The Skin Palace

27

The sound of a dog barking wakes Sylvia sometime before dawn. She gets up off the cellar floor and locks up the darkroom without looking at the pictures. She goes back up to the apartment, climbs into bed and falls asleep for another three hours, then showers and gets dressed and walks to the Snapshot Shack.

Now, sitting in the tiny booth with a half hour till opening, there’s no way to stop thinking. The radio is no distraction and Cora’s crossword magazines are all filled in. So she stares out the bubble window at the plaza in front of her, at the whitewashed glass and the realtor’s rental signs and the trash that’s collected on the walkway.

There is no reason to believe that twenty-five years ago, her mother bundled her in a blanket and took her down to an already abandoned and decayed train station. That her mother took a seat on a broken marble pillar and tilted her face toward the man who was her husband and Sylvia’s father. That her mother posed for seven photographs as Sylvia fed at her breast. That the man with the camera deserted them. And that for the next twenty years, up to the time of her death, mother never told daughter a word about any of these events.

There is not a single fact to suggest the validity of this particular story. And yet, Sylvia knows it’s the truth. She knows that this is exactly what took place. She knows the real fiction is comprised of the few details her mother did tell — that her father died before Sylvia was born, that the father was a milkman for a local dairy, that Sylvia had no family to speak of beyond her mother.

“And so what does she do with this knowledge? She thinks about Propp fleeing the Ballard last night and cringes at how close she came to violating the oldest taboo in the world. But should she seek him out now? Go back to Gompers or the Canal Zone cellars and try to find her way to St. Benedict’s?”

On the walk to work, low clouds rolled in and it’s been threatening to rain for the past hour. The air almost has that pre-tornado feel to it, a false stillness, as if this lack of breeze was just an ambush tactic. Sylvia looks at the strip of connected stores again and tries to picture what would happen if a tornado did touch down here. She can imagine the Snapshot Shack itself being torn off its slab and spun into flight, spiraling above Quinsigmond, just like Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse. She can imagine her head stuck out the bubble window, seeing people blown past her — Perry doing an off-balance air-swim, losing all the papers from his monogrammed briefcase, Leni Pauline bumping and grinding into the yonder, tassels revolving with the force of the twister, Hugo Schick maniacally grinning at this spectacle of nature, a hand-held camera filming the flight path of his own demise. And Terrence Propp just letting the winds take him, an ambiguous look on his face, neither terror nor contentment, just a nod in Sylvia’s direction as he passes.

She kills the fantasy and realizes she’s staring at Mrs. Ellis, Jenny’s tormented, agonized mother. The woman has her ever present “Missing” posters tucked under her arm. She’s dressed in the same clothes she was wearing when Sylvia saw her at the Halloween block party. The woman’s hair sticks out in every direction. She’s walking slowly past the plaza’s empty stores, trying to peer inside each one through the whitewashed windows, as if her daughter sits inside some bankrupt footwear shop, playing with abandoned laces and shoeboxes, just waiting for her mother to find the correct location and take her home again.

Mrs. Ellis walks up to an old man sitting on a slatted wooden bench at the end of the walkway. She begins to go into what must by now be an automatic spiel, the incomprehensible story of how random evil came to her door one day. The old man nods sympathetically and takes one of the flyers, studies Jenny’s picture. Then he gestures to the Snapshot Shack and, after some discussion, leaves Mrs. Ellis and begins to move across the parking lot toward Sylvia. He walks with a slight limp, leaning down on a cane. Halfway across the asphalt, Sylvia realizes that the figure is Mr. Quevedo from Brody’s Adult Books.

She slides the bubble open and waits for him to approach.

“You’re a long way from your shop,” she says before he can speak.

He comes to a stop directly in front of the window and stands formally with both his hands on the top of his cane and his milky eyes staring out at nothing in particular. He’s dressed in a slightly worn and very dated brown suit with a yellow and brown paisley tie.

“I decide to take a stroll,” he says, “before the weather turns.”

“I think you’ll get caught on your way back.”

“I won’t melt,” he says, then both of them are quiet for a few seconds and the awkwardness blooms. She should have expected to see Quevedo, sooner or later.

“I went to see Rory Gaston,” she says. “He swears he doesn’t know you.”

Quevedo seems to think for a minute. He blinks a few times and then says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever been introduced to Mr. Gaston.”

“You’re the one who told me to go see him.”

“I provided you with a name, Miss Krafft. I never said I knew any of the Proppists personally.”

A small, annoying smile comes over his face and prompts her to say, “What is it I can do for you, Mr. Quevedo? Do you have some film to drop off? We’re running a sensational price on Snapshot Shack brand when you drop off an exposed roll for processing.”

“I don’t take pictures, Sylvia,” he says.

“Well then,” she says, “it was good seeing you. I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“My child,” he says and she flinches. “This is no way to treat an old man.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m having a very tough day. And the morning shipment is due any minute.”

He shifts his stance and looks up at the darkening sky and she wonders just how much he can see.

“I’m not your enemy, Sylvia. Out of all the men in your life, I’m not the one you should fear.”

Before she can think she says, “There’s only one man in my life.”

“Would that be Mr. Schick or Mr. Propp?”

“That would be Mr. Leroux.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head and pushing his pale, cracked lips out as if he was trying to whistle, “no it wouldn’t.”

So far, she’s more angry than fearful. She yells, “Who the hell are you, asshole?”

“Vulgarity doesn’t flatter you, child.”

“All right, just knock it off with the child shit. Jesus.”

She wants to climb out of the booth and knock the blind old bastard on his ass. He remains unfazed. He touches the small knot of his tie and says, “I’m not here to anger or annoy you, Sylvia.”

“So why are you here?”

“Very simply,” he says, “to be of assistance. I know you currently feel that there’s no one you can trust. And I know what a horrible feeling that can be, Sylvia. Please believe me.”

“And why,” she asks, coming back to control, “would you want to help me?”

He smiles as if the answer should be obvious. “I’m a displaced person, Sylvia. Before I settled in Quinsigamond, I was often a transient. Often a victim of some very brutal forms of repression. Buffeted by forces I could not always see. Forgive the pun.”

“Go on.”

“You are not the only frightened person in this city. I am not a free agent. I have compromised to the point where I owe allegiances and favors to a multitude of conflicting clients. To everyone but myself. People seem to think I’m the nexus where they can find satisfaction. Attain some unattainable artifact of their desires. Believe me, Sylvia, I know what it’s like to be scared and confused.”

“You haven’t given me a single reason why I should trust you.”

“I’m not sure,” he says, “what I could give you that would be adequate. That would make you believe my intentions are simple and benign. I’ve lived in Quinsigamond for a number of years now, Sylvia. I was here before you were born. But I’ll always be a foreigner in this city. The advantage of that fact is that I see a good many things the natives miss. And I’m a blind man, so I hear much that the sighted are deaf to. I’m a receptacle of information. Much of it is rumor and gossip. But some percentage of it is of value.”

She studies him, this awkward, slightly bent old man with odd, papery skin, long fingers, brittle, white, birdlike hair. Flanked this way, by the deserted plaza in the distance, the sky looking like it was about to press down on him, all she can think is what a wonderful picture he’d make.

“Last night,” she says, “I met a man who claimed to be Terrence Propp. Was he telling the truth?”

There’s no hesitation. He says. “He is what he claims to be. Don’t judge him too harshly.”

“I never said anything about judging him at all,” she says. “He tried to warn me away from Hugo Schick. Is that good advice?”

“Schick,” he says, seeming to consider his words, “is a megalomaniac. He is also a man of some talent. But then, there is no law, natural or otherwise, that says artists have to be ethical people. Schick may be a pathological liar. And he appears to consume all but the strongest individuals in his path. To be honest, Sylvia, I can’t see the benefit of an association with Mr. Schick.”

“Which one is running me through the maze, Quevedo?”

“The maze?”

“You want to help me? Then answer some of my questions. Like who made sure I got the Aquinas? Why was I supposed to find those pictures? What happened to Jack Derry? How did Propp know I’d be at the Halloween block party?”

He waves his right hand, a kind of fluid stop sign.

“Slow down, Sylvia,” he says. “Yes, I want to help you. But understand, my child — I’m sorry, excuse me — understand that, like everyone else, I’m at the mercy of my age and my culture. I may well know a bit more than you about both Mr. Schick and Mr. Propp. And I confess that I can’t prevent myself from making certain judgments concerning their behavior, their attitudes, the wreckage both seem to leave in their wake. A man of my particular sensibility might use phrases like irresponsible cad, like self-consumed scoundrel. Possibly, I could use a word like deviant or perhaps, in some case, even pervert. These words might be applied to one or both of the men in question. But Sylvia, they are not limited to those men. The world is full of callous and cruel men.”

“You have a problem getting to the point, Mr. Quevedo.”

He closes his eyes, nods. “Perhaps,” he says, “your greatest threat does not come from either Schick or Propp.”

“I found Rory Gaston in my apartment last night—”

“He’s a sad and deluded figure, but not a dangerous one.”

“Should I be afraid of you, Quevedo?”

He lets out a quick blast of a laugh, a high-pitched, one-syllable bleat. “I’m an old man at the end of a tiring life, Sylvia. Admit the obvious.”

“You’re saying Perry. You’re saying you know something about Perry.”

The white eyes just stare at her and she knows he’s got nothing more to say.

“Perry would never hurt me,” she says. “He’s not even aware of what’s been going on in my life.”

“I must get back to the store,” he says, gives a little bow, turns on his heel and starts to walk away across the lot. Sylvia doesn’t try to stop him. She doesn’t say a word. When he gets to the edge of the plaza, the rain begins to fall and she watches him turn up the collar of his suitcoat before he disappears around the corner.

She turns on the radio. She searches the drawers for an eraser so she can rub out all of Cora’s crossword answers. She picks up one of the romance novels that someone’s always leaving behind in the booth, opens it randomly and reads a page.

… Yes,” Simone said as she turned away from the sight of Pierre disappearing down the beach, “if I can’t have you, my love, I can still paint you!” She picked up her palette and straightened the canvas on the easel. She began to mix the colors once again, swirling shades together the way she had been taught so long ago in Paris, but now her eyes began to fill with the sting of tears and the dabs of bright paint spread out before her began to blur and …

She throws the book in the trash bucket. The courier truck pulls up to the window and she slides the bubble open. She’s never seen this driver before. He doesn’t say hello. He’s writing furiously on a clipboard which he suddenly heaves at her, almost hitting her in the face. She signs for the delivery and hands him back the board and the courier passes her a fat packet of film envelopes held together with thick rubber bands. Then he drives off, leaving the Shack engulfed in a cloud of carbon monoxide. Sylvia closes the window completely, which she hates doing even when it rains. She unbands the envelopes and sits them in her lap and starts to alphabetize them.

The phone rings and she jumps and the envelopes fall onto the floor. She starts to scoop them back with one hand and answers the phone with the other.

“Snapshot Shack, this is Sylvia. Can I help you?”

“A heart and lung machine and total forgiveness would be a start.”

It’s Perry. She knew the call would come but she’s still dreading the next three minutes.

“You survived,” she says.

“Barely. You just can’t do this after you turn thirty. I’m going to be hurting for a week.”

“Well, you couldn’t let the district attorney think you were a lightweight.”

“Eddie’s out of my league. Never again. I’m just not a Scotch drinker,” a pause, then, “How are you feeling, Syl?”

“Much better,” she says. “I just needed some sleep.”

“You were gone when I got in this morning.”

“I got to work early. I wanted to beat the rain.”

“I’m really sorry, Syl. That was really juvenile last night. I’m an idiot.”

“It’s okay. I understand. The new law partner doesn’t say no when the D.A. is buying the drinks.”

There’s a second of silence and she wonders if he thinks she’s being sarcastic, but he comes back with a new tone to his voice, all low and serious. “We’ve really been strangers all week. It’s worrying me, Sylvia. I don’t—”

She cuts him off. She doesn’t want to do this. “It’s been a bad week, Perry,” she says. “It’s been bad for both of us. It’s the moon or something.”

“We need to do some major talking, honey. You know. We need to just sit down and clear the air. Start fresh. We’ve got to get things straight again—”

“Oh, God, wouldn’t you know it,” she says.

“What?”

“I’ve got a customer at the window. I’m going to have to run.”

“Call me back, Sylvia.”

“Okay, I’ll call. I’ve gotta go now.”

“Call me.”

She hangs up the phone. She doesn’t know why she lied to him. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t talk to him. She reaches down to pick up the last of the dropped pictures and the phone rings again. She stares at it, thinking about letting it ring, thinks that it might be Cora checking on her and picks up the receiver.

“Snapshot Shack, Sylvia speaking. Can I help you?”

“In more ways than you can imagine.”

It’s Hugo Schick.

“Actually,” he continues, “I think we can very likely help each other.”

“If you’re calling about the job, Hugo—” she begins, but he cuts her off.

“Did this morning’s delivery come yet, Sylvia?”

This throws her and she looks down at the black plastic envelopes in her lap. “Yeah. About five minutes ago.”

“I’m hosting a working party tonight, Sylvia. I need for you to be there. It’s going to be a major event. I’ll be filming all evening and into the morning. I’ll be completing my meisterstück. Tonight, we finish years of work on Don Juan Triumphant. I need you to document it all, Sylvia. I need your eyes.”

“I’m not coming to the party, Hugo.”

“We’ll be taking down a wall and using both studios. Bring your equipment, Sylvia.”

“I won’t be there, Hugo.”

“You’ll want to talk to me. And if you come, I promise I’ll make time. We’ll steal away at some point.”

“I’m sorry, Hugo—”

“In this morning’s delivery. A package for a Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Not much technique, but you have to credit their imaginations. You take a long look at their pictures, Sylvia. And then you decide about tonight.”

“Look Hugo,” but he’s already hung up.

She replaces the receiver. She shuffles the envelopes and looks at each name sticker until she comes to one that reads Jones. She puts all the other envelopes to the side and holds the Jones’s in her hands. She breaks the seal and pulls out the prints. They’re 4 × 6 color shots. Of Perry. And of Candice Haskell. And they’re having dinner in a restaurant that could be Fiorello’s. And they’re walking in what looks like a public park, holding hands. And then they’re seen from a distance, through the window of some nondescript room, kissing each other. They’re touching each other. They’re on top of each other. Perry on top. Candice on top. There are shots of them on some leather couch, necking. Shots of them half-clothed, bent over Perry’s desk at Walpole & Lewis.

Shots of them in Sylvia’s bed, completely naked, sitting up, in motion, chest to chest, both sets of eyes closed as if they were straining against the force of some imminent explosion.

28

Mr. Quevedo moves down Waldstein Avenue striking the sidewalk with his cane, tapping out the beat of a song from his childhood, “La Tablada,” a tango by Vincente Greco. He’s pleased with his recollection, though the song holds no sense of nostalgia for him, no longing for an unretrievable past time. Quevedo is simply happy and surprised that his memory is not only intact at this advanced age, but seems to be somehow improving. Images he hasn’t pulled up in decades are now being screened daily behind his ever worsening eyes. The candy store on Tucuman Street where the guapos bought their mermaid playing cards. The garden in Palermo where grandfather practiced his topiary. The old-book smell in the basement of the library at Montevideo.

We go back to the past, replay the familiar in slightly different ways, with new shadings and colors that give what was once mundane a new aura of excitement, and sometimes, of meaning. There’s no harm in this reconstruction. Like everything else, its a way to occupy the hours until the true darkness falls. Certainly it’s a more pleasant diversion than trying to determine where a schizophrenic camera salesman might be hiding.

There was a time in Quevedo’s life when the more complicated transactions were the most worthwhile and when a modicum of precariousness gave an exquisite seasoning to the deal. Those were the days of long afternoons in Turkish cafés, drinking raki and not having any idea whether the briefcase being opened by a fat man in a linen suit contained a stolen Egyptian fertility totem or a 9 mm Beretta automatic. Fortunes impenetrable to the tax man were made in Istanbul’s spring and squandered by Stockholm’s autumn. Contracts were sealed with a passing of the jewel-encrusted hashish pipe and ruptured with a bundle of dynamite underneath the antique Rolls-Royce.

Now, Luis Quevedo is a marble-eyed refugee in a city abandoned by God. And his lunch hour is spent, not bribing a customs minister with naked photos of Victoria Regina, but begging for information from trust-fund artists with brass rings dangling from one or more nostrils. Lucifer never fell so far, Quevedo thinks as he unlocks and opens the door to Brody’s Adult Books.

And is yanked inside by Huck Hrabal and thrown to the ground at the feet of Felix Kinsky.

Felix slaps closed an atlas-sized volume titled The Succubus Through History and heaves it over his shoulder.

“What in the name of God?” Quevedo says and tries to stand up, but Vera Gottwald steps forward and puts a boot on the old man’s back.

“The only God worth praying to today,” Felix says, coming down on one knee to pat Quevedo’s head like that of an indulged beagle, “is named Hermann Kinsky.”

“I’ve paid this month’s service fees—”

“My visit,” Felix says, “has nothing to do with our service fees.”

Quevedo tilts his head up and squints, as if contracting the skin around his eyes will do what a half dozen marathon surgeries at Havana Eye and Ear could not. He sees the usual ghost-world, the cloud-draped, shadowy symbols that have instinctively come to represent physical reality. There are a dozen people in his store. Their posture alone is disrespectful. They are lounging on his sofa, reclining on his Persian rugs, poring over his wares like dimadolescents surveying the cheapest skin magazines on the planet.

“My uncle,” Felix says in a whisper, “is extremely disappointed in your abilities, Luis.”

Luis, from the mouth of this teenager.

“Then your uncle,” Quevedo says, unbowed, spitting out the relation, “should have come to see me.”

Felix stands up, walks to a nearby shelf, pulls down Don Juan: The Suppressed Versions and starts to open to the illustrations.

“If you knew Hermann,” he says, “you’d know that he hates to waste time. And you, Luis, have become an enormous waste of his time. And, I will add, of his money.”

Quevedo makes another attempt to rise and this time Vera Gottwald climbs on his back, straddles him like a miniature pony at a petting zoo. All the Roaches laugh and Felix says, “Be careful, Luis, she’s wearing her spurs today.”

Then he snaps his fingers and Hrabal and Krofta and Bidlo get up and wander down different aisles, begin to grab books and toss them in the air, knock them in piles to the ground.

“Please,” Quevedo cries, “some of these texts are very old, very fragile.”

Felix steps to the first-editions case, runs a finger down a row of spines and pulls out a slim, leather-bound volume.

“Magdalene Revealed,” he says to the room. “Tell me, Luis, how much would this item be worth today?”

