Flicker (93 page)

I walked into the depths of the cave to examine the shelves of what was indisputably the most complete film library in the entire Indian Ocean. Scanning the labels I could manage to read in the thick shadows, I had to agree that most of what he had on hand was
dreck.
Monogram Studios horse operas, Saturday serials, coming attractions, stag movies. There was an entire shelf of what appeared to be industrial training films all having to do with the proper handling of machines and chemicals. Another shelf was taken up with something called “Collision Derby Highlights.” But my eye, traveling fast, also picked out titles by Renoir, Truffaut, Buñuel, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Bergman, Rossellini. There were Disney cartoons, John Ford westerns, Bette Davis tearjerkers, Pete Smith Specialties, Preston Sturges comedies sandwiched between old newsreels, travelogues,
The March of Time.
On the lowest shelf of the last rack I came upon some half-dozen cartons whose labels simply read “Student Projects—Outtakes.” And next to these, the last films in the collection, were two titles that caught my attention at once.
Big Stuffer
and
Sub Sub.
So he'd seen the work of his most important disciple. What did he think of it? I filed the question away for the moment and returned from my brief survey. “A pretty mixed bag you have here.”

“Without rhyme or reason it comes. Mostly scrap quality, whatever they no longer need. Some of it I cannot even run through the viewer. It is quite challenging. I never know what each delivery might bring. The Pathé news, the Dead End Kids… . You know perhaps the Roadrunner, this moronic little bird? I have, I think, the entire corpus. Also blue movies—many of these. The pupils study them to learn certain effects. Lately for some reason I am receiving the work of one Run Run Shaw. From Hong Kong, I believe. You know this person?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Simply amazing. The man seems to make a movie every fifteen minutes. You cannot tell one from the other. People kicking, people punching, people screaming … From forty miles of his creations, I have been able to salvage exactly sixteen decent frames. Would you believe, once I was sent eight defunct prints of
Citizen Kane,
each in worse condition than the last. From all eight, I could not glue together one complete version. At the schools, they study the film so intensely, it is torn to pieces by the time they are done.” He
paused, a small, smug grin on his lips. “I take that to be a great compliment, though my captors wouldn't know. It is my film, you realize. All the best parts. Orson would tell you so.”

“I know. He told me. I intended to include that in my book.” I could see that pleased him.

“Well now, as you see, I've become the garbage can of the film world. The waste, the trash, the crap, it all comes finally to me. But whatever comes, I work with it.”

“But exactly
how?
” I asked. I'd seen compilation movies that stitched together excerpts from many sources. They were a staple of film schools, an amateur exercise in cheap production. I couldn't believe he'd find enough artistic sustenance in that to satisfy his creative hunger. “What can you do with this stuff except splice your cuts together end to end?”

“Ah, but there are such possibilities in this splicing. You would never guess, as I didn't myself until I found that my whole art had at last come down to this one skill. With nothing to do with one's days and nights for—how long has it been? thirty-some years—one finds ways to work wonders with the razor blade, the X-acto knife, a dab of cement, a sliver of tape. Of course, we work here without sound. As it was in the beginning. Pure cinema. The image and nothing but the image. It is the pristine art.”

“But what about the
Unenthüllte?
No chance for much of that, is there?”

He returned an amused stare. “You know this word?”

“I picked it up from Orson.”

“Ah yes. He would remember. He had a weakness for the spook stuff. Well, as you will see, I have not had to leave the
Unenthüllte
behind.”

“You mean you have something to show me?”

“You have studied my minor efforts, why not my
magnum opus?”
Proudly he drew back a curtain that covered the bottom half of his makeshift editing bench. There on a shelf stood a number of film cartons piled on their sides. I bent down in the dim light to study them. They bore no title, only numbers.

“This is your work?” I asked.

“Awaiting its world premiere.”

I looked for the highest number I could find among the cartons. “This is all one movie? Forty-two reels?”

“Forty-three, actually. But not all the reels are full. On some there
is only five minutes, ten minutes. Whatever the overall structure of the work required at that point.”

“And it's finished?”

“Let's say it's ready to be seen at any time. Today in fact.” Almost tenderly he added, “You see why I was fearful you had been taken away? I've waited half my lifetime for an audience. For
you
”

I had to admire the brave front he was putting on his sad plight, playing the cinematic Prospero in his island exile. I was certain that behind the ironic facade there lay the pieces of a heart long since shattered. He wasn't an easy man to like, especially in this cut-down, quasi-senile version, but I felt sorry for him nonetheless. “You deserve so much better than this,” I said.

He smiled gratefully, but waved off my solicitude. “At first, it seemed to me a great pity to find myself in such reduced circumstances. But then I came to see, as more and more of my raw materials arrived, that in fact I had at my disposal all that the motion picture has to offer. The work of the very best, as well as the very worst. All of it mine. Through the films, I can treat myself to a kind of animated museum of modern times: the great ideals, the great lies, the unholy loves, the follies. What more could I ask for?”

His graceful resignation became grating.
“What more?
At the very least, if they insist on keeping you here—which is a crime and a shame—some decent equipment. You're working here like a savage, for God's sake.”

