into the kitchen. She flips on the light, puts the Canon down on the countertop and she’s both relieved and surprised that Perry isn’t there. She closes the door quietly and walks to the bedroom. The bed is empty but the red light on the answering machine is blinking in the dark. She hits the playback button and after the rewind comes Perry’s voice, hushed but clearly drunk.

“Syl, good, don’t get up, stay there, it’s me. I’m at Eddie Meade’s place. It’s about one A.M. and we’ve had a few, we’ve had quite a few, you know, drinks. After the meeting. After we finished the meeting. So I’m in no shape to drive home and I’m just going to sack out here on Eddie’s couch. Okay? You sleep. Hope you feel better in the morning. You sleep. I’ll talk to you then. We’ll talk in the morning.”

She sits down on the edge of the bed and puts her head in her hands. She’s too tired to laugh. She pulls the slippers off her feet and throws them in the wastebasket. She thinks about pouring some wine, going into the living room, flipping on the tube and seeing what Peter Lorre is up to. She unbuttons Propp’s coat and shrugs out of it, holds it in her lap and realizes it would be hard to explain if Perry saw it lying on the bed in the morning. She gets up, goes to the closet, opens the door and stares into Rory Gaston’s terrified face.

It’s his eyes that keep her from letting out a scream that could wake up Mrs. Acker. Gaston’s eyes are so wide and flinching he looks like a child on his second trip to the dentist. He’s hunched in on himself, trying somehow to disappear, a deer that’s suddenly sensed a predator in close proximity. He starts shaking his head no over and over and Sylvia’s first wave of shock and fear is replaced by anger undercut by just a little pity.

She steps back and says, “Get out of my closet.”

He complies and starts to walk past her for the bedroom door. She grabs the back of his sweater and yanks him to a stop.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He turns around to face her.

“I’m so sorry, Sylvia,” he stammers. “If there was any other way. I’m begging you, please don’t call the police.”

“You broke into my goddamn apartment.”

“I didn’t take anything. I swear to you. You can check. I didn’t take a thing.”

“You broke in, you bastard.”

“Please, Sylvia, try to understand our position—”

“I don’t see anyone here but you, Gaston.”

“You left the key over the door—”

“That gives you the right to come into my apartment.”

He stares at her, prematurely ready to give up. He says, “You’re going to call the police?”

“Are you going to tell me why I shouldn’t?”

He looks around the bedroom, pulls on his beard. “I wasn’t going to take them,” he says. “I just wanted a look. I just wanted to see, to confirm for myself …”

“See what?” she says.

“The pictures.” he says.

“And confirm what?”

He looks at her, suddenly more confused than afraid.

“That they’re Propp’s,” he says in a soft, kind of reverent whisper.

Sylvia stares at him and refuses to speak for a while. Then she steps over to the telephone on the nightstand and lets her fingers rest on the receiver. Gaston looks from her hand to her face and back again.

Sylvia says, “You look different when you’re not in your pajamas.”

“For God’s sake,” he says, “I didn’t even find them. I didn’t disturb anything. Can’t we just leave it be?”

“No, we can’t just leave it be. You broke into someone’s apartment, Gaston. That’s a serious breach. That’s a crime. You can’t let things like this go.”

“Please, Sylvia,” his voice breaking and his eyes starting to blink too fast.

She lets him struggle for a few more seconds and then steps away from the phone and says, “Let’s go in the kitchen.”

They sit at the table with glasses of tap water in front of them and stare at each other.

“Why did you come here tonight?”

“I told you,” Gaston starts, “I only wanted—”

“No,” Sylvia says, “I mean what makes you think I have any Propp photos. I told you the only place I’ve ever seen a Propp was at the Skin Palace.”

He draws in a doubtful breath and says, “Please, Sylvia—”

She cuts him off and says, “Mr. Gaston, you’re not in a position to dictate how this discussion will go. We’re not sitting in Der Garten tonight. You want to screw around with me? I can have the police here with a phone call.”

“All right,” he says. “Calm down.”