“Please,” Quevedo repeats, only to be answered with the cringe-inducing sound of brittle paper being torn from its binding.

“Five thousand,” he yells.

Felix clucks his tongue in the hollow well of his mouth and says, “Jesus, old man, we’ve been underchanging you.”

Quevedo shakes his head. “You must tell Hermann, I am making progress in the transaction. I am very close to finding Jack Deny. I will have the photographs—”

Another page is torn free and Felix says, “Hey, idiot, I’m not an errand boy here. I’m not some goddamn answering service. I don’t know what you were supposed to get my uncle and honestly don’t give a rat’s ass.”

He walks back to the center of the store and slaps Quevedo across the forehead with the wounded book.

“You fucked up, you moron.”

“Please, Felix,” Luis stammers. “I am asking for time, I am asking for another day. Hermann is making a terrible mistake.”

“Hermann,” Felix yells, then pauses, lowers his voice, “doesn’t make mistakes. Now I don’t know what business you two were doing, but something has gone terribly wrong. My uncle thinks you’ve taken his money. He thinks you’ve failed to honor your end of an agreement. That’s like spitting in his face, Mr. Q. And you just do not spit in Hermann Kinsky’s face.”

Felix motions Vera Gottwald off her geriatric trotter and she jogs to an aisle to join Huck Hrabal. Quevedo starts to stand and Felix gives a short kick to his side, collapsing him to the ground, then grabs the old man by the suitcoat and yanks him up into a wing chair.

Kinsky walks behind the chair, reaches over and puts his thumb and forefinger on either side of Quevedo’s Adam’s apple.

“I don’t like you, Luis,” he says, pinching in on the neck. “In fact, of all my customers, I think I dislike you the most. And I’m not completely sure why that is.”

He begins to apply more pressure to either side of the throat.

“It could be that smugness, you know what I’m talking about? That nose-in-the-air bullshit coming from a guy who sells smut.”

More tension from the fingers.

A gurgle from Quevedo.

“Or maybe it’s those fucking eyes. I can never tell when you’re looking at me. How much can you really see—”

“Just do it,” Quevedo rasps. “Just take out your wire and finish it.”

Felix lets go of the throat and pats the bookseller on the head. He walks back around the chair and takes a seat on the couch, opposite Luis. Felix crosses his legs, smiles and shakes his head.

“The Schonborn,” he says, then bites his bottom lip and nods. “My uncle’s signature. He always uses the Schonborn. It never breaks.”

He starts to leaf through a book lying next to him on the couch—A Manual for Extended Ecstasy—and he mumbles, “Such a waste of energy.”

Felix closes the book and sits back. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hrabal and Gottwald at the far end of an aisle, both staring into some thick art volume, transfixed by the image they’ve found, Huck’s arm hooking around Vera’s back to massage a breast.

Quevedo leans down, rests his elbows on his knees.

“Please, Felix,” he says, “You must speak with Hermann. If he genuinely wants the photographs, I am the only conduit.”

Felix sniffs, nods again. He leans back on the couch, seemingly exhausted.

“Luis,” he says, speaking to the ceiling, “I don’t know from any photographs. And I never use a Schonborn. It’s so,” he closes his eyes, brings a hand to his mouth, then to his chest, “primitive. Old world. You know what I’m saying? All that blood and spittle on the hands. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine for Uncle Hermann. He’ll die with the old ways.”

He reaches inside his green suede jacket, withdraws a pistol.

“This,” he says, holding up the gun, “is the American way of business.”

And he squeezes the trigger twice, pumps two bullets into Luis Quevedo, one entering through the forehead, the other finding its target and tearing through the left eyeball. Quevedo bucks upward a bit, then the body just slumps to the right and slides down slightly, the head coming to rest at a ridiculous angle. The old man’s mouth opens but no sound emerges. Then the mouth closes, but the right eye remains open, its creamy marble interior rigid in its socket.

Felix stands, reholsters his gun, moves to the body and rifles inside Quevedo’s jacket, pocketing a wallet.

“Hrabal,” he yells down an aisle, interrupting Huck and Vera who are lost in an endless French kiss. Huck pulls away, wipes at his mouth and jogs to the front of the store.

“I want the body lost,” Felix says. “You think you can handle that? Or should I assign it to the little lady?”

Huck Hrabal meets his boss’s stare but doesn’t say a word.

Felix gives a soft snort through his nose, then turns and exits the store.

29

Sylvia sits inside this overgrown camera and starts to cry. And immediately she gets furious with herself. But the anger doesn’t stop the tears, doesn’t stop the feeling that floods into her stomach and lungs.

She throws the pictures and they rain down around her until the whole of the booth is filled with odd-angled glimpses of two people in various stages of copulation.

I left my mother’s couch for this. I pulled myself out of a world that was confined to the corner convenience store and the sound track from Rita Hayworth movies so I could be assaulted from every possible direction, so I could be confused and betrayed and paranoid. So I could sit in the vault of film and batteries and disposable cameras with my ankles covered by glossy images of my lover lying down with someone else.

And then the thought occurs to her that there’s no way the lab would have developed these prints. There are strict guidelines for this kind of thing. They’ll print an exposed breast or behind, but no full-frontal nudity and absolutely no sexual activity of any kind.

She fishes around on the floor, picking up and discarding envelopes till she comes to the Jones’s package. She turns it over and looks at the order blank where instructions for developing and pricing are located. But the order boxes are blank. The only thing written on the envelope is Mr and Mrs Jones. And it’s not in any handwriting she recognizes.

So the package didn’t come from the normal lab. Schick managed to include it with the regular delivery.

Maybe these pictures are what Leni wants to warn her about tonight. And maybe Leni can explain why Schick wants to do this.

The phone starts to ring again and Sylvia starts to cry again. She turns out the light in the booth and lets herself sob. She misses her mother with an intensity that feels like it will take over, like it will become the only emotion, the only sensation she’ll ever feel. She thinks of Ma, alone on that first night, realizing her husband is not coming back, that he’s dead or that he’s run off, whichever story is correct, it doesn’t matter. And for the first time Sylvia understands the true weight of that kind of realization, the possibility that in the instant that fact of loss takes hold of you and lodges, permanently, intractably, into the deepest marrow of your bones, you could turn against life and movement. You could turn against yourself. She can picture her mother, she can see her, so brutally clearly, twenty-five years ago, looking in on the daughter, in bed, in the dimness of that tiny room, Ma staring at the form beneath the quilting, Ma in the doorjamb, framed, backlit, motionless, a definitive picture of a woman alone, fighting a kind of half-apprehended terror that she senses might never go away, looking down on the responsibility of a child, of Sylvia, in front of her, filling her vision. And all of Ma’s innocence, her sense of promise and hope, just dead, just petrified in the emptiness of the rooms behind her. How did she go on for the rest of this imagined night?

And now Sylvia’s crying more for her mother than herself. Because she knows that she doesn’t love Perry. She’s not sure she ever loved Perry. He was a way to move from one point to another. He was someone she needed badly at one time. Maybe desperately. And she’s crying because she doesn’t know if she’ll ever forgive herself for that.

She reaches down and picks up the razor knife she uses to open supply boxes. She lifts up the ringing telephone and puts it in her lap on top of the pictures of Perry and Candice. She grabs the phone cord in her left hand, makes a small loop. She cuts through the cord and the ringing stops, then she opens the bubble window and heaves the freed phone into the parking lot.

This will be Sylvia’s last day at the Snapshot Shack.

On the walk home, she keeps expecting to see Mr. Quevedo in the distance ahead, walking like the risen dead, an awkward zombie in a fraying suit. But she doesn’t see anyone. The storm has gotten worse and she’s completely soaked after the first block.

When she finally gets back to the apartment, she stands inside the entry and just shakes her shoulders and head like big long-haired dog. Then she un-Velcros the pouch on her anorak and takes out the pictures of Perry and Candice. She thinks about leaving them on the stairway, one on each stair, each picture getting progressively more explicit as you climb to the apartment. A trail of sleazy crumbs leading back to one more boring primal image—the wronged woman.

She puts the pictures back in the pouch and runs up to the back door, takes the spare key, lets herself into the kitchen, goes straight to the bedroom closet and pulls it open. And, thankfully, no one’s inside this time, so she starts pulling off sopping clothes and dropping them into a laundry pile. The plan is to collect all her dirty clothes, grab a bottle of wine, head down to the cellar, toss everything in the washer, pour the first drink of the day and go into the darkroom. She wants to pin the Perry-Candice pictures on the dry-line. She wants to study them the way a bride studies the proofs from her wedding package. She wants to pick the seven most hurtful poses, the seven most insulting and degrading postures. She wants to clip them alternatively next to the Propp photos. Madonna and Child followed by Perry and Candice followed by Madonna and Child. She wants to see what the positioning will do to her. What it might tell her. She wants to see if the combination of alternating images will have some reaction, like chemicals thrown together in some impulsive and radical experiment.

She slides into her mother’s slippers and is belting her robe when she hears a knock on the back door. She puts the pictures in the pocket of the robe, walks out, pulls the door open and sees Mrs. Acker, the landlady standing in her red sneakers and housedress covered by her dead husband’s old canvas fishing jacket, feathery lures still pinned to the lapels. The jacket has a detailed picture of a trout embroidered on the back, a huge hook through its mouth and the words this one’s a keeper written in script underneath.

Mrs. Acker smiles and tries to look into the kitchen. This morning she’s wearing her standard schmear of heavy makeup, layers of some rust-colored rouge from below her eyes to her chin and a bluish, purplish eye shadow that wars with a fire-engine red lipstick that Sylvia has never seen her go without. Last year there was a car crash out in front of the church at three in the morning. Perry and Sylvia ran outside and there was Mrs. A in housecoat and sneakers and full makeup. Someday Sylvia wants to get up the nerve to ask her where she buys her cosmetics.

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Acker says, “you’re home.”

“The Shack’s closed. Problems with the phone system.”

The landlady’s hands go to her hips. “Listen, Sylvia, I wonder if you could do me a little favor.”

Sylvia indicates her dripping hair. “I just got out of the rain, Mrs. A, could you give me about fifteen minutes.”

“This’ll just take you a second, honey. Honest to God. I’ve got some of Begelman’s coffee cake heating,” and she’s got Sylvia by the arm and is leading her down the stairs.

Sylvia doesn’t fight it. She moves to sit at the kitchen table, but Mrs. Acker says, “No, no, the papers are in the living room.”

For all her money, Mrs. A hasn’t redecorated her apartment since Mr. Acker died in 1969—we were up late, watching that moonwalk, and I say, Louie, don’t those big suits they wear look uncomfortable and he doesn’t answer. He’s had a coronary right in front of me and the astronauts …

The walls are covered with heavy flock wallpaper but the paper is mostly hidden by plaque after plaque bearing mounted, shellacked fish and the inscribed date of their demise. Mrs. A shoos a half dozen cats off the couch and they jump and run in a blur of different shades of brown and grey.

“Have a seat, dear, I’ve got the pen here somewhere,” and she starts pawing around the coffee table. “You’re such a help. Such a nice girl. The one before you, she was as surly as they come. A policewoman, of all things. Now she lives with an asthmatic mailman about a mile from here. I say, good luck to her.”

Sylvia looks at the clumps of cat hair covering the plaid wool sofa and sinks into the matching rocking chair. The television is on but the volume is turned down and she sees the Reverend Garland Boetell hopping around a red-carpeted stage in a huge auditorium, waving a Bible and thrusting his microphone around like a stiletto.

Mrs. Acker sees her watching and says, “Isn’t he just wonderful?”

“You’re a fan?”

“Sylvia, we need a man like the Reverend. We need him desperately.”

Sylvia nods agreement and looks back to the TV.

“The Reverend is here in Quinsigamond—” she starts.

“I know,” Mrs. A says. “Isn’t it exciting?”

Sylvia motions to the television and asks, “Is this a tape?”

Mrs. A raises her penciled-in eyebrows and steps over to a cherry bookcase filled to capacity with books and video-tapes. She puts a hand on top of the case like some bizarre display model and says, “I’ve got the entire library. Three hundred and sixty-five hours of wisdom. And all the books.”

She pulls out a volume and shows the dust jacket. The title is Tear Out the Offending Eye and the cover art is appropriately graphic.

“The books are divinely inspired, you know.”

“Is that right?” Sylvia says. She can smell cinnamon coming from the kitchen.

“He just sits down and turns off the business of his brain and the words flood into him. That’s what he says. They just flood in.”

Mrs. A sits down on the edge of the couch and a cat pops its head out from underneath the fringe and starts to mewl around her ankle. She picks up the cat absentmindedly, puts it in her lap and starts to stroke it. “I’ve never been a particularly religious individual, Sylvia. But this isn’t just about religion. This is about cleaning up. This is about restoring things to the way they should be. We’ve drifted, Sylvia.”

“I guess so,” Sylvia says and stares at the cat as its tongue comes out and swipes around its mouth.

“And the time is short,” Mrs. A says. “The time is dwindling. It’s upon us. The prophecies are all there, plain as day for anyone who’d take the time to look.”

The coffee table in front of them is blanketed with crumpled envelopes, manila folders, coffee mugs, a pair of scissors, and a pamphlet with the words Revelation Can Be Yours on the front flap.

“You mentioned a favor,” Sylvia says, pushing her wet hair behind her ears.

“When your Perry told me he was working with the Reverend, well you can imagine, I just about died. When he told me the man himself was in your living room the other night, I could barely contain myself. It’s as if it were destined, don’t you think?”

“That’s how it seems.”

“Perry’s told me about the important work they’re doing. How our city is going to be the springboard. They talk like such crusaders. Such passion. Springboard. Don’t you just love it?”

Sylvia’s head fills with a picture of a naked Perry and a naked Candice bouncing into the air off a monstrously high diving board. Intertwining during their free fall.

“You have to love it,” she says.

“But this morning I saw the forms required a witness—”

“The forms?”

Mrs. Acker nods and leans forward, pulls up one of the manila folders and hands it across the table. Sylvia opens it and reads Last Will and Testament of Roberta J. Acker. She looks up and Mrs. Acker is holding a pen out.

“You’re leaving all your money to Reverend Boetell?”

Mrs. A smiles and nods, proud and determined. “And the house. And all the rental properties and Louie’s antique coins and the greyhound I keep down in Rhode Island, though to be honest, Sylvia, I think his best days are over.”

It takes Sylvia a second to realize Mrs. A means the greyhound.

“Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t all go to the Reverend personally. It goes to Millennial Ministries Corporation of Macon, Georgia. And there is a small clause for the cats.”

“The cats?”

“Perry’s assured me they’ll be taken care of.”

“I’m sure.”

Sylvia starts to read through the first paragraph of the will and stops and says, “I can’t witness this, Mrs. Acker.”

Mrs. A looks confused.

“What’s the problem, dear?”

“It’s just,” Sylvia stammers, “I can’t—”

But Mrs. A suddenly ignores her and lunges for the remote control to the TV and the cat leaps over the coffee table and disappears in the direction of the kitchen.

“I just love this part,” Mrs. A says, focusing in on the screen, and Sylvia turns to see the Reverend in a brown suit that looks a little like cowskin. The man is furious, worked into a lather that puts his art museum spiel to shame.

The volume on the set comes up and the Reverend’s eyes roll back in his head and he slaps a hand on his forehead and falls to his knees, brings his microphone up until it touches his mouth and gets assaulted with spittle. It’s as if he’s launching into a seizure that will require long-term medical care. His whole body starts to buck like a rodeo rider on a ghost-bull.

“I saw a vision,” he screams, in a roar so intense it appears likely he’ll rupture blood vessels. “I saw a vision of the coming rapture. I saw the future of the coming war when blood will engulf this wretched planet. And I heard the voice of the Holy One calling down to me, calling down with the mission I could not refuse, calling down, dauuoown upon my pitiful human ears. And he said the battle is now upon us, my miserable servant. The battle is here and the time is now. And he says unto me the tha-rone of Satan rises in the east. The time of the tribulation screams down to our feet and none can escape the ravagement of these horrors. And I saw the son of may-ann with seven stars in his right hand and the key of David in his left hand and a raayzor-sharp two-edge sword issuing from his mouth. And his face was like the sun shining in full inferno. And I looked upon that face of the Master, seated there in the golden throne, and he showed me the scroll and the seven seals and said, it must be you, Garland, it must be you and you alone who will break open these seals and prepare my people for the coming Armageddon …”

Sylvia closes the manila folder and puts it back on the coffee table, but Mrs. Acker doesn’t seem to notice. She’s fingering the remote control box like prayer beads and Sylvia gets up and leaves the apartment without another word.

Down in the darkroom, she mounts the step stool and makes herself look at the seven pictures.

And all the surety of last night is gone.

There’s nothing in these images to suggest that this woman was Sylvia’s mother. That Sylvia is the infant in her arms. That a man named Terrence Propp took the shots. Or that the man named Terrence Propp is Sylvia’s father.

Playing the idea back now, like this, it sounds ludicrous to her. The kind of thing you can only conceive of at the height of your most outrageous drunk. The kind of thing that in a day’s time and sober, you can’t imagine having considered.

She imposed that meaning on these photographs. She took the essence of these seven images and imbued them with a need completely specific to her, and yet one that, until now, she’s not sure she knew existed.

And if she can do that with random pictures, chance images that happened to come into her possession, she has to wonder what else, what other artifacts, what other identical and meaning-free objects she commonly acts on. What other haphazard items does she mindlessly change into something she wants or needs them to be?

The first answer is Perry.

And then everything else lines up behind

The Berkshires nightgown.

The Snapshot Shack

Old movies.

The last answer is Memories of my mother.

Last, not because she’s exhausted the subject, but because she sees there might be no end at all.

What she needed was for Rita Hayworth to look out from the screen just once, just one time during the tenure on mother’s couch, during the Lost Months, the zombie-time. She needed Rita H to turn away from her on-screen co-star and peer into Ma’s dim living room and take the cigarette from her lips and say, “The world does not revolve around you, Sylvia.”

She takes the snapshots of Perry and Candice from the pocket of the robe. She gets off the stool and walks to the dry-line and pins one color snapshot over each of the Madonna and Child shots. She moves back to the stool and sits down and looks. There’s no reaction, chemical or otherwise. No interaction between the two series. Nothing that will give up an answer, a way to act or react.

So, what to do? Confront Perry? Wait for him to come home, be sitting maybe in the living room, silent and coiled the way he was the day of the Skin Palace riot. She could glue the pictures to the TV screen until the whole tube was covered, stay frozen as he walked in loosening his tie, wait until he noticed the new station she’s found on the cable band. The infidelity collage network.

