Flicker (46 page)

The authorities at Saint Hilaire were puzzled by my visit. I presented myself as neither relative nor friend, but a scholar interested in Rosenzweig's writing. The word “writing” elicited a bewildered stare, then a suspicious closer inspection. Was I perhaps a nut case too? I was asked if I realized that this was a mental institution, that Rosenzweig was an inmate here. Yes, I said. Another baffled look, then a shrug. I signed a book, filled out a form (in triplicate), and initialed a slip of paper that had something to do with the legal consequences of any bodily harm I might be exposed to. Then I
was led to an overlit, minimally furnished room whose heavy-duty, double-locked door bore the sign “Guests. One hour limit.” All the furniture in this room—four chairs and two tables—was made of metal and bolted to the floor. The windows were barred. There without a magazine to read or a picture to study on the wall, I waited for nearly half an hour. Overhead the lights—a row of glowing, ice-blue bars—buzzed like trapped flies. Beneath them, I felt as if I were being disinfected.

I'd never talked to a homicidal maniac before. I wondered if I was in any danger. Would he be wearing a straightjacket or handcuffs? When Rosenzweig finally arrived, I saw I had nothing to fear. If the will to do murder was in the man, there was no muscle to enact the deed. Rosenzweig, though still just marginally ambulatory, might have passed for a walking corpse. Gaunt to the point of emaciation, he was barely able to keep his feet without help. The help was being grudgingly supplied by a burly, sourpussed attendant at his back who seemed to be keeping him upright by the scruff of the neck. Once inside the room, the old man froze in place, gazing intently at me. The attendant had no great trouble forcibly inching him forward; he might have picked up the fragile little man and pitched him at me. Rosenzweig was bundled tightly into a clerical black jacket and trousers that made him seem all the more cadaverously white. A thin gray nimbus of hair and a few wispy white strands of beard surrounded his head; in the harsh light, they took on an eerie glow.

The old man was carrying a disorderly stack of papers—mainly notebooks—clasped to his chest. His writings no doubt. As he was shuffled forward across the floor toward me, bits and pieces of what he held threatened to slip through his grasp; feebly, he clutched where he felt things escaping. Grumbling with annoyance, the attendant stooped to recover the items that floated to the floor; these he crumpled and roughly stuffed back into the heap. After he got Rosenzweig into a chair, he drew off” and took a seat by the door where he buried himself in a newspaper.

Making my tone as gentle as possible, I started talking. I talked a long time, receiving no response except long, awkward silences that betrayed not a glimmer of comprehension. All the while, Rosenzweig's dismal and weary eyes stared fixedly at me, a blank, untrusting look. Speaking in French, I said all I could think of saying by way of a carefully benign introduction: that I was a scholar … from the
United States … from California … studying motion pictures … interested in his theories … planning to write a book … a scholarly book. I alluded to an interest in early methods of animation and projection, dropping a few key names. Nothing. When I was talked out, there was a ponderous pause that must have lasted more than five minutes, long enough to make the attendant glance our way to see if the meeting was over. I supposed it might be. My visit was turning into an exercise in futility. Rosenzweig wouldn't speak. Perhaps he didn't even understand. For all I knew, he was deaf or catatonic. I was growing more than willing to break off this unpleasant encounter; twice while we sat together, I was aware that he was wetting his pants. Each time he did so, he wept soundlessly with shame. The clothes he wore, dirty to the point of being vile, were permeated with the odor.

At last, with only ten minutes left, I decided to fish for whatever I could catch. I asked, “Can you tell me about Oculus Dei?” The name was one of the few things I remembered from what Sharkey told me about Rosenzweig years back. He'd spoken of a group, “the ODs” he called them, identifying Rosenzweig as one of them.

The words were no sooner spoken than the little man stiffened, his brows knit, his mouth gaped. I might just as well have administered a jolt of electrotherapy to him. Expecting an outburst, I flinched. But he hadn't the strength for it; he weakened and fell back. The nearly toothless old mouth emitted only a few bubbles of spit; the eyes brimmed with tears. He cried silently in small feeble convulsions. A dry, whispered stream of German leaked from a throat that might not have spoken for years. I picked up only one word I could understand.
“Bitte, bitte, bitte!”
Please, please, please.