“Quevedo told you the story, didn’t he?”

He shakes his head. “I told you before, I never heard of a Mr. Quevedo. Call the damn police if you want. I don’t know the man. Nobody in the group knows the man.”

“Please, Gaston,” mocking him.

“We know this much. We know you were the last person to visit Jack Derry’s before he stripped the store and ran. We know you left the store with a camera. An Aquinas. And we know you showed up at our door the next day.”

She takes a sip of water and gets overwhelmed with a metallic taste. She gets up and goes to the sink and dumps the glass.

“Back up. How do you know Deny? How do you know I went to the store?”

“Jack Deny has been in the Zone for years—”

“So has Quevedo.”

“I don’t know a Quevedo,” he snaps.

“All right,” she says. “You don’t know Quevedo.”

“Look, Sylvia,” he says. “We’re like the apostles after the crucifixion, okay? The group tries to live on faith. We look for signs, little traces that Propp’s still around. That there might be more—”

“More what?”

He looks at her, either annoyed or confused. “More images. More clues. More messages.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We can’t get enough, Sylvia,” he says. “There have to be more pictures. We go on in the hope that there are more pictures.”

“Look, we’re getting off track here—”

“What would you think?” he says, kind of a challenge. “A stranger comes to Der Garten. She asks questions about Propp. She’s evasive about her reasons and her existing information.”

“I’d think that she wasn’t telling me everything. That maybe she knew something I didn’t.”

“Exactly,” he says with a little pound of his fist on the table.

“But I wouldn’t necessarily break into her apartment.”

“But then,” he says, “you haven’t been infected as long as I have.”

“Infected?” Sylvia repeats.

“After a time it’s more of a burden than a joy. That’s probably true about every obsession. But it’s worse with Propp.”

She comes back to the table and sits down.

“Did you ever think,” she says, “that maybe Propp wouldn’t want all this devotion?”

“Did you ever think,” he answers, his voice on the edge of a sneer, as if she’s the fool for trying to reason with a fanatic, “that perhaps that doesn’t matter?”

She lets a beat go by and then changes the subject

“So Derry’s been a link to Propp information in the past.”

He nods. “A very tentative link. But at times he’s all we had. You have to understand that there are a lot of shysters in this area. People who will lead you on, tell you they know of someone who knows of someone, that there are rumors of a print in Europe. It’s like pulling teeth and it’s always expensive. More often than not it all leads to a dead end or a forgery.”

“But that wasn’t the case with Derry?”

“It never appeared to be. Once or twice he grudgingly supplied us with a tip. A phone number. An ad in a catalog. Nothing ever materialized, but it wasn’t a case of fraud or deceit. Things just blew up in our faces. People didn’t show up for meetings. That kind of thing.”

“Do you think Derry personally knows Propp?”

“Now that,” he says, “supposes that Propp is among the living.”

“So it does.”

“What do you think, Sylvia?”

“I’m new at this, remember?”

“Tell me you’ve got some prints, Sylvia.”

The look on his face is so earnest and really almost desperate that there is this sucker part of her that wants to take him by the hand and lead him down to the darkroom and hand him the salvation or narcotic that’s hanging on the dry-line.

“I wish I could, Gaston. But I’ve got nothing. Yes, I knew a little more about the myth than I let on at Der Garten. And yes, I bought a camera from Jack Derry. But that’s all I bought. I’m more in the dark than you people.”

He looks down at his lap and says, “You know I don’t want to believe you.”

She gets up and crosses to the back door and opens it.

“I’ve got to get some sleep now.”

He sits staring at her, finally rises out of the chair with a weary effort, walks past her out to the back hall, then stops and turns back and says, “I’m sorry, Sylvia.”

She doesn’t say anything and he moves down the back stairs.

In the cellar, Sylvia sits on the step stool. Her head has started to ache again. Her eyes are so tired and dry that each blink brings a sting like a wound. But she looks out on the line of pictures. She keeps looking at the pictures. She keeps staring at this woman and this child and this cavernous ruin.