Or maybe she could get dressed right now and go down to Walpole & Lewis, march past the receptionist’s warning that Mr. Leroux is in an important meeting, throw open the doors on the conference room where Reverend Boetell and the FUD-heads are huddled down with Perry and Candice trying to decide how to rid the world of Hugo Schick and all things lewd and lascivious. She could throw the pictures on their fat walnut table, watch Boetell’s face go white and red, see Candice run for the partners’ washroom, feel the vibrations of Perry’s future crashing and burning around him.

But if she really doesn’t love Perry, these photos shouldn’t mean much beyond hurt pride and embarrassment. And if that’s true then the only motivation for attacking him with the pictures is vengefulness.

Still: three feet in front of her is a photograph, the last photograph in the series, of her lover, the man she’s lived with these past two years, the man who supposedly wants to marry her and buy a house together and have kids together. And he’s naked, in their bed upstairs, having sex with someone other than Sylvia, with a woman he very likely finds more attractive.

Sylvia wants Rita Hayworth to appear out of the blackness of the darkroom’s corner, done up in that dress from Gilda. Wants her to step in front of the dry-line and say, “This is a place for vengefulness, Sylvia.”

But Rita, all of this is taking me away from the more important questions.

Hugo Schick called on the phone to say that the pictures existed. Schick’s biggest enemy is Reverend Garland Boetell. And Boetell’s point man, his newest tool, his latest creature, is Perry Leroux.

Hugo and Sylvia need to have a talk.

30

Back upstairs Sylvia unplugs the phone, lies down on the couch, relieved the sky is overcast, turns the TV to the Peter Lorre Festival and watches They Met in Bombay and Invisible Agent, then dozes off halfway through Hotel Berlin.

At seven-thirty she gets up and it’s dark outside and she’s still alone in the apartment. She goes into the bathroom and throws water on her face and pulls her hair back. She puts on jeans, a pair of ankle boots and a sweater. She grabs the Canon off the counter and a new roll of film from the fridge, then pulls a very old yellow rain slicker from the hall closet.

She heads outside just as the Wolcott Street bus pulls up. It’s one of the ancient, small and boxy, green-and-red buses with the porthole-style windows and the antiquated exhaust system that belches black clouds every time the driver accelerates.

She gets on, drops the change in the fare box and moves all the way to the rear bench seat. The driver grinds gears and they start to roll downtown. She takes the Canon out from under the slicker, loads the film and sets the speed, brings the camera up to her eye. She starts to focus on the framed advertising placards hung near the bus ceiling. She shoots

Attention Lonely Bachelors

Why go it alone?

We have a wide selection of mail order brides

All shapes, sizes & colors

Write for our free catalog

Vixens & Virgins Unlmtd.

Box 99

Bosnia — Herzegovina

and

Yat-sen Footbinders Inc.

“Over A Century of Tradition”

Prager Plaza, Little Asia

Walk-ins Welcome

and

Eddie Gein’s Discount Upholstery

Custom Orders Our Specialty

Call 1-800-COVER-ME

She moves her focus from the advertisements to the spray-painted graffiti and street art marking every free foot of wall space. And it starts to feel like she’s being overloaded, attacked by images, messages, signals, until none of them make any sense and she pulls the camera from her face, closes her eyes and rubs at them. She takes a breath, brings the camera back up, but this time focuses on the backs of human heads. She wonders if the other riders can feel her looking at them, magnifying the rear of their skulls, pulling in the wet, slightly matted hair, enlarging the flecks of dandruff, the patches of scalp that show through the thinning spots.

She puts the camera down in her lap and looks out the window. The rain has obscured everything and as the bus starts to approach the business district, the colored lights from neon signs are fragmented across the windowpane, made to sparkle more, to flare out and pinwheel a bit.

When Sylvia looks back to the other passengers, she comes eye to eye with an old woman who’s turned around and is staring at her. The woman is bundled inside a tan raincoat with the collar turned up. Sylvia smiles at her but the old lady just gives this dour, threatening look, then reaches and pulls on the stop-cord and the bus lurches into the curb to let her off.

Sylvia looks out the rear window and finds the woman still staring, standing motionless in the rain, hands pushed into the pockets of her raincoat, waiting for the bus to pull away.

When Sylvia turns back around to face front, three other riders are perched sideways in their seats looking at her. All of their faces have a kind of beaten quality to them. One is gaunt and bony, another puffy, and another bland, nondescript. But all of them seem tired and angry and most of all, worn-out, as if energy has been chronically stolen from them in small doses but over a long period of time.

She looks out the window, watches a black limousine pass on the left, looks back a second later. More faces have joined the trio. They all look malign, like they wish her harm, but they’re too listless to actually attack. And yet it’s as if their bad intentions were adequate, as if their sluggish malevolence was enough to bring her down and cause her trouble.

“What?” Sylvia blurts out, loud and annoyed and scared. She focuses on one young guy in a leather jacket and bristly flattop and matching ear and nose rings connected by a silver chain. They stare at each other until he lets a horrible grin break slowly over his face.

Sylvia pulls on the stop-cord and there’s a frantic moment when she wonders if the driver will let her leave, but the bus cuts in to the curb and she grabs the camera tight and slides from the back bench, runs down the aisle as all the other passengers start to laugh in unison. She jumps to the curb as soon as the doors spring open.

She stands for a minute and catches her breath, then wipes the rain from her face. She’s on Maddox, just a couple of blocks from the Canal Zone. She starts walking quickly toward Rimbaud Way, rounds the corner and starts running for the Rib Room Diner. The windows are all steamed up ad the Open sign is glowing in the door.

She goes in, finds a booth midway down the aisle, slides in, her back to the door, pulls the zipper down on the slicker and dries her hands on her jeans. Tacked to the wall of the booth is another Jenny Ellis flyer and the huge, black letters that form the question Have You Seen This Child? feel like they’re demanding an answer from Sylvia. She looks away from the poster, puts the camera on the table and an old guy with an unruly mane of white hair bounces up to the booth with a coffeepot in one hand and a mug in the other. And Sylvia knows from all the photos in the Spy over the years that it’s Elmore Orsi himself, owner of the Rib Room and legend of the Canal Zone.

“You look,” he says, filling the mug and sliding it in front of her, “like you need a mug.”

She nods and says, “Thank you,” and he smiles and lingers. Part of the Orsi legend is that Elmore, now in his mid-seventies by most estimates, still has a weak spot for the young boho women who hang around the diner.

Sylvia sips the coffee and says, “Delicious.”

He’s pleased. “Hazlenut mocha,” he says. “Pain in the tush to get, but, you know, anything to keep my children happy.”

She knows that Orsi is thought of as this eccentric godfather to the art crowd and she wonders how much of his oddball shtick is genuine and how much is made up. He’s a vision here in front of her, done up in pleated white wool pants, black silk shirt opened wide to reveal a forest of chest hair and a fat, gold crucifix dangling by a chain around his neck, and red paisley vest.

Maybe because she can’t judge the artifice factor, she’s got no impulse to photograph him.

“You’re Mr. Orsi,” she says and he takes this as an opportunity to slide into the seat opposite her.

“In the flesh,” he says. “And you are not a regular. New to town?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve lived in Quinsigamond my whole life.”

“That’s wonderful. A real native. That’s tremendous.”

“Is it?”

He sits back jerks his head to the rest of the booths on the other side of the aisle. “All the natives want to leave these days. Everyone wants to move away.”

“Not you.”

“They’re going to bury me in this town. I want the wake right here in the diner. Two days. Open bar. I know it’s a big health code violation, but I’m an old friend of Counselor Campana. There are ways around everything, if you follow.”

Sylvia nods her unspoken understanding of the not-sosubtle back-scratching that powers City Hall.

“You’ve been down here in the Canal a long time,” she says.

“Opened the doors on September fifth, Nineteen fifty-seven. I was a goddamn youngster.”

“You’ve seen a lot of people pass through this place.”

“The famous and the not-so,” Orsi says, thrilled at the chance to bask in his own history.

“I’m more interested in the famous.”

“Another pilgrim,” he says. “I’m telling you, I’m waiting to be put on the historical register there. That has to be some kind of tax break, wouldn’t you think?”

She takes a swallow of coffee, then asks, “I’ve heard you knew Terrence Propp.”

There’s no flinch or balk. There’s no reaction at all and that’s as unsettling as if he’d exploded. He just shakes his head and says, “That’s an old rumor that just won’t die gracefully, dear. Every now and then somebody comes in here and mentions that name to me. And I’ll tell you what I tell them. I don’t even know who the hell this Propp son of a bitch is.”

“I heard you once claimed you knew him.”

Again, no anger, only, “Honey, I’ll say anything to fill this place up. I’ll tell you Jesus ate the last supper in here if it’ll sell more meatloaf and coffee.”

“But if someone really needed some information—” she starts and he shakes his head and says, “Then someone would be out of luck. Personally, I don’t even think there is a Terrence Propp. I think it’s all a kind of hoax. Another way to push some product. Nothing gets more attention. How could someone not want attention? Twenty-four hours a day we got people sticking their faces into your television and telling you more horrible crap about their lives than you ever wanted to hear. I wish I’d come up with something like this Propp idea—the Myth of Elmore Orsi. Christ sake, they’d be lined up down the block to eat the leftover chili. Put some faded picture of me on the wall, I could spend every day at the goddamn track.”

He laughs, runs both hands over his eyes, then refills her mug.

“You seem like a nice girl,” he says, somehow without sounding patronizing. “Don’t buy into this Propp nonsense. Find your own routine.”

He slides out of the booth.

“Routine?” Sylvia says, but Orsi just smiles at her and heads toward the kitchen yelling into the air, “Renata, clear table six.”

Sylvia looks up at the clock on the back wall. It’s over three hours until midnight and her meeting with Schick. She thinks about going to a movie and then catches herself and wants to laugh. Her eyes fall from the clock down to the huge cork bulletin board that fills most of the back wall. The bulletin board where she found the original ad for the Aquinas. The place where all of this began.

She gets out of the booth and walks to the rear wall. She finds the exact spot where she’d first seen the little 3 x 5 card filled with the black block letters that said PORTRAIT CAMERA. Where she’d yanked out the red pushpin that secured the card to the cork and where she’d felt that rush of delight as she pictured an Aquinas in her hands.

In that same place now is a new index card, but this is a glossy printed ad, like an oversized business card, with raised, multicolored lettering that reads

Lusty Lady Lipservice

“fulfillment is just a phone call away”

picture your dream woman & we do the rest

Call: 555-6628 / 24 hrs a day / 7 days a week

MC/Visa/AmEx

She rips the card from the board, turns it over, turns it back. It’s her own phone number.

She pushes the card into the pocket of her slicker and walks out of the Rib Room.

The rain has faded to an occasional mist and Rimbaud Way has filled up with marching women. They’re all wearing black armbands and chanting as they parade.

Intercourse is Genocide

Castrate, Castrate

Cut with Pride

their arms shooting into the air like angry cheerleaders. They’re being led by Paige Beatty, who’s setting the pace of their cry with her red police bullhorn.

An arm reaches out and pulls Sylvia off the curbing and into the throng and the next thing she knows a woman with a hook for a hand is linking arms and yelling, “It’s everyone’s fight.”

Sylvia looks to see a hefty woman with a baby supported against her other shoulder. The child might be about a year old and it’s burrowing into its mother’s neck, clearly more interested in sleep than political ideology.

Sylvia walks along, though she doesn’t chant. She cranes her neck to see everyone carrying white candles shaped like small phalluses. And they all have a small chalkboard, about the size of a dinner plate, bouncing off their chests as they walk, hung around their necks with twine and shoestrings. The boards all have male first names written on them — Sylvia notes Harold and Dennis and Karl and Antonio.

She asks the one-handed woman what the story is and her new partner shouts, “Didn’t you get yours? You write down the name of the last bastard that abused you.”

What if he was anonymous, Sylvia wonders. What if he was a phantom?

They swing off Rimbaud and onto Main Street and there’s a group cheer at the sight of the City Hall Tower. Through the bullhorn, Paige yells, “Tell Mary and Martha to go check on the sheets,” and two women in matching sweat suits break off from the assembly and start to sprint down the middle of Main.

“What sheets?” Sylvia yells and the hook-handed mother gives her an annoyed look and yells back, “Didn’t you go to any of the planning sessions?

Up ahead, cars are being detoured out of the way by a cop with a flashlight. Clearly, Mayor Welby and Manager Kenner know how politically hot this thing could turn and they want as little confrontation as possible. Let Paige and Company vent some steam and if it means rerouting a little night traffic down Main Street, so be it.

The marchers pass unmolested down the center of the road though there are some comments about dyke bitches yelled from the doorways of the greasier bars. When they’re almost on top of City Hall, Sylvia is shocked to see the building totally surrounded by even more women. They’re spilling off the front steps, overflowing on the common and the side pavilion. The halogen spotlights that normally shine down from the Hall’s tower have apparently been knocked out and this sea of bodies is lit only by the hundreds of candles that everyone’s holding aloft. It gives the whole scene a weird, semi-religious feel and a churchlike hush falls over the crowd as Paige leads her platoon through a parting of massed spectators who simply roll back like the Red Sea and clear a path to the front stairway.

Paige climbs the stairs like some cross between a military president and a pope, someone who’s moved beyond the boundaries of ego and power and into a realm where the forces of history can be wrestled with and occasionally altered. In Sylvia’s small living room Paige gave off none of this larger-than-life quality. She seemed like a smart pragmatist, a savvy deal cutter who’d rely on lawyers and opinion polls. But here, mounting the steps of City Hall with bullhorn in one hand and flickering, penis-shaped candle in the other, she’s transformed into an icon, a definition of charisma and strength so vibrant it feels as if she could liberate every soul in earshot with the sound of her voice.

She takes her central position at the rail of the balcony that leads to the building’s main entrance. Two lieutenants take their places to the right and left of her. They unhitch a banner that drapes over the rail and reveals the night’s motto—Intercourse Is Genocide—written in red paint. Paige lets the quiet permeate the midst of this swollen mob, lets its meaning become palpable and fix the depth of her command. She turns her head from side to side, then lifts her candle into the air, to the full extension of her left arm.

Through the bullhorn, she yells, “The purge has begun,” and the crowd goes insane for the next few minutes, making it impossible for Paige to continue speaking.

The one-handed mother and Sylvia move up onto a knoll of grass that slopes down from the First Apostle Bank building, Sylvia watches the baby, almost a toddler and of indeterminate sex, shift its head on the mother’s chest. It’s a pudgy, sallow-faced child and even in this dim light smudges of crusted food can be seen on its cheeks, maybe some form of carrots or squash.

“Tonight,” Paige announces from the balcony, redemanding that attention of the crowd, “is the Night of Short Candles. And it will be remembered for years to come as the first strike in the battle that will free us forever. In a few hours, sisters, we are going to cut down their balls.”

Sylvia looks up at Paige Beatty, then around at the crowd. She listens to the escalation of the leader’s rage and feels the way it’s palpably spreading among the faithful. She turns to the mother and says, “That’s pretty extreme stuff.”

The new friend is ready for the comment.

“Paige says people are sheep. You’ve got to hit them over the head. You’ve got to be extreme. You’ve got to be visceral. Go for the throat. You have to make them see behind the screens. Make them understand all the signs and signals being pumped out as part of the war against us. All this common junk, you know, from Playboy to the beer ads, it’s even more insidious by its subtlety.”

“Beer ads are porn?” Sylvia asks.

The mother gives a look like she’s not sure why Sylvia’s here, like Sylvia might be something worse than the sheep. Something like the wolf’s collaborator. And Sylvia wants to tell her, this stranger with a metal claw at the end of her arm and a shivering child sleeping at her neck, that she’s nobody’s collaborator. That she’s a free agent. That she’s so free she’s dizzy with the isolation.

A new wave of explosive cheering sounds and it becomes clear that if Paige wants to get through the speech she’s going to have to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric.

“No one can fight for us,” Paige’s voice booms, hoarse with the intensity of both her rage and her empathy. “We unite. And we fight. Or we die. Because make no mistake, don’t let yourselves be deceived ever again, they are our enemy,” spitting out these four words loudly and slowly.

Sylvia leans into the ear of the mother and asks, “What’s the baby’s name?”

The woman turns and gives a surprised and maybe angry look, then says, “Maria.”

“They answer,” Paige screams, “we are your fathers, your sons, your brothers, and husbands. But no fact of relation can change the nature of the beast. And on that day the species enters puberty, the switch is thrown that regresses the boy back to the swamp at the dawn of time when the code of aggression was imprinted on his animal heart.”

“How old?” Sylvia asks Maria’s mother.

This time she says, “I’m trying to listen to this.”

“See the beast for what he is,” from the bullhorn. “He is our oppressor. He is the savage who would enslave our bodies, destroy our minds, and obliterate our spirits. He of the Y chromosome. He of the testosterone depravity.”

Sylvia stares at the child. She tries to picture, if Perry and she had a child, what would it look like. She can’t do it. She can’t produce the image.

All she can hear are the amplified words that seem to assault the air around her head.

“The exploitive, objectifying demon. The primal brain that escaped evolution and now strives always to dominate, to victimize, to abuse into submission, to erase our very presence. This is his Final Solution. This is his death camp. The images he makes us into are his ovens. And we will not, we can not, walk into those ovens peacefully. I am calling for an absolute separatism. And I am calling for a holy war. We must rage. We must fight. We must battle with everything we have inside us. There can be no truce. There can be no compromise. We must rise and we must triumph.”

The crowd hits its climax and comes together in an evangelical hysteria. And then Sylvia’s being hugged by her hook-sister. After a minute they step back, out of the embrace, and Sylvia sees the water off her slicker has partly obscured the name on the chalkboard. It must have been something like Benny or Barry. Sylvia reaches out and touches the chalkboard and says, “Did he do that? To your hand?”

The woman nods and shrugs at the same time and says, “Sort of. It’s a long story.”

Sylvia gestures to the Intercourse Is Genocide banner and asks, “Do you believe that?”

The woman gives an earnest nod.

“You don’t think sex can ever be okay?”

The woman stares at her for a second, smiles and says, “Not with a man.”

Sylvia nods because she doesn’t know what else to say and they both turn their attention back to the balcony as Paige Beatty relights the head of her candle with a pocket butane, brings up the bullhorn one more time and says, “Now let’s burn down their filthy constitution and let the flames ignite our war.”