Please what? Spastically, with trembling hands, he deposited the papers he held on the table and pushed them toward me, spilling some on the floor.
Please look at these,
he meant. I reached out and opened one of the notebooks. Even if the writing inside had been English (I supposed it was German), I couldn't have read it. It was a madman's scribble, page after page scrawled in all directions, underscored, writ large, writ small, crossed out, blotted. Here and there were drawings, mechanical sketches mainly. Some vaguely suggested movie projectors. One was clearly a Zoetrope. One notebook, the most orderly, was filled from cover to cover with tiny, painstaking drawings of the Maltese cross, one after another, hundreds of them,
each, I noticed, slightly rotated beyond the preceding drawing like the turning gear in a projector. Filling the book with these minute sketches must have taken endless hours, a lunatic's pastime. In one of the other books, I noticed little stick figures drawn into the lower right hand corner of each page; if the pages were thumb-riffled through, the little figure seemed to jump and spread its arms in the shape of a cross. A primitive animation. From the offered heap of materials before me, I dislodged a few crumpled paperback pamphlets, one in French, another in German. I noticed there were two or three other copies of these, so I assumed Rosenzweig could spare one of each. Seeing me take them, the old man grew excited. His dry, raspy mouth worked.
“Ja, ja. Oui. Prenez.
Take, take.
Ne permettez pas qu'ils vous voient!”
Don't let them see you. Once again, he was wetting himself.

I shuffled through the remainder of his papers looking for printed matter. There were a few more items I set aside, old and tattered booklets. One I noticed was composed in Latin. As I picked up the materials, I said, “I'm especially interested in the films of Max Castle. Castle, the German director who worked in the United … ”

I heard a sudden sucking gasp from Rosenzweig, the sound of someone punched hard in the gut. I looked up. And then there was a moment … it passed as swiftly as a flash frame in a movie. Had I really seen it at all? A sudden light deep in the old man's cavernously shadowed eyes, there … gone before I could draw it into focus. Afterward, immediately, dumb pain twisting his face, Rosenzweig pitched forward in his chair, nearly slipping to the floor.

I thought he might be collapsing and rose to help. But I saw he was struggling to reach across the table for the writings I had set aside. He got hold of them in one desperate clawing gesture and pulled them back protectively into his heap—all except the one I happened to be holding in my hand. His face, twisting up from the table, was now glaring fiercely at me, the look of a man betrayed. Words, probably curses, gagged in his throat. I moved quickly to stash the one pamphlet I still held in my pocket. Rosenzweig saw the move and reached out toward me, wanting it back. By that time, the attendant, who must also have assumed the old man might be throwing a fit, had got hold of him and was roughly straightening him up, all the while scolding him, telling him to keep quiet.

When he had Rosenzweig manhandled back into docility, the attendant
let me know my time was up; he jerked his head toward the door and led me off. Behind us, the still floundering Rosenzweig was mouthing things under his breath, urgent little fragments that died away into whimpers; he was too fatigued by his own anxiety to give the words sound. He finally did slide to the floor; the attendant gave his plight a contemptuous wave of the hand and continued to escort me out. I didn't realize how eagerly I was rushing off until I found myself blocked by the attendant, who began fumbling ineffectually with the door as if it presented some major challenge. I finally got the idea; he expected a tip. I fished out a few francs and the door swung open. I was sent on my way with a churlish grunt.

At the front desk, one of the officials stopped me to ask if my visit had been satisfactory. Before I could answer, he rushed on to ask if I could provide the name of a next of kin for Rosenzweig. I said I couldn't help. Why didn't he try the church? The church? I reminded him that Rosenzweig had once been a Jesuit priest. “Surely not,” the official replied, and then asked if I'd be willing to have the old man's possessions sent to me in the event of his death.

“Me? Why me?”

“You are his only visitor since he came here.”

“What sort of possessions?”

“Not much. He has a small library. A dozen books, some papers, a few small boxes.”

“I really don't know the man personally,” I told him.