She thinks about a Friday night long ago, attending the Stations of the Cross with her mother down at St. Brendan’s. She thinks about the Stations, the carvings, hung on the walls of the cathedral, hung in a specific order, each a story unto itself, and yet, each one connected to the next, connected by a ceremony, linked by a chain of interrelated events, and telling a larger story, the sum greater than the parts. And now the drying line is like the Stations of the Cross, hung this way, seven stories, seven segments of one story: Sylvia’s Stations.

She rubs her eyes, opens them, stares at the photographs.

Here are the things she knows.

No, here are the things she believes she knows: There is nothing erotic about these photographs in front of her.

She understands how subjective a judgment that is. She realizes that there are individuals who could find the erotic in a landfill or an ad for mouthwash, people who could manage to insert some idea of eroticism into any image they happen upon. But she believes that the majority of people, confronted with these seven pictures, would not attach the adjective, the concept, of erotic to them.

There is something extraordinary about these photographs.

She knows what they aren’t. But it’s something else entirely to define what they are. They are ethereal, but at the same time rooted in an earthy, actually grimy, setting. They are tender, and yet that tenderness feels overlaid with a fear, a vague conviction that something malignant is within reach. They are tragic and yet the more she looks at each one, the more she’s convinced of this unexplainable, unjustifiable sense of endurance emanating from the mother figure. Maybe even from the infant. More than anything, she wants to say the prints are haunting, like touchstones for memories that could unseat someone’s entire sense of the world. The pictures scare her, and yet she can’t turn away from them. They sadden her, and yet she can’t get enough.

There is no way to be sure these prints were taken by Terrence Propp.

Or, for that matter, that the man she spent this evening with, the man who took her to his underground lair and the flea market and the movie theatre, the man who photographed her at Gompers Station, there is no way to know that that man is Terrence Propp. Terrence Propp could be Jack Derry. He could be Mr. Quevedo. He could be dead and buried. He could be continents away, having renounced photography and his own past. He could be an empty legend created by a slick entrepreneur with the eye of an artist.

Whoever the man was tonight, he posed me in the same manner as the Madonna in these pictures.

Which means he must know about these pictures. Which suggests that it’s likely he did take these pictures. Which suggests that the Aquinas was placed in her hands on purpose, that the events of the past several days are much more than coincidence, are likely part of a plan, a strategy, a system for manipulating where she goes and what she thinks.

Someone wanted me to have these pictures.

She gets up off the stool and unclips the last print in the series, brings it to the worktable and holds a magnifying glass over it. She bends down, peers over the print, focuses on the mother’s face, stares at the shadow that obscures her features.

Propp’s voice comes to her.

There are stunning similarities.

She drops the magnifying glass. She walks to the dryline and steps in front of each photograph. She looks at the mother. She looks at the infant. She looks back to the mother.

She doesn’t want it to hit her, but of course it does, with the kind of vengeful, crippling intensity that can only pass over you once in a life span. She sinks down on the floor below the seven pictures and she begins to weep. Her arms and shoulders start to shake slightly and her nose begins to run. She tries to stifle any noise and manages only a soft keen, like a small animal caught in an even smaller space.

Epiphanies of this nature don’t grow out of a logical progression of facts. They don’t evolve from a rational chain of deduction and analysis. They simply appear, unexpected and uninvited, like a car out of control that changes the life of every person it collides with.

She cries even though she knows that it’s a waste of energy to try to fight this kind of knowledge. This certainty. This simple but horrible idea. It comes at you with the kind of suddenness and persistence you’ve chronically feared in your dreams. It rapes you with a kind of shocking but undeniable certainty. It takes your body, without warning or explanation, and hurls you brutally across a chasm of protective doubt, across the impediment of absent proof. And it lands you with a bone-rattling crash that no amount of time will allow recovery from.

She hears her throat and her tongue form the word out of the remains of her crying.

Mother.

The last things she’s sure of are the most awful of all.

Terrence Propp is my father.

The Madonna in the pictures is my mother.

And I am the infant at her breast.