31

The train lot behind Gompers Station looks like a ridiculously gritty set from something filmed in a ruined city near the end of a particularly vicious war. Gompers itself seems unreal, this crumbling, graffiti-obscured hulk of broken white marble, toppled Ionic columns, charred rosewood, and thousands of splinters of stained glass that once, combined, depicted an idealized tour of the industrial age. It’s almost as if the ruined building was really just a one-dimensional fronting propped up by plywood struts, or maybe worse, an intricately detailed matte painting that could be broken through by a speeding car or a rain of bullets.

The only lighting comes from the moon and the red bugeye spots near the junction of two freight lines. The ground is a brittle carpet of cinder and ash and gravel. And the temperature has dropped, triggering Jakob’s asthma and causing wisps of steam to gust from his mouth with each struggling exhale.

He tries to ignore his lungs, huddles inside the boxcar and looks down on his notebook.

EXT. LOWENSTEIN ROAD — NIGHT

The Doomed Man emerges from an alley in a stumbling lope. Stops to steady himself in front of LASZLO’S CAFE. Falls to one knee. Places hand against storefront window. Looks in window at display shelf to see freshbaked rolls. Looks from rolls to his own vague reflection.

EXT. LASZLO’S CAFÉ

Focus change to show a customer within the café notice the Doomed Man framed in window. Attention of all patrons turns to the window. Slow zoom through window to WAITRESS who lifts head from order pad. widens eyes, lifts arm, points finger and mouths words, “It’s him,” though we can’t hear her.

TIGHT SHOT — FACE OF DOOMED MAN

realizing he’s been spotted.

WIDE SHOT — EXT. LOWENSTEIN ROAD

Doomed Man turns and begins a pathetic, limping run down narrow, curving Lowenstein. Waitress emerges from door of Lazslo’s, runs into middle of street.

WAITRESS

(cupping hands to mouth, yelling)

It’s the killer. The killer is here.

Doors open up and down Lowenstein. PEOPLE emerge pulling on coats. Confusion as they all approach waitress at once. Slowly they begin to form into an ANGRY MOB. Din of cries and curses fills the air. Mob overturns trash cans. Arms itself with rocks, broken bottles, iron bars, baseball bats. Whistles are heard. Barking dogs are heard. Police sirens are heard in the distance. Mob begins pursuit.

EXT. THE TENDERLOIN

The Doomed Man hears the commotion behind him. Dashes from street lamp to mailbox to doorway, bumping into and off of drunks and seedy thugs who populate the area. Doomed Man emerges to an open square where there is no place to hide.

TIGHT SHOT — FACE OF DOOMED MAN

as he turns and sees the bulk shadow of the mob moving forward through the tenderloin. Panicking, blinking eyes. Blood, seeping from forehead, obscuring vision.

CRANE SHOT — EXT. OPEN SQUARE — LIT BY HARSH HALOGEN SPOT

The Doomed Man turns around and looks across the square toward the Train Station, where he began this odyssey. He runs toward the Station, falls on his face in middle of square. Sound of the angry mob increases. Doomed Man gets to his feet and desperately runs to the train yard.

“Cuz.”

Jakob looks up, unsurprised, unruffled, and smiles.

Felix leans his elbows onto the lip of the car, peers inside.

“We’ve been worried sick about you,” Felix says. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Jakob closes his notebook. He cradles the Seitz and climbs outside to see all of the Grey Roaches waiting for him.

“I couldn’t visualize a scene,” he says, “I had to come out here. Look at it again. Up close.”

Felix smiles and shakes his head, throws an arm around his cousin’s shoulder. “The things you do for your art, huh?”

“What are you doing here?” Jakob asks, staring across the yard at Huck Hrabal who flinches and looks to the ground.

Felix turns to Jakob so they face each other, then he begins to brush down Jakob’s lapels like some compulsive valet.

“Well,” he says. “It was supposed to be a surprise. Huck had an idea where we might find you. We wanted to have a little party back at St. Vitus—”

“A surprise?”

Felix takes a deep breath, shrugs his shoulders a bit.

“I’ve talked to your father, Jakob. And it’s clear to both of us. Finally. Our way just isn’t your way, cuz. You’re an artist. You can’t help yourself. We’ve all seen the light. Gustav has even found a way to funnel income to underwrite your career. You are in business, cuz. You can make your movie. And we’ve got a present for you.”

Jakob looks over Felix’s shoulder at Vera Gottwald who gives nothing away.

“It’s good you brought your movie camera,” Felix says. “We should record it all from the start. Some day the archivists will want to look back at everything. Hugo Schick is meeting us here. He’ll be turning over the deed to the Skin Palace. To you, Jakob. It’s yours from this night on, cousin. Your own studio. Your own stable of actors. Your own crew. Your own theatre. The whole thing is yours.”

“But Papa—”

“Your father is a very wise man, Jakob. In the end, he always knows what’s best.”

The cousins stare at each other, the space between their faces filled with the white clouds of their breath. There’s a minute of silence until Felix says, “You don’t look very happy, Jakob. This is what you’ve always wanted. I thought you’d be delirious.”

Jakob stares down at the ground, at the crumpled remains of dozens of Jenny Ellis posters.

“It’s just …” he begins and breaks off.

Then starts again, “It will be awkward. Mr. Schick has been very good to me.”

“Well,” Felix says, shaking his head, tossing his arms out to the side and making a hand signal that the Roaches note and act on, spreading into a circle around the two Kinskys, “everyone has been good to you, Jakob. Haven’t they?”

Jakob lifts his camera to his shoulder, pans across the faces of the Roaches and says, “We’ve all been fortunate, Felix. America has been very kind to our family.”

Felix squats down and starts to trace something in the ash with his finger.

“Still,” he says, “I lost both my parents in the July Sweep.”

Jakob moves the camera to Felix’s face, zooms in.

“I know that. And I’m sorry about it every day.”

Felix smiles for the camera.

“Yeah, well, like that prayer says, life’s a bitch—”

“And then you die,” Jakob finishes for him. He pans to the left and sees Vera Gottwald take a section of rubber hose from an inside fold of her suitcoat. He turns slowly, keeping the Seitz running. He does an even 360, frames each Roach extracting saps and blackjacks and brass knuckles from their clothing.

“It looks like Mr. Schick is going to be late for our meeting,” Jakob says.

Felix lets out a laugh.

“Aputz to the end, eh cuz?”

“Mr. Schick isn’t coming, is he Felix?”

“No, Jakob, I’m afraid Schick won’t be joining us tonight.”

“This is suicide, Felix.”

“Put the camera down, Jakob.”

“You are out of you mind. Do you have any idea what Papa will do to you? There’s no way you can pin this on one of the other gangs.”

“Put the goddamn camera down.”

Jakob refuses. He keeps the Seitz filming and comes back to a closeup of his cousin, who’s now holding a longbarrel revolver straight out, pointed at the camera.

“All right,” Felix says, “have it your way. Film the whole thing. Your first and last feature, you stupid little son of a bitch.”

“Please,” Jakob says, “put your gun away.”

Felix jerks the pistol into the air and pulls the trigger. A shot explodes, echoes across the train yard, fills the air with a trace of burnt powder.

“It’s not a prop, dickhead. It’s the real goddamn thing. It’s a beauty, isn’t it? And there’s a bullet in every chamber. You know who gave me the gun, Jakob? Uncle Hermann. Your goddamn Papa who’s coddled your wheezing ass since the day we hit this city. You know where it came from, Jakob? Any idea? Huh?”

Jakob stays silent.

“It belonged to the commandant who murdered my mother and father. A man named Teige. One of the great zealots of the July Sweep. Before we left Maisel, Uncle Hermann paid more money than you can imagine to get next to Teige. Then he took out his Schonborn and strangled the bastard, came close to taking the man’s head off his shoulders. Literally separating the head. He told me he’s never pulled that hard in his life. He hit bone, Jakob. Can you imagine what that feels like, cousin? To pull wire through the skin, through the cartilage and the arteries?

“Uncle Hermann gave me the commandant’s gun, Jakob. He gave you your camera there. Belonged to some great director, right? He gave me the pistol that killed my mother and father.”

“Felix,” Jakob says, “should you hurt me in any way, Papa will manage to bury your head a block away from your body.”

“You idiot,” Felix’s voice dropping low. “Can you imagine how you’ve disappointed him? I told you the video store was your last chance. I tried to help you. You were in there talking to that freak. You were inside talking about movies. My God. You should have seen Hermann’s face when I told him.”

“Felix, I’m begging you …”

The Seitz catches Hunk Hrabal, in fuzzy back-focus, taking a step up behind Felix.

Felix levels the gun back at Jakob and says, “I promise we’ll bury you with the camera, cousin.”

Jakob pulls out to a medium shot and watches Hrabal bring a truncheon down on Felix’s arm as the pistol explodes again, this time planting the bullet in the ground. The arm snaps. A quick zoom to show the shock spreading across the cousin’s face. Huck throws a kidney punch and Felix crumbles to his knees. Vera Gottwald comes forward, picks up the pistol and carries it to Jakob who puts it in his pocket. The Roaches yank Felix back to his feet. He starts to struggle and Huck saps him in the back of the head.

Jakob detaches a shoulder strap from the camera and tosses it to Huck, then he turns the Seitz over to Vera, saying, “Remember, just keep the red button pressed.”

He walks toward his cousin, extends his arms out at his sides, smiles and says to the whole congregation, “I’m as bad as Hitchcock. I promise this will be my only cameo.”

He comes face-to-cafe with Felix, stares into the incredulous eyes, bites back the pity and slaps his cousin across the face, drawing blood that steams in the cold air.

“But how—” is all Felix can manage.

“It’s not your fault,” Jakob says. “It’s vanity and greed. It will always blind you in the end. Your problem is you haven’t seen enough movies.”

He nods to Huck Hrabal and the Roaches force their former leader to his knees, then Hrabal fashions the shoulder strap into a kind of collar and twists it around his deposed boss’s throat.

“I spoke with Huck yesterday,” Jakob says. “I explained to him that it made much more sense to back Hermann Kinsky’s only son rather than his idiot nephew. And, of course, I’ve promised all the Roaches walk-ons in the film and small gross participation. They’ll each get half a point of the distribution deal. We win some prizes at the Sundance Festival, these guys can buy some new suits.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jakob sees the Roaches all smiling at one another.

“Huck is to be my screen face, Felix. Do you approve? I think he’ll make a fine alter ego. All the true auteurs need one, you realize. Ford had Wayne. Fellini had Mastroianni. Scorsese had De Niro. Lynch—”

“Jakob,” Felix yells, licking frantically at his wound. He’s scrambling, dizzy with the reversal. He stammers, “Don’t do this, please, think of the film. This climax, beaten to death by the angry mob, it’s derivative.”

Jakob laughs, pats his cousin’s cheek, looks around to the Roaches.

“Didn’t I tell you, people? Everyone’s a critic.”

He turns back to his cousin.

“You’re a lowbrow schmuck, Felix. I’m a postmodern artist. I know all the images and I steal from the pool. It’s all collage, cuz. Juxtaposition. Besides, if all else fails, the snuff market is making a big comeback these days.”

Jakob leans down and kisses Felix softly on the cheek, whispers in his ear, “You know, I was going to play this part myself. But I’m glad I reconsidered. You’re so much better in the role.”

He straightens and turns to Huck.

“Now remember people, we’ll only get one take here. We’ve got to make it work the first time. He’s the anti-hero at the end of the road. I’m going for tight close-ups here, so don’t anyone block the face. I need to see the real terror as his fate dawns upon him.”

He steps back, frames Felix’s head between his hands and whispers, “You look absolutely doomed, Felix. You’re such a natural.”

Then he claps the hands together, turns to Vera Gottwald, nods and yells, “Annnnd. Action.”

TIGHT SHOT — HEAD OF THE DOOMED MAN

as it turns side to side, struggling futilely against the garrote, the eyes beginning to bulge, a gurgling noise beginning to emit from the tortured hole that is the mouth.

MED SHOT — THE TRAIN YARD

as the leader of the angry villagers, the self-appointed AUTEURCUTIONER, pulls a pistol from his pocket and erupts in a horrible laugh that echoes across the landscape. Several villagers shudder. The Doomed Man begins to convulse but is held on his knees by the hands of the crowd.

TIGHT SHOT — THE HAND OF THE AUTEURCUTIONER — SLOW MOTION

as it lifts the pistol through the smokey night air and brings the barrel to rest against the bulging right eye of the Doomed Man. Intercut the various sound tracks — the diseased lung, the July Sweep sirens, the cries of the little girl lost — all played at half-speed.

TIGHTEST SHOT — EYES OF THE DOOMED MAN SLOW MOTION

as the auteurcutioner pulls the trigger and a bullet discharges from the pistol barrel and tears into the eyeball, through the cornea, through the anterior chamber, the lens, through the jellylike lake of vitreous humor, tearing through the retina and the sclera, and finally exploding the optic nerve itself. The end of vision. The obliteration of perception.

BLACK SCREEN

NO CREDITS

32

Sylvia walks through the drizzle with this vague, semiconscious understanding that she’s heading, eventually, toward the Skin Palace. And she tries not to focus on the fact that the walk holds at least some resemblance to the way she’s come to live her life, to the way she perpetually pivots and drifts once she has a glimpse of her general direction. No matter what that direction might be.

For over twenty years, since memories began, since she developed whatever neurons or language skills image-storing capacity necessary for remembrance, she’s let events wash over her, take her and turn her. And then in the calm after the wake, she’s always accepted her new position. She’s continued to move, with a little thought, in whatever direction she ended up facing. As if there was never another choice. As if she’s suffered a forgotten virus at one time, maybe in infancy, that destroyed any idea of free will.

She drifted into the movies and took up residence there. She drifted into photography and gave herself away. She drifted into numbness upon the death of her mother and let it take her. She drifted into the banality of the Snapshot Shack and let it cover her. And she drifted into Perry and surrendered without question or thought. Because in each case it was easier than fighting a current. It was easier to ride out forces that she knew would be stronger than her own small desires.

Like now, just like now, like this moment, when it’s so much easier to accept that it’s fated, that she’ll go to Hugo Schick, that she’ll eventually walk all the way to Herzog’s Erotic Palace, to this monument to multiple illusions, this church of light and shadow and manipulation that Hugo has filled with dozens of entwined naked bodies, moaning and writhing for the sake of an imagined masterpiece. She’ll stand in the middle of the pretentious, choreographed orgy, totally distant from even the idea of all the fabricated connections, of the endless daisy chains of coupling taking place on the floor below her feet. She’ll stand alone in the middle of one more crowd, one more gathering of interconnected people, and like a child, like a powerless toddler, without rights or skills, she’ll ask Schick why she’s there. She’ll ask why the events of this week have taken place, what knowledge she’s supposed to gain from all that’s happened.

She’ll go to the Skin Palace, to Hugo Schick, to the filming of Don Juan Triumphant, knowing there will be no real answers. Just another turning of the tide. Because movement feels better than stasis. And because she still doesn’t know what else to do.

Was her mother supposed to impart some kind of wisdom before she passed on? Was there supposed to be some very old ritual whereby on a given night, a specific event determined by a phase of the moon or a vision or a biblical code, Ma was to wake her, to sit her in the kitchen and brew tea, to bring their faces close together, kiss the forehead with a long and warm touch of mother’s lips, bring those lips finally to Sylvia’s ear and whisper words of revelation and epiphany? Did Ma’s ovaries kill her before that clarifying night could take place and she left Sylvia, one of those occasional freaks, one of the uninitiated, the uninformed who stumble around on rainy nights like this one hoping for some substitute disclosure, for some surrogate imparting of wisdom that will heal her, make her like everyone else, trigger these long-hidden and deeply submerged guidance systems that will once and for all put an end to this perpetual drift?

She finds herself on Coburn Street looking in the window of a camera store called Strand’s. She stares down on a blue velvet display of lenses — Hasselblads and Minoltas and Noskowiaks. The lenses are all lined up in perfect rows, black and silver cylinders running from standard, utilitarian pieces to specialty stuff — fish-eyes, ridiculously long telephoto mounts. All this glass bent to alter vision.

A police car pulls past, shines a spotlight on her back. She turns around and waves, imagining what she looks like — hair hanging, sopping, clothes drenched through. The light gets extinguished and the cops move on and Sylvia turns back to the window. She looks beyond the front display to the interior of the shop. It’s lit by a single, dim lamp in the rear and all she can really make out is a glossy sign hanging above the service counter that reads The Electramatic 35: Calibrate the Moments of Your Life.

She walks on, finds an open coffee shop called Café Arco. The night manager is a young Spanish guy who’s totally involved in a worn paperback with a grotesque cover whose title—The Monk—seems oddly familiar. Sylvia orders an espresso, takes a seat and tries not to listen to the argument of a miserable twentysomething couple in an opposite booth. The woman holds her voice at a low mumble, but the man keeps interrupting her monologue, punctuating her long sermon over and over with the same demand—Just tell me why you won’t.

Someone has left an old children’s Highlight’s magazine on the table. Sylvia opens it to the rear and focuses on the hidden picture puzzle until the doomed romance vacates the place. There’s only one other customer, a young man in a dark, rain-rumpled suit, hunched over his coffee at a corner table. He’s got his back to her and Sylvia sits and stares at the rear of his head. Every now and then, the guy lifts a hand from his mug and rubs it over his face, as if he’s having difficulty staying awake. She hears him struggling to breathe as if he’s suffering a terrible chest cold.

Finally, he swallows the last of his coffee, fishes in his jacket pocket, comes out with a handful of change and drops it on the table. Then he pushes his chair back and gets up to leave and their eyes meet.

“It’s you,” Sylvia says, recognizing the huge ears and the bony face, “from Der Garten. The owner’s son.”

The young man rears back as if he’s been accused of something. His eyes squint at her and then recognition plays across his whole face and he says, “The film woman.”

“The film woman,” Sylvia agrees. “I’m sorry but I don’t remember your name.”

“Jakob,” he says with an embarrassed tilt of the head. “Jakob Kay.”

“I’m Sylvia Krafft.”

“Ms. Krafft,” he begins to stammer, “I assure you, I honestly did not mean to—”

She waves away his apology.

“It was my fault,” she says, “I was having a very bad day. I was misinterpreting everything.”

“In any event,” he says, the origin of his accent still unknown, “I am sorry if I bothered you.”

She nods her acceptance and suddenly wants to keep him here a bit longer. She pushes the opposite chair out with her foot and says, “Would you like to join me?”

He stares at her like he doesn’t quite understand, then slowly starts to shake his head no.

“I have some business. There is someone waiting—”

“It’s a raw night,” she says. “And it sounds like you have a pretty awful cold.”

“It’s nothing really,” his eyes moving from Sylvia to the door and then back again.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she says. “But they’re reopening the Ballard Theatre.”