He shrugged. “Then we will just destroy it all. Perhaps there is something of value.”

I didn't believe he really thought so, but, on the other hand, what did I have to lose by saying yes? “All right,” I agreed. “If nobody else claims it. But none of his clothes, understand?” I left my school address.

I had a leisurely trip back to Paris on a train that seemed to make a hundred stops along the way. It was the route, I presumed, LePrince had taken on his way home from Lyons in, when was it … 1887? I used the time to peruse the little volume I'd managed to swipe from Rosenzweig, a cheap self-published effort whose binding had been shedding pages for years. The pamphlet was trouble from the first page. Even before the first page. The title alone occupied me for nearly half the journey. It covered most of a page and let me know at once that Rosenzweig was in no danger of making the best-seller
list. Translated from German into Father Rosenzweig's erratic French and now gropingly into my English, it read:

Anathematic Explication of the Dual Hypostases, Most Ancient of Heresies, and of the Accursed Teachings of the Disciples of Abraxas Chronicled since AnteNicean Times, Together with a Documented History Here for the First Time Revealed of Secret Machinations within the Holy Apostolic See at Rome of the Proselytes of Satan Known as Cathari, Unrelenting Enemies of Christ Jesus Truly Proclaimed Redeemer of Both Flesh and Spirit, Covering Eight Centuries of Lies, Deceptions, and Obfuscations, Including an Impregnable Defense of Trinitarian Doctrine Against All Heinous Mechanisms and Unnatural Practices Derived from or Associated with the Delusory Phenomenon Known as the Persistence of Vision, Offered for the Greater Glory of God by His Long-Suffering Servant, K-H. R., S.J
.

Below the title, wedged into the remaining space on the page, was an insanely intricate little emblem. I recalled seeing something like it doodled here and there in the pages of Rosenzweig's notebooks. A circle inside a square inside a triangle inside a hexagon inside a square … more than the eye could discriminate without blurring. And at the center of this little geometrical jungle, the drawing of an eye with a circular pupil, within which I could just barely make out a cross. Below the eye, there were what looked like two small marks. These I was only able to read later in a stronger light with the help of a magnifying glass. They were the letters OD in a Gothic font: Oculus Dei.

The geometrical symbolism of the emblem meant nothing to me, the gargantuan title little more. Yet the title page was as lucid as the little book was to be. Worse followed. Seventy some (unnumbered) pages that would have been daunting enough if they had been legible. But the cheap pulp paper had yellowed and flaked away at the margins; the densely packed, often microscopic, print had faded. Whole sections were unreadably mildewed and permeated with what I took to be mold possibly mixed with the odor of urine. One day, I mused, after Father Rosenzweig had passed on, a box might arrive from the authorities at Saint Hilaire that brought me more such treasures.

Having gone numb from the title alone, I settled for skimming the rest of the text. Throughout there were lengthy, cramped quotations from obscure sources—Church Fathers mainly and in Latin. Here and there, I picked up recognizable references. Sharkey's old Knights
Templar were much in evidence; there were snippets on magic lanterns of days gone by. LePrince and the Zoetrope were mentioned and roundly denounced. When I reached the point of terminal boredom, I skipped to the end. Amusingly enough, the final paragraphs of this ponderous theological disquisition dealt with Donald Duck and his animated friends. The book closed in the midst of anathemas pronounced upon poor Walt Disney, archcorrupter of the young, which broke off abruptly at the bottom of the last page. There was a concluding line crammed into the last available quarter inch of space. It read, “We resume our inspired defense of the faith in volume two“—which of course I didn't have and which probably didn't exist.

One thing came through my cursory reading with unmistakable clarity; the steady drumbeat of anger and paranoid hostility that animated every word in this ugly little volume. I'd never read anything so filled with spleen. It was the work of a fanatic and a madman, no question of that.

Why had I made this foolish trip? Face it, I said to myself: there's something intellectually masochistic about what you're doing. For if there was anything that could dim my fascination with the movies, it was the possibility that they could have any connection with the dismal and maniacal diatribe I held in my hand. Why not crank down the window of my compartment and consign it to the rushing wind outside? Cast away and forget.