Jakob’s hand goes back over his face, comes down to his neck and tugs at his collar. He nods slowly, then slides into the chair. She lifts her coffee toward him, raises her eyebrows. He declines her offer.

“I know the Ballard,” he says. “I’ve been there. A few years ago. I hadn’t heard this.”

“It’s a rumor. I don’t know how reliable it is.”

“Always the case,” Jakob says, “with rumors.”

There’s an uneasiness they both wish wasn’t there, something more attributable to the night than the chemistry. They stare at each other until the level of discomfort extends across the room to the clerk behind the counter, who calls out to them, “We’ll be closing up soon.”

Jakob tries to clear his throat and manages only a wet-sounding gurgle.

“Well,” he says, “I do have someone I must meet.”

“I suppose,” Sylvia says, “I do too.”

Jakob stands up awkwardly, looks out the door to the street, turns up the collar of his suit jacket.

“I wish,” he says, bowing his head to her, “we had met under different circumstances.”

Sylvia tries for a smile.

“We both like movies,” she says. “Maybe we’ll bump into each other sometime.”

He nods but doesn’t say anything, then walks out of the coffee shop and into the rain.

At twenty to midnight Sylvia leaves a five-dollar bill under her cup and walks back outside. She stays off the main drag and moves over cross streets until she comes to Aragon Ave. She rounds the corner onto Watson at a club called Propa Gramma and moves north toward the Skin Palace.

One of Hugo’s meatboys is standing a solo watch inside the locked doors of the theatre. As Sylvia approaches, he starts shaking his head and saying, “We’re closed tonight.”

“I have an appointment,” she tries through the glass. “With Mr. Schick.”

He stares at her with a blank face until a voice from inside yells, “It’s all right, Mr. Franco. Let her through.”

The bouncer turns a deadbolt, opens the door and steps aside to let her pass. She enters the lobby and stands for a second pushing her wet hair back on her head until a voice calls from above, “You’ll catch cold, my darling.”

She looks up to the center of the lobby’s balcony and sees Hugo Schick, dressed up in a Nazi SS uniform. He looks down on her, smiles, bows his enormous, bald head forward until she thinks he’s going to swan-dive over the railing, then rights himself and begins to brush at his lapels.

“It belonged to my grandfather,” he says, indicating the uniform. “You like?”

She tries to push her hair behind her ears and says, “You didn’t tell me this was a formal event.”

He starts down the right-side stairway.

“Momentous, yes,” he says, “but not formal, my dear.”

He approaches, takes her hand, squeezes it, lifts it up and, of course, brings his head down slightly and kisses it.

“As you’ll soon see, the dress for tonight’s gathering is anything but formal.”

She pulls her hand free.

“Where’d you get the pictures, Hugo?”

“Has no one ever told you, Sylvia,” he says, the almost-patient father figure, “you mustn’t, you cannot rush the more important things in this life?”

“And tormenting me is an important thing for you?”

He looks over her and gives a kind of sad smile, shakes his head slightly.

“One of the achievements of my career,” he says, “has been my ability to prolong the moment. You can’t imagine how complex a task this can be, Sylvia. Too much prologue and the eye gets bored. Not enough, and there’s no time for the anticipation to build. It’s an instinctual talent. It’s born here,” rubbing his stomach.

“Why did you go after Perry? Is it because he works for Boetell?”

“You’re so American, my love,” he says. “Now let me take your raincoat. We have a long and wonderful night ahead of us.”

There’s no question he’ll have everything played his way. He’s the director. Her opinion is to walk away or accept his terms. It’s a matter of how badly she wants explanation, how much she needs definitive answers. So she unzips the slicker, pulls it off and hands it to Schick. It’s not that she has some idea that what Hugo tells her will change things. It’s just that she’s so disgusted by ambiguity at this point that she’s willing to walk this thing through to the end. Even if what she hears is exactly what she fears. Even if the voice of revelation isn’t that of her mother, but an egomaniacal Austrian pornographer.

“Let me have Mr. Franco bring you a robe,” Hugo says.

“I’m fine as is, thanks.”

“But you’re soaking—”

“I’ll dry.”

He gestured to her camera and says, “I knew you wouldn’t disappoint, Sylvia.”

“The night is young, Hugo.”

He takes her hand again and starts to lead her up the left-hand staircase.

“My work, as you know, is my life,” he says. “And I can’t help but feel that with the completion of tonight’s filming I’m surrendering to mortality.”

“Happens to the best of us,” she says.

“There will be other features,” ignoring her, “but they’re just cookie-cutter entertainments. They will have their flourishes. They’ll proudly bear the mark of Schick. But there will never be another epistle from the purest center of my heart.”

“Well, we’ve each got just so much purity to go around,” she says.

They come to the top of the stairs, walk past the entrance to the theatre proper and start up the spiral stairway to the studios.

“We began Don Juan Triumphant seven years ago. We filmed just one week each year since then. This was my plan from the start. Our starlet, Miss Pauline, was just eighteen at the time we began. She lacked much of the assertiveness we’ve all come to love.”

He stops at the landing and looks down at Sylvia, trapping her in the narrow circle of metal. “You don’t know where Leni is tonight, do you?”

“Leni didn’t show? On your last night of filming?”

He stares at her.

“I believe she may have run off with my assistant director. I finally find someone who knows what he’s doing and she seduces him and kidnaps him. She is a plague sent from the angry god of cinema.”

“What are you going to do?”

He squints and says, “A Leni Pauline cannot stop the fulfillment of this film. I can shoot around the hole that is Leni Pauline. Her absence is a minor technical difficulty. I’ve dealt with far worse. Besides, this is Don Juan’s night. The scenes all belong to him.”

They come to a stop in front of the double wooden doors spray-painted Henrick Galeen Memorial Studio. She hears Hugo take a deep breath, sees him square his shoulders. He stares straight ahead and whispers, “Once I go in, I do not come out until it is done.”

Then, before Sylvia can respond, he straight-arms the doors and they fly open to the full extent of the hinges and inside the studio you can hear all sound sucked away immediately, as if a machine had been turned off.

He stands framed inside the doorway, surveying the landscape. Sylvia lags back, stays in his shadow, follows as he slowly enters this cavernous loft. And his people stare back at him as if he were Hannibal or Napoleon or Cecil B. DeMille, some conquering entity inflated larger than life by vision and ego. Some force that can change the course of the moon.

He comes to a stop a few feet inside the studio, stands quietly, then brings his hands up to chest-level and presses them together as if in prayer, an enormous, mutant, fascist altar boy. And then he begins to bow slightly, over and over, in a running semicircle aimed at his entire congregation.

A wave of applause comes back at him, starting slowly at first, but building to an ovation which Hugo eventually waves down.

“My people,” he says to the room in a booming, theatrical voice, “my little family, my fellow dwellers in this madhouse we call art, I welcome you all tonight for the conclusion, after seven years of backbreaking, soul-crushing labor, after hundreds of hours of exposed film, after countless changes of cast crew and scripts, and yes, my friends, my family, after births and deaths and lost loves and betrayals and too many trips to the brink of financial disaster, we come to the final night of our story. Tonight, the myth shall be made whole. The tale completed. My work ended. And the thing itself, the film, birthed into this wretched world. And so,” a pause and another small bow, “it ends as it began. With love. With courage. And with passion. I say to you, my people, my children, let us begin this last night in Eden.”

No applause now, just a respectful, earnest hush. And then Hugo brings his hands around to his back, locks them together and begins a pre-filming tour of his soundstage. Sylvia catches up next to him and says, “Very impressive. Now, about the photographs you sent me—”

He looks at everything except her.

“Did you like them?” he says, for the first time acknowledging the shots of Perry and Candice. “They’re technically crude, but they have a certain bite, don’t you think?”

“Just tell me what—” she begins, but he cuts her off.

“I take it you’ve brought plenty of film?” he says, meaning it’s not yet time for their heart-to-heart.

They stroll past a line of tables filled with platters of food and pastries. A young woman dressed in someone’s clichéd idea of a French maid’s uniform — something out of a thirty-year-old imported farce — is lighting sterno cans underneath silver chafing dishes.

“No, no, Mariette,” Hugo barks without looking at the girl. “Nothing is to be served until after three. I don’t want the smell of food distracting them from their work.”

They come to half a dozen people engrossed in various duties from planting bottles of Möet in crystal serving buckets to slicing open cherrystones to chiseling a fat block of ice into what might turn out to be a rosebush in full bloom.

Apparently satisfied with the preparation of the feast, Hugo marches toward the set and comes to stand behind a classic director’s chair with Schick inscribed on the back. He grabs a script out of the chair and holds it against his chest.

“I must confess my nervousness at this moment,” he says. “So many of the greats have taken their turn with the legend. Gabriel Tellez may have been the first. But they all had a go at it. Byron. Shadwell. Mozart. Espronceda. Molière. Shaw. Even Bergman, The list goes on and on.”

“And now,” Sylvia says, “we add Schick.”

He looks at her, frowns slightly. “You’ll discover I’ve taken quite a few liberties, so to speak, with the myth.”

“No guts, no glory.”

He nods. “A coarse phraseology, but the truth is the truth. An artist interprets the old myths for the new age, yes? His job is not so much to decode as to re-code.”

“Well,” she says, “there are only so many stories.”

“Exactly,” he says. “And style is everything.”

She nods but he’s not looking at her. He seems to be dazing slightly, staring out at the set, but not quite focusing.

“It’s so tragic, Sylvia,” he says, “when an artist peaks too soon. I think, so often, of Welles.”

She stays quiet.

“I’ve been working on this film for so long now,” he says, “I feel as if the only thing to do upon its completion is expire.”

He opens the script and brings his face down close to a page, then immediately closes it and says, “Do you feel prepared, my child?”

She stares at him until she remembers why she’s here— Hugo wants her to photograph his work tonight. Hugo wants a record of the genius in the grip of his art.

She nods, steps back, lifts the Canon, focuses in on him and shoots the first image of the series. She keeps the camera at her eye and says, “When will you answer my questions, Hugo?”

He stares into the viewfinder for a while, then says, “You’re quite sure you want all the answers, Sylvia?”

She lowers the Canon. She keeps her voice even. “I’m here, aren’t I? I brought my goddamn camera, didn’t I?”

“At three o’clock we break for dinner,” he says. “You and I can dine. And talk.”

She takes a breath, not sure what to do. “You set me up from the start, didn’t you, Hugo?”

He looks surprised.

“You came to me, Sylvia,” he says. “Don’t you recall? You came to the theatre on the day of the riot. You sought me out.”

She wants to say something, to voice some contradiction or insult. But nothing comes out. He reaches out, puts his hand on her shoulder and says, “Keep your eyes open, Sylvia. Tonight won’t come again.”

Then he claps his big hands together and people start scurrying to various stations and jobs. Hugo’s got three cameras ready on dollies, two boom mikes, and two simple banks of lights mounted high near the ceiling. It looks like a fairly second-rate production in light of his speech. A step above an amateur video shoot, but not much of a step.

The set resembles an enormous dance hall. At one end of the room four musicians, two men and two women, all with narrow black bow ties secured around their necks, form a naked string quartet seated on cheesy and cold-looking metal folding chairs. Above them, mounted on the brick wall, is a hand-painted sign that reads Club Sevila. The rest of the room is outfitted with such a dizzying array of anachronisms that determining what time period Schick is going for is almost impossible. The design strikes Sylvia as the quintessential nightclub from hell. It’s sort of a hybrid — the classic New York hotspots of the thirties and forties, places like 21 and the Stork Club, crossed with something vaguely Germanic. It’s a location from your queasiest dreams, the perfect locale for Desi Arnaz to bound onto the stage and sing “Babalu” to Hermann Goering and his date.

And the club is populated by a stunning array of freakish, disparate characters in the gaudiest, most mismatched costumes imaginable. There are dozens of actors and actresses arranged at cocktail tables and dressed in loungewear from Mars, lingerie from the nightmares of a disturbed carnival geek. The view through Sylvia’s camera looks as if Halloween has spontaneously broken out in some tacky clinic for schizophrenics.

Hugo takes a long, slow look around the set, seems to meet the eye of every performer and technician. Sylvia focuses in on him with the camera, watches him through the lens as a makeup man leans over and dabs a little pancake on his glistening forehead. Hugo pulls down on the hem of his uniform jacket, then nods to a young woman in jeans and a blue work shirt.

The woman calls out, “All right everyone. Quiet on the set. Cameras roll,” then steps out in front of one of the cameras and holds up an old fashioned clapboard, says, “Don Juan Triumphant. Scene Seventy-two. Take one,” smacks the clapper down on the board and jumps back next to Hugo who shouts, top of his lungs, “And action.”

The room falls to silence. A beat goes by. Then the naked quartet is cued and, to the sound of screeching violin and cello, Hugo, the Virgil of the porno-tour, pushes out his chin and stork-walks into the center of Club Sevila, clasps his hands in front of him and initiates the movie’s finale, the consummate narcissist to the end.

Sylvia focuses in on the director, zooms until his enormous head is squeezed within the box of her vision, until Hugo’s mouth is a cavernous vacuum that begins to move.

“This, our final circle of hell, can be a very liberating residence. Don Juan has an eternity to indulge his carnal impulse. You, my sweet voyeur, my audience and my customer, are not nearly so lucky. Waste no more time. Join us in the consummation of a lifetime of yearning. Excise the oppression. Cast off the yoke of inhibition. Let the beast inside ride free and wild tonight,” his voice escalates to a roar. “Let this rapture begin.”

And all the performers begin to tear each other’s clothes off. Hugo starts prompting and directing, matching partners up, instructing, his hands flying, letting loose buttons and zippers and hooks and fasteners of all variety. Costumes are flying in the air as more flesh begins to fill the set, all of it young and toned and unreal.

Suddenly Sylvia’s watching an entire stage full of copulating men and women groping and heaving and thrusting and moaning. The actors are acrobatic and wildly imaginative. Hugo, the ringmaster, the carnal dance instructor, stays in his SS uniform throughout the orgy, and once he sees everyone is well-lubed and arranged in a chain of copulation that snakes across the floor from wall to wall, he climbs back to center stage, stands for a moment with his hands clasped behind him, rigid, at full attention, staring down the camera, a prissy general surveying the messy plains of his conquest. Then he pulls two long baton-like sticks from behind his back and holds them out in the air like an orchestra conductor. He extends them downward with a flourish until they touch the closest firepot and burst into flame, become skinny little torches. Hugo turns sideways, bends the trunk of his body backwards, the dome of his skull finally parallel with the stage floor. He lifts one torch to his mouth and inserts it slowly and deeply, pulls it out extinguished. He performs the same feat with the other torch, a bit faster this time, popping the burning stick down into the cavity of his face and withdrawing it seconds later a charred black wick. And then he comes upright, turns forward, and blows out a full lungful of breath that fires a jet of flame into the air above the sexual performers, a tongue of orange fire that seems to roll outward in liquid-ish, spiraling balls. Waves of an inferno from the belly of the Austrian beast.

Sylvia stares at the scene through the camera until she feels a tap on her shoulder. She turns to see the soundman holding a slip of paper up in front of her face. She takes it from his hand and he moves off without a word. She opens the paper and reads

I’m downstairs

and I can’t stay long

— Leni

33

The theatre is in darkness. Even the aisle lights have been turned off. Sylvia stands in the doorway and tries to spot some movement. She walks down the center aisle until she can turn back and look up into the balcony. But she can’t see a thing. She suddenly feels like she’s at the bottom of an enormous swimming pool filled with black ink. Finally she lets out a whispered yell.

“Leni?”

There’s no answer, but that horrible waltzing Muzak starts to play at the wrong speed through the faulty sound system. She’s too tired to find anything funny in Leni’s games tonight.

“Just knock it off,” she yells.

The screen fills up with light. Above Sylvia’s head, in the shaft of movie-beam, she sees countless particles of dust drifting through the air. She follows the shaft to the screen. She watches black numbers, numbers as big as houses, run onto and off the screen. Then there’s a cloudy image that takes a maddeningly long minute to focus. When it does come clear, she’s watching something familiar — a young woman, naked and sleek, watching her own beautiful reflection in a huge, oval, gilt-framed mirror. It’s that stupid soft-core flick that Perry and she saw at the Cansino Drive-in last week. The Meyer Dodgson film, The Initiation of Alice. But this is a lousy print of it. The image is jumping all over the screen and the focus cuts in and out. It looks like a pirated print, maybe even one of those street-cuts they shoot right off the screen with a video camera.

Why the hell does Leni want her to see this?

She slides into an aisle seat. She doesn’t really remember this part of the movie. It seems like some kind of overly artsy dream sequence. Alice’s reflection is replaced in the mirror by three muscular lovers. She steps through the mirror into their waiting arms and a languid, gauzy mingling begins as the heroine gives herself over completely to three pairs of stroking hands and roving mouths.

And then the point of view gets completely confused. It’s as if the cameraman lost hold of his equipment. There’s a stuttering jump from the lovemaking on the screen and into the darkness and then out of darkness and onto a neon sign that reads

The Cansino Drive-In Theatre

Adult Films Nightly

$10.00/Carload

Whoever stole this movie took it from the same drive-in screen that Perry and Sylvia watched it on. They must have filmed from one of the trees that borders the back end of the car lot.

Her stomach begins to slide into a horrible clench, as if she’s willed what she knows is about to come. The camera begins to pan over the rooftops of all the cars in the parking lot. It shoots the roofs of the Chevys and Chryslers and a lot of vans and pickups. Sylvia sees young couples sitting and lying on the hoods and trunks, laughing, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and joints, eating popcorn and the horrible microwave pizza from the concession stand.

And she knows where the camera is going to move next. She knows it and can’t do anything to stop it. So she watches, helpless, frozen as the camera pulls farther back and the drive-in screen becomes that much smaller and the cinematographer finally finds the Skylark convertible with its top rolled back. The shot zooms in slowly.

There’s Perry. Naked below the waist, sitting in the backseat, his head lying over the crest of the seat, tilted toward the moon, his eyes closed, his lips pulled into his mouth.

And there’s Sylvia. Naked, mounted on top of him, chest to chest, her knees crushing into the seat, riding Perry, holding onto his head. There she is, twenty feet tall, having sex on the big screen of the Skin Palace.

A single set of applause breaks out and she jumps up from the seat and turns to see Leni behind her, staring up at the movie, her mouth smiling and her head shaking.

“You bitch,” is all Sylvia can think to say and Leni stops clapping but continues to stare at the screen.

“You’re looking like a real star up there, Sylvie.”

“Who did it?” Sylvia makes herself ask.

“Who do you think?” Leni says, coming down the aisle. “The Schickster always dogs his enemies—”

“I wasn’t his enemy—” Sylvia starts and Leni shakes her off.

“No, but your Perry was.” She pauses and adds, “You were just there.”

Sylvia looks up in the balcony to the projection booth. “Did you run it? Is anyone else up there?”

Leni puts a hand on her shoulder, lowers her voice. “Forget it, Sylvia. He had a dozen prints made before you two were back in your goddamn apartment.”

Out of the corner of her eyes, Sylvia sees her face getting bigger on the screen, a tight shot as she builds toward climax. And here in the theatre, her hand comes up to take a slap at Leni’s face, but Leni catches her by the wrist and holds her arm up in the air.

“Sylvia,” Leni says, “I’m probably the only friend you’ve got in this pathetic city right now.”

“How do I thank you?”

Leni drops hold of the arm. “If Hugo knew I was down here showing you this he’d go crazy. He’d probably sic some of his muscleboys on me. This is one of his big chips, Sylvia. He needs it for the right moment. He needs to hand it to the media when Boetell and Perry make their move. He needs to humiliate them as soon as they start building steam. Your boyfriend sits down at a press conference to yell about the new crusade against filth, Hugo makes sure all the reporters present have a video-cassette of this,” pointing to the screen, “waiting on their desks by the time they get back to the Spy. Anti-smut lawyer stars in porno flick Great headline.”

“But it’s obvious we didn’t know this was being filmed.”

Leni looks up at the screen. “Maybe. But do you think that will matter?”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“No,” she says,“you didn’t. It’s a filthy world, Sylvia. The innocent get kicked a lot.”

“Why did you show it to me, Leni?”

“Thought I’d give you a little advance warning. So you could decide what to do.”

“My options are pretty limited.”

“Oh, c’mon, is it that bad?”

Sylvia looks at her and says, “Not for you …”

She lets the rest trail off and Leni says, “You’re embarrassing me with your gratitude, you know? I’ve got to get out of here.”

Leni steps back, turns and calls out into the rear darkness of the theatre, “Hey, Counselor, you’re up,” then she pats Sylvia on the shoulder and starts to walk for the exit.

Sylvia looks in the direction of the yell and sees someone getting up out of a seat near the last row underneath the balcony. She knows it’s Perry before she even sees his face in the light of the movie. He comes down the aisle awkwardly, hands in pocket, comes next to her and just stands there.

“You think we’ll get nominated?” Sylvia says, knowing he won’t get the reference.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” Perry starts and Sylvia looks at the screen and shakes her head to shut him up.

“The thing is,” she says, “we’ve got such stiff competition. I hear The Perry and Candice Show has gotten rave reviews. Four stars. I hear you’re even better in that one.”

He closes his eyes. If he starts to cry she knows she’ll punch him right in the mouth.

“It’s funny, Perry,” she says, “but I honestly think I can live with it better than you. I can live with the idea of greaseballs from coast to coast renting the video of us-at-the-drive-in. Every night, horny little guys from L.A. and Chicago and Detroit forking over three bucks for a peek at the real thing. I think I can accept it better than you can, Perry. ’Cause you’re such a vain son of a bitch. And you look like shit up there.”

He’s breathing heavy. He loosens his tie, trying to figure out how to play her as if she was one more tough customer at a Walpole & Lewis conference table.

“We’ve got to get out of here, Sylvia.”

“You get out—”

“We can talk at home—”

“We don’t have a home, you bastard.”

He takes her arm and she rips it away from him, gets ready to punch and kick if she has to.

“Look,” he says, getting frantic, “this thing is about to get out of hand, okay? When your friend there called me—”

“Her name’s Leni.”

“—We were just finishing up the logistics for tonight’s march.”

“We’ll save a seat for Eddie Meade and the good Reverend Boetell,” she says and nods her head toward the screen. “God, Perry, look at the way you’re clawing my back there. I hadn’t noticed what a real savage you were. Does Candice like it on top, too?”

“Sylvia,” he says, “They’re on their way here right now. All of them. Paige Beatty and WAR, Boetell and the FUD people. They’re going to make some headlines tonight.”

“And Schick is going to do them all one better tomorrow morning. This is the public’s favorite story — self-righteous scumbag hypocrites caught in the sins they’ve screamed about. They’ll probably make a movie of the week—”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he yells.

“Outside of betraying me, you mean. Is Candice coming tonight? I know how much she loves a good party.”

“I’ll get an injunction,” he babbles, “I’ll impound every film, every photo—”

“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that, Perry,” and she genuinely wants to laugh at him. “Hugo doesn’t play by your rules. You’ve already lost. You’re a lightweight with bad instincts, Perry. Your first time out in the big leagues and you pick the wrong scapegoat. You were a joke to Hugo. Your credibility is gone. You’re an insult to family values. All the bad ink is going to piss off Walpole & Lewis in a big corporate way. Boetell is just going to have to take his account elsewhere.”

“I’m not going to let this happen, Sylvia. I’m—”

“It’s already happened, Perry. For Christ’s sake.”

“We have to go now.”

They stare at each other. She watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows.

“Get out of here, Perry. My movie isn’t over yet.”

And after a minute, with the sputter from the projection booth the only sound in the theatre, he surprises her by giving up, just turning and walking toward the exit. No need for any slapping or kneeing. No need for a big, cheesy finish.

She watches him disappear through the swinging doors. When she looks back to the screen, the lovers in the back of the Buick have finished up and lie in a pile of flesh and sweat. But the camera stays on them. It’s a static, boring shot. An aggravating picture.

There’s no motion. No progression.

34

Jakob stands in a doorway across the street from the Hotel St. Vitus. He’s not sure what to do with his hands, having given the Seitz to Vera Gottwald for safekeeping. He looks up at his home of the past year, its cold, castle-like facade seeming to lean out over Belvedere Street even more then usual, the angles seeming sharper than normal, the spires somehow appearing taller than before. Even the heads of the gargoyles seem to have grown larger over the course of the past week.

He sits down on the stoop and wonders how his family managed to arrive at this point. He thinks back on the last days in Maisel that now seem like a fading dream, more myth than truth.

He remembers Papa’s supper-table talk of emigration seeming to increase. But Jakob wasn’t really paying much attention. Not even the attack on Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill could dampen the boy’s passions. He was thinking of Felice, dreaming of Felice, fantasizing the lewd story lines about the woman round-the-clock. As she placed a bowl of Cockova’ on the table, he gritted his teeth and stared at the curves of her breasts under her bib apron. As she sat by the night’s dying fire and finished the last of the mending, he imagined his hand taking in the warmth and smoothness of her thigh, his fingers rolling over the small mole on her left shoulder.

He began to perspire continually. His concentration deteriorated to a single, obsessive longing. His notebook screenplay dissolved into both soft-and hard-core musings about his governess-cum-lover. He’d be scribbling a scene intended to culminate in a prolonged gun battle only to find the doomed hero undressing an older mystery woman on a speeding train while the other passengers appeared to sleep. In the night, Jakob would cry out at the climax of a lascivious dream, loud enough to wake Felix. And all the while his anxiety grew in proportion to his lust. Because he couldn’t determine where this erotic madness would end. Because he was the fifteen-year-old son of the busiest gangster in central Maisel. Felice was a thirty-year-old washerwoman from the Schiller ghetto. Just the thought of this union had an unreal quality to it, required a fantastic leap of faith to traverse its improbability. Were Jakob watching this affair unfold on the screen of the Kierling, he’d shake his head at the inconsistencies of the script, the logic glitches, the lack of foreshadowing and back-story buildup. But as the passion transpired in the mundane commonality of his real life, he could only go along with it, give in to the most primal and elemental impulses he’s ever experienced.

Then came the week the Kierling managed to secure a print of The Big Sleep. And the rumor spread among the regulars that the theatre was closing. That Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill, now blind and broken, was selling the cinema and emigrating to Jerusalem.

Felice left another note to arrange a rendezvous in Devetsil Park. She wrote that she’d be wearing the black stockings and the red lipstick the boy loved so much. Jakob was wheezing from anticipation as he ran down Havetta Boulevard. But when he saw Gustav Weltsch pulling a steamer trunk through Loew Square, his lungs began to labor from dread rather than expectation. And when he entered the Park and found their usual bench empty, his heart began to pump as if he’d overdosed on his camphor injections. He sat and waited until nightfall, but Felice never arrived. He waited an hour after sundown, after the horrible, haunting supper bells from St. Wenceslas Abbey had rung. He waited as the first-showing crowd filed out of the Kierling and into the cafés as the second-showing crowd replaced the first. He waited until the cafés had dispatched the last of the drunken, credo-spewing students back to their dormitories.

He tried to pray, but could not, and so instead repeated dialogue from random films, sometimes mouthing entire scenes, reciting all the parts, whispering the scripted words as if they were sacred petitions in some ancient and holy language.

As he spoke, he stared at the second-rate marble Pietà at the rear of the park, the mother cradling the limp body of a martyred son, mourning a loss that will never go away, grieving an absence that can never be relieved.

And when he finally ran out of the movie-prayer, Jakob got up from the lovers’ bench and walked across the park to the statue, stepped up to the base of this stone testament to the relentless tragedy of this life, and peered behind the statue where he saw the body of Felice Fabri.

Both of her eyes had been shot out.

The boy let himself fall down on top of her. He pulled her head next to his own, smearing his cheeks with the drying blood. He rolled into a sitting position, lifted Felice into his lap, held the weight of her head in his hands. Her skirt rode up on her thighs and he could see the patterns of contusion where the stockings had been ripped away. His chest began to tremble uncontrollably. He brought his mouth to hers, felt the coldness, brought a hand around and touched the lips, wiping the lipstick where it had smeared.

And then he convulsed, his head snapping backwards in a seizure-like series of twitches, his vision blurring, dissolving, until all he could see were flashes of grey and white, monstrous shadows that seemed to be approaching.

He woke to find himself in his own bed.

Papa was sitting on the edge, wiping the boy’s forehead with a washcloth.

“I am not angry,” Papa was saying.

Jakob tried to sit up. Gustav Weltsch, on the other side of the bed, pushed him gently back to reclining.

“You had us very worried, my son,” Papa said.

“I knew he’d be at the movie house,” Felix blurted from across the room.

“Thank goodness the projectionist called us,” Gustav said. “This flu is serious business.”

“You can’t go running to the films when you are sick like this, Jakob,” Papa says. “You should know better. Passing out in the cinema. Where is your sense, my boy?”

Papa made a head motion for Gustav and Felix to leave. He waited until the bedroom door closed and then pulled the covers up to Jakob’s chin. He brought his head close to the boy’s ear and whispered, “You rest now, Jakob. You get some more sleep.”

Papa folded the washcloth precisely and placed it on the nightstand. Then he stood and turned out the light. Jakob stared up at the man’s bulk, just his father’s outline, nothing more that that, barely visible in the darkness.

“Felix has packed all your things for you, like a good cousin,” Hermann Kinsky said walking to the door. “You get to sleep now. You need your strength, Jakob. We have a long journey ahead. But you can sleep on the freighter. The sea air will do those lungs a world of good. And when we arrive in America, you will be as fit as the rest of the family.

The chapel is in darkness as Jakob steps through the door. His father’s head is in silhouette, outlined only by the dim shine of the street lamp outside the stained-glass window. Hermann is seated in his chair but swiveled away from the altar/desk. It’s possible he’s fallen asleep, though the son can’t hear the heavy, guttural snore that normally signifies Papa at rest. If it were someone besides Hermann, he might believe the man was praying, speaking hopefully to a God who continues to hide his face.

Jakob stands in the doorway for a while, staring at the back of the father’s head. And though the boy is tempted to give way to what’s now an instinct and begin finding alternative ways to view the room, seeking interesting camera angles, methods of using the faint light to the best advantage, he refrains. He simply stands and breathes and stares at the rear of the head until the silence is broken by Hermann’s voice, sounding unusually low and tentative.

“You have your mother’s sense of timing, Jakob. She always knew when I needed to speak with her.”

Hermann turns his chair around. He’s holding a framed photograph in both hands. He continues to stare at the photo as he talks to the boy.

“Where is your cousin?”

Jakob gives the hint of a shrug and says without any sarcasm, “Oh, Papa, am I my cousin’s keeper?”

Hermann brings his face forward a bit, tried to get a better look at Jakob, as if he senses for the first time that his son might possibly be more than a tubercular repository of trivial dreams. Then he shakes his head slightly and looks back down at the photo.

“When your mother and I were first married, she would often wait up for me. Like this. Very late into the night. I’d return home to our flat on Budec Road. Six stories up, I’d climb those filthy stairs and wondered if she’d be spying through the crack in the door as I came around the corner. I’d give her my work sack. Maybe a few eggs. Half a loaf of plum bread. Once a bottle of Becherovka and a freshly slaughtered goose. Your mother loved me very much, Jakob.”

The son just nods.

The father gestures to the opposite seat. Jakob sits down, unfastens the top button of his shirt and loosens his tie.

“Schick kept you working late.”

“He’s a very dedicated man,” Jakob says.

“You need that in life,” Hermann answers, modulating his own voice to an identical volume. “You need to care deeply about what you do and why you do it. You can’t rely on luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” Jakob says.

“Neither do I,” Hermann says. “But what do you believe in, Jakob? Besides the movies.”

Jakob ignores the question and says, “Can I see it?” motioning toward the photograph.

Hermann stares across the table and just when Jakob thinks his father is about to say no, Papa slides the picture across the altar. Jakob picks it up and looks at his mother’s face, still a girl, not much older than Jakob is now, dressed in what must have passed as a wedding gown in those desperate times. Holding a bouquet of some sort to her chest. And staring out, slightly unfocused but somehow contented, pleased, happy with whatever thoughts had lodged in her mind at that moment twenty years before.

“She was a beautiful woman,” the son says.

Hermann shakes his head.

“Beauty is nothing. She was my religion. As close as I will ever come to having one. To worshipping something. To believing in a better moment. I have wondered, if she had lived, if she could have perhaps taught me to see things as she did. Maybe just a bit. If we’d had more time.”

“I’m sorry,” is all Jakob can think to say.

“Your father is a brutal man,” Hermann says. “I want to say that I had to become this way, but perhaps I was born this way.”

“It’s a brutal world, Papa.”

“Is that what the movies tell you?”

“Among other things.”

They sit in silence, stare at those parts of each other’s face that aren’t buried in shadow, until Hermann whispers, “Do you know what it’s like to live without any kind of faith, Jakob?”

“I don’t think I do, Papa. But faith isn’t a static thing. It’s a process. It’s a methodology. A way to get someplace else. And it comes and goes.”

“Sometimes, son, it never comes.”

“I think you have to want it. Very badly. You have to look in the right places.”

“You’ve seen so much in eighteen years, Jakob?”

“I’ve seen a lot of things.”

“From the comfort of a velour seat, squinting at a white screen.”

“No, Papa. From next to your elbow. With my eyes wide open.”

Another bout of silence that Hermann again breaks up by asking, “Where is Felix, Jakob?”

This time, Jakob answers, “I think maybe he’s visiting Johnny Yew.”

The boy doesn’t know what to expect, but after a second, Papa pushes his bulk back in the chair so that his face is lost in darkness. And then Jakob hears what might be a small laugh. A kind of suppressed chuckle. The father gets out of the chair and walks to the window.

“You know you’ve been a great disappointment to me?”

“I’m sorry about that too, Papa,” Jakob says. “But life is full of disappointments. That’s one of the things I’ve seen.”

He hears the old man walk back toward him, come to a stop behind his chair.

“And what,” Hermann asks, a little breathlessly, “is your greatest disappointment, my son? Did they close your favorite theatre one night? Did your favorite movie leave town?”

“No, Papa,” Jakob says, pushing his hands into the pockets of his suitcoat. “Not at all.” He waits a moment, lets himself compose Felice’s face one last time. “There was a woman. Back in Maisel. She took care of me. She tried to help me. To teach me. She loved me.”

A long moment of hesitation until Hermann says, “The fishwife?”

“Her name was Felice, Papa. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”

“The fishwife from the Schiller ghetto?”

“What happened to Felice, Papa?”

“That woman I hired to clean and cook for us? She was a maid, for God’s sake—”

“She was all I had.”

“She was twice your age, Jakob,” catching his breath, his hands on the back of the chair. “I had to dismiss her. I knew we were leaving for America. I had to let her go.”

“What did you do, Papa?” Jakob asks. “Does it matter so much if you tell me now?”

“We were making arrangements to leave. I couldn’t bring her with us, son. She was a bad influence on you. I could see what was happening. She infected you with her movie sickness. She had you at that theatre day and night. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t—”

“You killed Felice, didn’t you?”

“She was a victim of the pogroms. Like the others—”

“No,” Jakob yells, trembling. “Just say it. Just tell me. Pay me that little respect.”

Hermann has sat all night in the chapel trying to find another way, slouched before his desk like a well-tailored Abraham agonizing over his duty, choking on promises and vows and long-held notions of how the world is put together. And knowing that those long, tormented hours could only lead to this moment, when his hand edges up the flap on his jacket pocket and his fingers plunge into the felt and touch the always cold, twice-reinforced metal string of the Schonborn.

“I have told myself there was no other way. I have tried to convince myself that she was a very evil influence on my son, making him soft, filling the head with nonsense. I knew what she meant to you. I told myself I had to free you so you could start new here in the States.”

The hand withdraws the piano wire, loops ends around fingers.

“But I do owe you the truth. As my son, I owe you my honesty. And I have to confess, I know, without doubt, that I killed her, in part, as a touch of revenge, Jakob. For what happened at your birth. For how your life was traded for that of my wife.”

“Papa,” is all the boy can say and no matter how hard he attempts to restrain the muscle, tears well and start to roll from his eyes. Tears for Felice. And for his unknown mother. Maybe tears for Papa. Maybe even some for Felix.

Hermann steps back from the chair, raises his arms and starts to bring the garrote down to his son’s neck.

And he finds the barrel mouth of a revolver touching his throat at the Adam’s apple.

“Jakob,” he says.

Jakob swings out of the seat and around to face the old man. He wipes his eyes with the back of his free arm, and pushes the barrel tighter against the fat, fleshy throat.

“A gun?” Papa’s voice going high, his face actually brightening.

“Don’t you recognize it? It’s kind of a family heirloom.”

“You’re carrying a gun?” the meaning of the last several seconds still dawning on Hermann.

“Carrying is the easy part, Papa,” Jakob says and cocks the firing hammer. “Would you like to see me use it?”

The father’s hands come up to shoulder level as his fingers open and the length of the Schonborn drops to the floor.

“So, Felix is really—” the father begins and Jakob interrupts.

“You’re going to be shorthanded around here for a while, Papa. Just you and Gustav.”

“We’ll manage,” Hermann says, unable to contain the smile bursting over his face.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Jakob says, chinchucking the old man with the commandment’s pistol. “To see if I could do it? If I was capable?”

“You just told me what a brutal world we live in.”

Jakob lifts the gun from under the chin to an inch above the nose. He pushes the barrel in, applies pressure until Papa closes his eyes.

Then he uncocks the pistol and lays it down on the altar. His father’s chest heaves.

“I’m opening the wall safe on my way out,” the boy says. “I’m taking what I think is a fair amount. My birthright, so to speak. Enough to get me started. Tell Weltsch to keep an eye out for my company. It’s called Amerikan Pictures. We’ll be going public one of these days.”

“I’m sure you’ll make a fortune,” Hermann says. “I may want to invest myself.”

Jakob shakes his head, gently pushes his father aside and walks back to the door.

“I don’t think so,” he says, watching the old man sink back into shadow. “But come by sometime. I might put you in a movie.”

35

Sylvia walks out of the theatre blinking against the light, moves down the corridor and into Schick’s office. She goes to the bar, pours a glass of absinthe and looks at the couch. Resting on the cushions is the framed poster for Don Juan Triumphant. It depicts a teenage Leni Pauline, the Leni that existed seven years ago when the filming of the masterpiece first began, a Leni who still looked like a cheerleader-turned-bad and just off the bus, with the smooth ghost of baby fat only recently starting to fade from her face. She’s positioned on her knees in some vague period-costume, a sort of low-cut medieval gown that makes her breasts defy gravity. Her eyes don’t have any of their current hardness, their reflective calculation, and Sylvia wonders if this is the work of a talented airbrush artist or a true representation of the past.

She moves to Hugo’s desk and takes the massive seat, rests her drink in her lap, picks up a fat, bound script from the desk and reads

DON JUAN TRIUMPHANT

(revision 91, pink sheets)

“They have perfected a science of blinks”

— Geoffrey O’Brian

then opens to the last few pages and reads

554 INT/CLUB von SCHICK

Don Juan and Sylvia begin to rise back through the mouth of hell, all the while tangled in a passionate embrace. Sylvia becomes reanimated. Sylvia’s body is covered in reflective glitter. The couple begins to Tango.

She throws the script back on the desk, swivels the chair around, puts her feet up on the credenza and looks up at the rest of the framed posters from Schick’s seven self-proclaimed favorites. And there, in the space where Don Juan Triumphant had been, there’s the variant Madonna and Child. Maybe the one she saw in the lobby during her first visit. Maybe something new.

She closes her eyes and tries to imagine what the poster would look like for Perry and her movie.

Then she opens her eyes and stares at the Madonna’s face. And she knows it’s a forgery. It’s a talented attempt to reproduce an original Propp. But it’s not a Propp. Hugo’s picture gives nothing up. It’s a facade. A veneer. It’s a death mask that says I’II never tell you a thing. Propp’s pictures are exactly the opposite. No matter how cleverly, how purposefully, the photographer tried to hide her, the woman looks out of the shadows and says Here’s the only truth I have left to tell you.

Sylvia thinks, But Ma, I’m too tired to understand it.

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

If Terrence Propp expected her to jump and dump her drink in shock, he’s disappointed right now.

Sylvia doesn’t even turn around to face him. She just holds the glass up in a toast position, over her head so it’s visible above the back of the chair. She looks at the portrait of the Madonna and says, “Daddy, you made it to my party after all.”

The real surprise is how easily the sarcasm and hostility slide out of her throat.

Propp doesn’t respond. Not that she expects him to.

“Let me guess,” she says. “There’s a tunnel that leads under the Skin Palace.”

Still nothing, so she’s forced to swivel to the front and finds him looking out the window down at the street.

“Where’s the gang?” he says, without turning to her.

“Up in the studios,” she says. “They’re filming the big finish to Hugo’s masterpiece.”

“I envy a man,” Propp says, “who knows when he’s at the height of his career.”

“What about a woman?”

“My experience with women,” finally looking, “such as it is, says they don’t measure themselves that way.”

“She nods, takes a sip, says, “You ran off pretty quickly last night.”

He tries to smile and misses.

“I remembered,” he says, “I’d left something back on the stove.”

It should feel like he’s making fun of her, but it doesn’t.

“Come over here, Sylvia,” he says, the voice so resigned, his fingers gently bending down the Levelor blinds.

She goes to the window, takes a seat on the sill. Outside, a crowd is massing in the street. Perry’s horrible little alliance. They’re lining up in their specific pockets, the Women’s Resistance not getting too close to Boetell’s army, but both groups mimicking a pseudo-military stance, a little coiled, a lot of hands on hips, a collective and unnatural posture, tense with the silence of their thoughts. They’re bent into two wings with Perry and Candice and Ratzinger between them, opposite the main entrance to the Skin Palace.

Into the mix rolls a large silver van. Painted on the side in a fluorescent-red script trimmed with glitter are the words.

The Reality Studio

“the fastest news-magazine in America”

now syndicated globally

There’s a mini dish-antenna mounted on the roof. Three people jump out of the vehicle like a SWAT team, but instead of bearing assault rifles they carry cameras and microphones and ropes of black, rubbery looking cable. Perry waves the team over and goes into an immediate huddle with a tall woman in a blue blazer, gesticulating with his hands, thumping a fist into a palm and nodding with conviction. Ratzinger and Candice look on approvingly.

Reverend Boetell paces before his people in a poplin suit that’s too white and light for the New England fall. As he walks he taps his ever present Bible against his right leg and keeps his eyes screwed closed, moving his lips in conspicuously passionate prayer.

Still staring out on the street scene, Sylvia says to Propp, “The other night at the diner, you asked if I’d taken a look at the Aquinas I bought?”

He doesn’t say anything but she feels him turn from the window to look at her.

“The answer,” she says, “is yes. I looked at the camera. I looked in the film magazine. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted me to do?”

After a long time he says, “What did you find, Sylvia?” his voice so close to cracking, like some pathologist who suddenly can’t find his professional distance. Like someone whose last tool for defending himself has irreparably broken.

“I found,” she says, “some pictures from a long time ago.”

She turns and meets his face. One tear has streamed from the corner of his left eye.

“What am I to you?” she asks, as gently as she can.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

“That’s not the right answer.”

He nods, has difficulty swallowing. He says, “You make choices in this life. You make choices. Things happen and you can’t go back.”

“Just say it for me, please. Who is the woman in the photographs?”

She watches his throat quiver. After a while, he says, “Have you ever been out. With the camera. You find a spot. You find your subject. You wait for the moment. You wait for a long period of time. And you find you’ve waited too long.”

“Or,” she says, “you haven’t waited long enough.”

He reaches over, puts his hand just barely on her cheek. His voice goes so low she has to read his lips.

“Can’t you forgive me?”

She covers his hand with her own.

She says, “I’m asking for even less than an apology. I’m asking for a single piece of information. I’m asking for the sound of your voice. A few simple words. One confirmation.”

He just stares.

And she can’t stop herself from taking things one more step, from forcing the progression no matter how badly instinct says what’s to come will hurt her.

She says, “Until I know what to forgive you for, how—”

The window above their heads splinters with a loud thud. They both cringe down to the floor and look up to see a fat shard of glass trapped in the blinds. They stay on the floor for maybe a full minute, then Propp gets up first and looks and Sylvia follows, both on their knees, peering gingerly through the gap their fingers poke in the blindslats.

A small pocket of Boetell’s holy rollers have come forward, stepped out to the front of the crowd. One of them holds a placard, freshly painted by the looks of the dripping red ink, that reads Get Out Now. Sylvia looks for Perry and can’t find him anywhere, though she sees Ratzinger and Candice arguing over the hood of Boetell’s Chariot of Virtue, Ratzinger banging a fist on the Cadillac, uncharacteristically ruffled.

She spots bricks and rocks clutched in various hands. She doesn’t see any police cars or uniforms. She doesn’t even see any of Hugo’s payrolled muscle.

“Something’s wrong,” she says.

“I think we’d better heed their advice,” Propp says.

Sylvia looks from his face to the variant Madonna and Child. She looks back again to his face. She tries to imagine him as a young man holding a camera up to his eye, surrounded by decay, twenty or thirty hours without sleep, possessed by conflicting needs he can’t name let alone control, focusing, again and again, on a woman he’ll soon abandon.

Sylvia leads the way down the corridor toward the rear exit she used on the day of the riot, but before she can push outside, Propp takes her arm, gestures to an old, wooden door on their left and says, “You were right. Down in the basement, there is a tunnel.”

She starts to shake her head no, but he turns the knob and pulls the cellar door open and suddenly Fernando, Reverend Boetell’s chief gofer, is standing in front of them looking shocked and almost losing his balance on the top stair. He’s dressed in a pair of green zip-up workman’s coveralls with some kind of logo-patch stitched over his heart and a red baseball cap too tight on his head. And he’s carrying a bulky, rusty-metal tool chest.

Before Sylvia can say anything, Fernando ducks his head and rushes between them and out the rear door.

Propp and Sylvia look at each other. Propp pokes his head into the darkness of the cellar stairwell, comes back out into the hall and says, “What the hell was that?”

They follow Fernando’s path out into the alleyway next to the Skin Palace and swing up onto the fringes of the crowd, but he’s nowhere to be seen. And now there’s an awful tension in the air, almost the antithesis of the chaos that was here earlier in the week. There’s a feeling of false stillness, this sense of a fraudulent vacuum. There’s no changing, no baiting, not a single catcall. There’s not even much talk, just a lot of abbreviated mumbles and head-nodding. It’s as if a veneer of calm has been painted over everything. There’s a palpable absence of randomness, as if something monstrously harsh has been decided and the decree passed on to the mob without the use of language. As if everyone massing outside the Skin Palace shared one angry brain under excessive and building pressure.

Propp and Sylvia move through the bodies to the back rim of the crowd, both looking around for Fernando, trying to get a sense of what’s about to happen. Sylvia steadies herself against Propp’s shoulder and climbs onto the same mailbox she used to shoot up the riot. Up in front, she spots Boetell whispering into Ratzinger’s ear. Ratzinger is staring at his wristwatch, maybe oblivious to the Reverend’s babble.

And then the noise comes from the north end of Watson and the attention of the mob pivots to watch the last of Paige Beatty’s troops, her elite guard, swing around the corner of Goulden Ave, still chanting their castration march, now even more intense than when Sylvia first heard them outside the Rib Room. She looks back to see Boetell kind of absentmindedly rubbing his hands together like some greasy, fat rodent and the sight makes her nauseated so she looks back to the platoon, to Paige out in the lead, to the constellation of stubborn phallic candles still flickering in the drizzle.

Paige lifts the red bullhorn to her mouth and points it skyward toward the roof of the Skin Palace.

“Mary and Martha,” she yells, her voice made mechanical by the horn, her syllables electrically dulled a bit, “drop the sheets now.”

There’s a collective intake of breath from the crowd and in that second Sylvia sees Ratzinger walking away from the mob, heading for a Mercedes sedan that’s parked halfway up on the sidewalk a block past Herzog’s. He doesn’t look back and he doesn’t run. He just disappears into the car, kicks over the engine and drives away.

Sylvia turns her attention back to the roof.

From the front two corners at the top of the Skin Palace, figures can be seen heaving clumps of pillowy white material over the edge of the parapets. The sheets billow out on the night’s breeze, resemble for a moment parachutes being unfurled on a current of cold air, then sail downward, almost, but not quite, in synchronized glides. The sheets flap and come to a rest, hanging close to where the sidewalk meets the building’s foundation. A pack of women tear out of the crowd and run to the sheet’s hems to tie them down, secure them in place against the breeze. They look like a well-trained yacht crew, everyone assured of her particular duties and performing them with the speed and precision of an eternal instinct.

Sylvia thinks for a minute that Paige is making some kind of visual statement, that she’s “wrapping” the building, like the artist Christo. That she’ll give a detailed exegesis of her complex symbolism to some indulgent Spy reporter and tomorrow’s paper will translate her meaning for all.

But then Paige speaks through the bullhorn again, saying, “Start the projectors,” and from the rooftops of the buildings across the street, Sylvia sees tiny bluish circles ignite and then beams of light, shafts of expanding illumination, fire down on the new wall of sheeting. And Herzog’s Erotic Palace is no longer a building but a massive, bizarre canvas, an enormous movie screen simultaneously presenting dozens of moving images. And the images are all of the hard-core S&M variety. And the images are all overlapping, bleeding into one another until the whole projection seems like a horrible hundred-foot hallucination. A violent, nightmare vision from a special section of hell. A raw and confusing dream where elongated women are perpetually manhandled and desecrated and beaten into positions of acrobatic submissiveness.

Paige Beatty is projecting sadistic fantasies onto the face of the Skin Palace itself.

Paige has somehow coordinated an offense that Sylvia already knows, standing here just seconds after its birth, has instantly evolved into legend. The planning must have been backbreaking — amassing such enormous sheets, scrounging up industrial projectors, smuggling projectionists onto the rooftops, and then, finally and most important, willing this craziness, this whole visual stunt, into something so far beyond a stunt. Into a ritual. A ceremony. A blitz of light divorced from sound. Into a larger than life art form and ideology, a cumulative image whose meaning won’t let the observer alone for a long time, if ever again.

Whether by chance or analysis, the sheets are completely covered with images. There’s no margin, no border of white to show where the movie ends. There must be seven different movies playing from one end of the building to the other. It’s like going to a drive-in where rival projectionists are battling for dominance but no one is winning. It’s like a drive-in with a multiple personality disorder. And if she keeps watching, Sylvia knows it’s going to give her a headache because there’s no way to distinguish exactly where one film leaves off and the next one begins. And she thinks maybe this is one of Paige’s many points.

Because the movies are being shown on sheets rather than real screens and because of the distance of the projection and the fact that they’re outside and there’s moon and street lights, the images thrown up on the building look a bit faded. But that doesn’t detract from the graphicness of their content. There’s a good chance that Paige will end up in jail tonight, not just for storming and seizing someone else’s property, but for publicly displaying these films for anyone walking down Watson Street to see.

There are women shackled and being blasted with firehoses. There are women bent over a row of Ping-Ping tables being paddled on their behinds. There are women being pursued through dark woods by men with dogs and rifles. There are women bound to hospital operating tables. There are women being burned at the stake in open fields by men dressed in flowing black robes. There are women on their backs and on their knees. Handcuffed. Manacled. Chained. Tied down with ropes. Tied down with belts.

Sylvia looks to Paige and the banner that her lieutenants are flying high over her head—Intercourse is Genocide—then looks back up at these despicable images playing high on the front of the Skin Palace.

And she feels she’s missed something. She’s not sure what the abominations silently repeating on the enormous sheets have to do with intercourse. As far as she can see, there’s no sex taking place on the sheets in her view. Just image after image of brutality.

She looks out over the crowd which seems to be growing. She feels like everyone has more knowledge than she. Like everyone else understands all the central connections of this life, all the primal pictures. Sylvia looks at Paige again and then looks up. On the front-facing screen, ten feet above Paige’s head, is the central image, stationary, static, more like a photograph than a movie, but also more horrifying than anything else being projected. This is the picture, the one that everyone will carry home with them, the one Sylvia will carry for the balance of her natural life: a naked woman, hanging, crucified on a wooden cross, planted on the top of a stark and desolate hill. There’s no one around the woman and when you focus on her image everything else on the sheet/screen dissolves. Her head is hanging down so you can’t see her face. Blood is running from her hands and from her feet. Sylvia closes her eyes for a long second then opens them. Pinwheeling all around the crucified woman are the other images from the other movies. But this martyr just stays absolutely still on the cross. And absolutely fixed in Sylvia’s brain.

Is this what happens to the Madonna?

“How much longer?” Paige screams into the shivering silence of the crowd. “How much longer will we allow the horror?”

As if on signal, the mob erupts into a scream of rabid, cheering approval and Paige clusters into a three-way hug with her lieutenants. When they release, Paige relights her phallus-candle with a disposable butane, brings up the bullhorn and screams, “Free at last.”

A handful of women break out of the assembly and run forward to the steps of the Skin Palace. They’re carrying what look like brightly colored plastic rifles. They form a fairly precise line, bring the rifles up and buttress them against their shoulders and fire. Fat streams of water shoot fifty feet into the air and Sylvia realizes they’re firing those super squirt guns, the kid’s toys that are so popular lately. But when the wind comes and she gets the heavy chemical odor of gasoline or lighter fluid, she knows they’re not squirting water. Their liquid barrage is arcing, making it above Paige’s head and soaking the screening sheet.

“They’ll burn down the goddamn building,” Sylvia says to Propp and jumps down from the mailbox.

When the gunners exhaust their spray tanks, Paige turns her back to the crowd, clasps her hands together around her candle, and throws it into the air. It sails, starts to dive and bounces off the middle of the sheet, the central image of the crucified woman. The fabric catches immediately, starts to burn, flames licking upward to begin a run of consumption. And the mob goes crazy with screams and whistles and horn-blowing. The fire increases its strength, gaining on the sheet, feeding faster on the accelerant with every passing second. The images of beating and torture and humiliation start to dissolve upward and outward into a charred black that wastes into smoke. The drizzle is having no effect on the blaze.

Sylvia watches, drunk on the spectacle, shivering. She watches the crucified Madonna begin to blacken and instantly fade. She watches the woman in agony begin to crumble upward and vanish like a magic trick that’s performed too fast for understanding, her misery dissolving instantly with each lick of flame. And as Sylvia stares, she goes into one of those helpless moments when sound seems to ebb away, when all that’s left is a very narrow field of vision, as if her eyes can no longer pivot in their sockets, as if her pupils were frozen into a singular position that assured her brain she’d take this one image in.

Only this image.

And in that instant of locked-up, intensified vision, she sees the explosion.

TIGHT SHOT — THE EYE OF HUGO SCHICK

as seen framed in the round, black circle that is the perimeter of the lens. He is looking through the Panaflex. He is a maniacal cyclops, insatiable and feeding on just this latest meal of manipulated imagery. But it is to be the last meal for the Doomed Artist, as we pull back to

WIDE SHOT — INT HENRICK GALEEN MEMORIAL STUDIO

where the entire cast of Don Juan Triumphant are engaged in an immensely complicated orgy, well on its way to a synchronized and unanimous crescendo as orchestrated by Hugo Schick from his position behind the camera.

TRACKING SHOT — THE MOUNTAINOUS DAISY CHAIN OF WRITHING FLESH

as the camera passes face after glimmering face contorted into masks of imminent, passionate explosion.

MED SHOT — HUGO SCHICK, THE DOOMED ARTIST

as he pulls back from the camera and drops his face into his hands and weeps with the realization of his achievement. CAMERA takes the place of Hugo’s eye and looks through his lens to see

WIDE SHOT — INT HENRICK GALEEN MEMORIAL STUDIO

as the walls dissolve, implode, cave inward and are replaced by new and moving walls of fire, waves of rolling blue flame that stretch from collapsing floor to collapsing ceiling, a new world of inferno replacing instantly the prior, physical world. Sound track fills with a chorus of screams, ultimate pleasure succumbing to ultimate pain. The mountain of coupled flesh is consumed by a Technicolor holocaust in special effects display that could only be engineered in hell itself.

FINAL SHOT — THE FACE OF HUGO SCHICK

as the Doomed Artist’s eyes sear and melt and fade.

Possibly, Sylvia sees it with a clarity that no one else in this mob can achieve. She sees the first-floor windows blown outward to the street, the shards of glass raining down on the instantly scrambling and screaming crowd, the way the gust of flames roll outward to the street, like the fire was liquid, like it was some transplanted ocean wave of orange and blue, coasting, ball-like, jetting through the portals of the Skin Palace windows. And then the second-floor windows follow suit, shattering in unison as if detonated, tremendously hot air pushing outward over the street, over the bodies colliding with one another, the heat singeing the hair of the closest protesters. The building seems to be belching flames, spitting tongues of fire from every orifice.

And, like a perverse reflex she can no longer control, Sylvia flashes on Tara being burned to the ground in Gone With the Wind. On the disastrous skyscraper in The Towering Inferno. On John Wayne in Hellfighters. Kurt Russell in Backdraft. On Spontaneous Combustion and Inferno in Paradise and The Flaming Urge …

She sees Paige Beatty down on her knees, bleeding from the side of her head, her back to the Skin Palace, shocked, not comprehending what’s happened, looking as if a hand had reached down from the sky and picked her up and pitched her back down to the pavement. Looking as if the Skin Palace itself has struck out at her, responded to her theatrical dissent with retaliation.

She sees people running everywhere, trying to cover their heads with their arms, packs of runners slamming into other packs. People scrambling, falling, trying to get anyplace else. Horrible slapstick.

And then the sound fades back in and Sylvia hears the noise of fireworks, that booming, thunderous, slightly muffled roar of explosion. And she’s in Propp’s arms and he’s trying to steer her away from the noise and light.

She lets her head turn in to his chest, but she keeps her eyes open. Someone checks into their backs and they go down onto the pavement, Propp on top, and Sylvia tears open the knee of her jeans and the skin underneath, Propp pulls her up by her right hand and they run through a gauntlet of fleeing, screaming individuals, people reduced to fleshy, charging panic by terror and confusion.

And then they’re down a side street, still moving, staying close to the storefronts and running away from the Skin Palace until Propp pulls her to a stop and says, “Your leg.”

They sit on the curbstone and Sylvia looks down and sees blood has soaked through her jeans. But she doesn’t feel any pain yet. Propp gets up on one knee as people run past. He takes out a white handkerchief, slowly pulls back the torn denim, and dabs gingerly at the wound.

He looks up at her and they stare at each other. Sylvia starts to hear sirens in the distance.

“In the cellar,” she says, “where we saw Fernando …”

Propp nods, holds the cloth flat against her knee.

“He must have been opening the gas lines. Boetell will blame the whole thing on Beatty and her people.”

Sylvia jumps back up to standing and the first blast of pain shoots from her knee up to her heart and she screams and starts to fall and Propp catches her in his arms.

“Schick is still inside,” she yells and Propp just stares at her.

“And all his people. They’re up in the studio. They’re up there filming.”

She struggles for a minute in his arms and then collapses against him.

He hugs her into himself. He says, “They might have gotten out,” into her ear.

Then he says something else, but Sylvia can’t hear what it is above her own sobbing and choked breathing. She feels like she’s going to pass out and she hangs onto Propp’s neck and the water pours through her eyes until everything she sees is obscured, refracted, almost glittering.

And she looks over Propp’s shoulder as he pats her back, rubs his hand against her back in circles, the way you’d attempt to calm an infant who’s trying to wake from a nightmare. The way you would try to comfort your child. Your baby. This small creature convulsing with fear and confusion and the absolute horror of the unknown.

Sylvia lays her head against his shoulder and stares out across the street. The sirens are closer and louder now. She scans the storefronts through tears. She doesn’t even try to focus.

But she can still see the sign where everything began:

Jack Deny’s Camera Exchange.

So she closes her eyes and holds on to this stranger.

36

They go back underneath the Canal Zone, under the safe cover of concrete and asphalt and red-brick arcs. They end up sitting at the counter of St. Benedict’s Diner, killing a bottle of something called MD 20/20, neither of them saying anything, not looking at each other, just working on the sweet wine, pulling it down their throats with a lazy persistence, as if this was the only job left in the world.

The last thing Sylvia remembers is wondering, if she sold everything she owns — the Aquinas and the other cameras and all the darkroom equipment — would she have enough cash for a down payment on the Ballard Theatre? She could take the place over from the Loftus Brothers, reopen it as The Pink Cage and show an endless succesion of women’s prison movies. Caged Women. Caged Fury. Caged Heat. Maybe even Born Innocent.

And then sometime later, Sylvia ends up asleep, lying sideways in one of the booths, her knees pulled up to her stomach, crouched in, fetal, as if once again she was back on her mother’s zombie-couch, living in Rita Hayworth’s black-and-white world, sinking into a kind of timeless dreamscape where all five senses are perpetually numbed.

When she wakes, her head is pounding and her knee is inflamed and burning and Propp is gone. There’s a note written directly onto the Formica tabletop in red marker.

Gompers Station

The Madonna’s Chamber

Midnight.

She sits for a second in the booth and stares at the words. She’s so tired of messages. She’s so tired of decoding and translating symbols and images. This means this. This does not mean something else. She licks the heel of her hand and feels how gritty it is. Like sandpaper. Like the tongue of a cat. She rubs at the tabletop, but instead of wiping the words away, she simply smears mem into a red mess, the letters still readable but bleeding into jagged angles and runny lines.

She leaves the diner and walks the railroad tunnels away from Gompers. After maybe an hour, she locates a rickety stairway that leads up into some anonymous Canal Zone basement, finds an exit and emerges into a freight alley off Rudolphe Road.

At the mouth of the alley, Mojo Bettman, the legless newspaper vendor, is perched on his fat skateboard with his back to her. She walks past him, then turns to see he’s selling the latest edition of the Spy.

Spread out on the sidewalk in front of Bettman, fanned like enormous playing cards, Sylvia sees copy after copy of the same photo of Paige Beatty being hauled into a police car, trying to resist, her hands shackled behind her, a riot-helmeted cop forcing her headfirst into the rear of his cruiser.

Bettman rocks slightly on his stumps, holds a folded paper out toward her, says, “Fanatics Bomb Local Porn Hall,” in this old-fashioned, newsboy chant.

She stares at him, then moves down Rudolphe.

Back at the apartment, she finds the kitchen door wide open and the gruff and sloppy noise of drunken men seeping out at her. She walks to the edge of the living room, stands hidden behind the doorjamb and looks around the corner. She sees a frat party that’s degenerated and turned the room into a grungy pigsty. She sees Mrs. Acker passed out on the couch, a cat asleep and wrapped around her throat like a thick, woolly scarf. She sees Eddie Meade and Garland Boetell sitting on the floor, side by side, their backs propped against the couch, both of them wildly disheveled and pathetically soused, each with a bottle of Scotch in one hand and listlessly fighting with their other hand for control of the television remote. Sylvia turns her head so she can see the screen. She expects to find pictures of Herzog’s in flames. Instead, she sees Perry and herself at the Cansino Drive-in, frozen in mid-copulation by the pause button.

“Hey, Perry-boy,” Meade barks, sounding a little like the Reverend, “Don’t you worry now. I’ll get you a real job downtown …” and his words degenerate into a rolling, phlegmy cough.

Sylvia finds Perry on the floor, head under the coffee table, unconscious.

She goes into the bedroom. There isn’t much she wants to keep. She gets a duffel from the closet and crams it with jeans and sweaters and she leaves without any notice.

Down in the darkroom, she unclips the seven prints from the dryline, shuffles them into an ordered pile, sits on the step stool, holds them in her lap. She puts her thumb on the lower right corner of the pile, holds the stack tightly with her left hand at the left margin. Then she riffles the prints. As if she can animate the photographs. As if the Madonna will get up off her perch, walk forward until she’s a full-faced close-up, and tell Sylvia what to do.

She finds a manila envelope under a pile on the work table, puts the prints inside and seals it, then puts the envelope inside the duffel and pulls the zipper closed, She turns off the darkroom light and starts to move out of the cellar, stops and walks to the Peg-Board where the electrical wiring for the house is mounted. She locates the main circuit breaker for the whole of the building and throws it to off.

Sylvia spends the rest of the day and night moving from theatre to theatre until she’s seen every movie currently in release. Over and over, in the brilliance of Technicolor and Panavision, she sees men and women come together and break apart, as if this was as inviolable a fact of nature as photosynthesis or the survival of the fittest. In between, a lot of guns go off and cars chase each other and inevitably crash.

She drinks so much cola and uses so many movie-house rest rooms that by the time she watches her final credits scroll up toward the ceiling, she thinks she’s come close to damaging her bladder.

And by midnight, she’s back at Gompers Station.

She finds her way into what she’s now naturally, instinctively, thinking of as The Madonna’s Chamber. On the marble column stump, a figure is posed with something in its arm and her breath goes shallow and her heart belts against the inside of her chest.

But then the figure turns and some light plays down on the face and she sees that it’s just Propp and what he’s cradling is only his Diane Arbus rucksack. He stands and comes to her, his arm fishing inside his bag as he walks.

“I’ve got something for you,” he says. He pulls out a stack of snapshots and hands them to her.

“Like an old spy movie,” Sylvia says. “Two people meeting in the shadows.”

“In a train station, no less.”

“Exchanging information.”

“You’ve watched,” he says, “too many Peter Lorre movies.”

“No question,” she says, then takes her manila envelope from the duffel and hands it to him. “I’ve watched too many movies altogether.”

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at the envelope, just crams the package into his bag, He takes her arm and points to the remains of the main stairway that are now just a slanted incline of rubble.

“Did you see the news?” he asks.

She shakes her head no.

“They found what was left of Schick and his company—”

“I really don’t want to hear it—”

“A lot of conflicting reports, but the main take is that the woman—”

“Paige.”

“Yes, Paige, she’ll likely be charged.”

“She didn’t do it …” Sylvia starts to say and lets it go.

Propp nods as they reach the top of the stairs and start to walk across the open lot toward the freight yard.

“Still,” he says, “it’ll make a great film.”

They walk the rest of the way in silence until they come to the tracks where a string of freight cars, all the color of deep rust, sits for the engine to pull out. Every other car bears the faded words Elias Freight on its loading doors. The last car has its doors rolled up, but Sylvia can’t see anything inside.

“What are they hauling?” she asks.

He gives a small laugh and just stares at her.

“Where are they headed?” she tries.

“South, I think. Or maybe west.”

They stand and listen to the diesel powering up until Sylvia makes herself say, “Why after all these years? You were just a dead milkman to me. I didn’t even have a face for you.”

He looks at her as if she’s talking another language, but he doesn’t say a word.

“Didn’t you love her?” is all she can manage.

He shifts his stance, stares at the freight car, finally says, “If you mean the woman in the pictures—”

“You know who I mean.”

“Yes, I love her.”

“Then why?”

His eyes start to blink. Sylvia can see him pulling in on his lips. And she still can’t make it easy on him.

“My whole life came apart this week,” she says. “You’re leaving now. Can’t you just tell me why you did this to me?”

“I didn’t do it,” he says. “I swear to you Sylvia—”

“Just confirm it or deny it,” she says. “Are you my father”

When Propp hugs her, crushes her against himself, kisses her forehead for a long minute, she can feel the shake of his crying. She can feel his tears against her forehead.

He breaks off and moves for the car as the train starts to roll. He jogs along the next to the tracks for a second as he heaves his bag up and into the boxcar. Then he picks up speed, chooses his moment, and throws his body inside, the last leap that will take him out of Quinsigamond forever. Sylvia watches the train roll out for a few minutes, slip down the rails like film rolling into a projector. Twenty-four frames a second.

She turns away and looks at the small stack of photos in her hand. They’re shots of her from the other night. The shots of her as the Madonna. Sylvia in the remnants of the Berkshires nightgown. Perched on the marble base, looking up into the balcony. Half a dozen shots of Sylvia as an icon. Sylvia as a myth-figure.

Except for the last picture. It’s clearly not part of the set. It’s an old, faded image. A portrait shot. Full-face this time. No shadows. Nothing obscured. It’s a photo of her mother as a young woman. Looking out at the photographer with a shy smile, leaning over a wooden crib, wearing a housecoat. And lifting an infant, delicately, perfectly, into the air.

After leaving her duffel at St. Benedict’s Diner, she comes back up onto the street and starts to walk. She avoids the Canal Zone, makes a loop around its perimeter and enters Bangkok Park from the other direction.

She walks down Goulden Ave until she comes to the intersection of Granada, picks a corner and takes a position sitting on the curb. She waits an hour. Then another. No one bothers with her. Now and then she pulls the camera from the cover of her jacket and takes aim at something easy. A neon sign that flickers the words Brasilia Beef. A young Hispanic kid stumbling out of the Granada Cantina, steadying himself against a light post. A bicycle that glides past under the direction of an individual whose face is totally hidden by a hooded sweatshirt.

When a pack of bodies turns the corner onto Granada, she expects to be overtaken by one of the Park gangs, until she notices that the individual in the center of the group is carrying a movie camera up on his shoulder. It’s that young kid — Jakob Cain — the boy she met at Der Garten and the coffee shop. He’s surrounded by a circle of thugish-looking bodyguards, all of them dressed in Schickian khaki safari jackets with epaulets and waist belts. As they pass, silent, all the eyes wide, the boy nods to Sylvia and aims his movie camera in her direction. Then they continue down the street. Sylvia lifts her Aquinas and focuses in at the stitching on the back of one of the jackets—

Amerikan Pictures Presents

Little Girl Lost

coming soon to a theatre near you

She aims and she focuses, but she doesn’t shoot any pictures.

Sometime just before dawn, when the street is momentarily deserted and the last breeze of the night blows the lighter trash down the length of Goulden like filthy ragweed, she spots a beat-up old pickup rounding the corner and rolling toward her. It’s an old Ford covered with huge blotches of paint primer and bearing an out-of-state license plate. Sylvia stands up and the driver’s window comes down a crack. She sees a woman behind the wheel who has gone too long substituting coffee for sleep. The driver’s eyes are blinking and her head gives a sharp twitch just before she speaks.

She says, “Is there a motor lodge around here?”

Sylvia stares at her. The woman is wearing a pink nylon smock and a white plastic nametag, about the size of a stick of gum, that reads Gretta. Sylvia looks at the foot well on the passenger side. It’s loaded with empty brownstained paper cups and a half-folded road map.

“You’re on the wrong side of the city.”

Gretta looks out at the street and says, “Is there a gas station near here?”

“Take your next left,” Sylvia says. “In a couple of miles you’ll hit an all-night place.”

Gretta nods and Sylvia waits for a thank you, but the truck just rolls away slowly and swings onto Goulden. Sylvia brings the camera up and follows her movement. In the rear bed of the pickup, wedged between piles of ragged luggage, her face hanging over the tailgate and looking out on everything she’s passing, is a young girl. Maybe ten or twelve years old. Her hair is pulled back into some kind of loose braid and her bottom lip has a tired pout to it. She’s holding something in her hands. Her eyes are wide and there’s a good chance she’s staring at the photographer.

Sylvia twists the lens a bit, barely nudging the girl’s face into sharper focus, gingerly pushing for just that much more clarity.

And then she opens the shutter.

~ ~ ~

The title of the movie is The Rosy Hours of Mazenderan. It’s a foreign film, dubbed carelessly into a hilarious English. The actors and actresses move their mouths for long moments after the noise of their dialogue has finished. The images on the screen are unusually faint, as if a bulb had burned out and no one had bothered to replace it.

The woman, at one time an actress of some renown in certain circles, sits behind the wheel of her Citroen and tries not to make judgments about the performances she’s viewing. She tells herself it would be unfair given the quality of the print she’s seeing and the fact that she’s viewing the movie outdoors, on a shabby drive-in screen.

Instead of forming a critical opinion, she lets the images roll out before her, get processed by her optic nerves without any accompanying valuation or assessment. She knows there are people who would tell her she’s deceiving herself, that this is an impossible feat. She has nothing but contempt for these people.

The former actress is being fed popcorn by her companion, a classic drifter possessed of a nervous demeanor. The drifter is reclining with his head in the woman’s lap, a bucket of popcorn propped on his stomach and his long legs hanging over the car door.

The drifter was hitchhiking when he met the woman. He was leaving the city with no specific destination in mind. He looked disheveled and distracted, the kind of man you might cast as a serial killer in a horror movie. He was tall and round-shouldered with a crown of clown-like red hairand doughy skin. He looked as if he’d only recently ended a hunger strike.

He got in the Citroen on route 64 and the woman asked him for gas money. The drifter explained that he had no money at the present time, but that he was owed a final paycheck from the management of the Cansino Drive-In Theatre, where he had been employed for the past week as a projectionist. He had even been allowed to live in the small projection booth. The woman agreed to drive the man to the theatre.

The drifter said he had been a salesman for a time, but he would not elaborate on what he sold. The woman said nothing of her former profession.

When the paycheck was retrieved, the drifter signed it over to the woman, scribbling only Jack on the rear endorsement line because he could no longer remember any more of his name.

In fact, he can no longer remember very much about himself beyond random flashes, dull images of what seem to be chronically fading memories: darkrooms, red lights, pieces of glass bent into odd shapes and sizes.

The woman accepted the paycheck and, as it was dusk, suggested they stay for the first feature of the evening. The drifter fetched a tub of popcorn.

The woman glanced into the rearview mirror of the Citroen, pulled her lips in, puckered them out.

And now the screen is alive with shadows and motion. Bodies float across the expanse of white matte. The woman, for some reason even she can’t fathom, trembles in her seat.

The drifter stares up through the windshield at the night sky, all this distant light, and says, “What’s wrong? It’s only a movie.”

Dissolve