“Exactly so!” he chirped with a clap of his hands. “The way our barbaric forebears salvaged the ruins of Rome to make their barns, pigsties, churches. And yet, I have come to see my work as the film of the future. I imagine the French would call it
cinéma brutal,
the way movies will have to be made if there is any future at all for us.”

He'd finally struck on the one great subject we'd left undiscussed. I was saving it up. “You mean after 2014.” To my surprise, he didn't flash on the date; I had to explain it. “Armageddon,” I said. “It's the date of Armageddon—at least as your church sees it.” He returned an inquisitive stare. All I saw in his face was total incomprehension. “Your church
does
subscribe to an apocalyptic teaching, doesn't it? The end of the world. The day of wrath.”

“Oh yes, yes. But as to
when
this will be, frankly it strikes me as pedantic to ask—2014, 2114, 2214 … the date is immaterial.
That
this thing will happen—this is all that matters. In fact, some might say it has already happened.” He looked at me with an owlish expression,
waiting to see if I followed him. I didn't. “The religious wars, the witch hunts, the death camps. Surely these represent the end of the only world that matters, wouldn't you agree? The Great Whore rules over us long since.”

Confounded by his apparently sincere ignorance, I hastened to brief him on everything I'd learned from Angelotti about the bomb, the germs, the seven-hundred-year conspiracy. I was moving over the ground so rapidly, trying to elicit some sign of recognition from him, that I feared I must be making a hash of the story. Nevertheless, he listened with great concentration and just a touch of irritating amusement.

“Amazing,” was all he said when I finished. Wagging his head, he led me out of Paleolithic Productions, which had by now become intolerably clammy with the moisture of our breath and bodies. The cave might have solved his heat problem, but I guessed the humidity was still dense enough to be a film killer in its own right. Outside, he slumped down on a fallen tree that lay against one wall of the bungalow. He was showing signs of the fatigue that usually preceded a long snooze. “And you believe all this?” he asked as I settled in beside him.

“I hardly want to. But our mutual friend Angelotti assured me it was true.” He emitted a dry soundless cackle, a laugh that implied, boy, had I been taken in.

“Now I see. This is what impelled you to go to Zurich and to Albi. You thought you were saving the world.”

The way he put it made me fairly blush with embarrassment for my own presumption. But worse, he was raising the possibility that my gullibility had cost me my freedom and had led to Clare's captivity. If that were true, I didn't want it rubbed in. In fact, I now wanted desperately to believe that the great Cathar plot was real. It was all that made sense of my otherwise idiotic adventure. “You mean to say you've never heard about any of this? How the orphans are planning World War III?”

“There was always talk of this kind around the church. Big apocalyptic fantasies. When the Great War came—in 1914, I mean—I recall my schoolmates in the orphanage cheering. Most disturbing. But you see, they believed ‘we' had made the war happen. Soon we would see the end of the world. For them, this was a thing devoutly to be wished. Myself, I had bad dreams for months. Perhaps because in my mind, the end became so graphically vivid. I could see it before
my eyes like a movie, an Eisenstein epic. Terrible, terrible. Of course, as it turned out, 1914 was not the end of the world, only of European civilization. My schoolmates found this most disappointing. Accordingly, when the second war came in 1939, they once again rushed to claim credit for initiating
Götterddmmerung.
It didn't trouble them that this meant accepting Herr Hitler as the unwitting instrument of the true God. For my own part, I was not prepared to regard Auschwitz as the gateway to salvation. I would just as soon see us remain indefinitely in our normal human state of semidamnation.”

“You're saying that Angelotti duped me? There's no truth to his story?”

He reached back a long way in his memory. “I do remember hearing of schoolmates who went into the sciences—biology, physics. No doubt they have made their significant contribution to the patriotic carnage on all sides. But as you see, the world goes limping on. Abraxas is not omnipotent, nor are his followers.”

“But you have to admit,” I insisted, “that we get closer to the brink all the time.”

“True. And still the brink remains a long way off.”

“Does it? You
have
heard of the bomb—the H-bomb?”

“H? I thought A. The atom bomb. Like in
Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Did it really wipe out the whole city?”

“You
are
behind the times. H for hydrogen. Millions of times more powerful.”

“Millions?” He was struck by that. “Ah well … ”

“And the chemicals, the germs. You don't believe there are malignant little orphan geniuses at work in germ labs all over the world cooking up better poisons by the day?”

“Ah yes, the germs.” His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I remember … ” He brought the fingers of his hands together to form an arrow point and placed it against his upper lip as he thought back across the years. “I remember some talk of a project many years ago. Brother Marcion told me about it one day at St. James School. A disease that would someday make sexual relations—fucking, you understand—absolutely lethal. The ultimate
Liebestod.
The man was quite exhilarated by this prospect. As you know, our faith takes a rather dim view of human concupiscence. There have always been militants among us who advocate the example of Origen.” When he saw that I didn't understand, he clarified. “Castration for all male
members. Literally so. No pun intended. Fortunately, these extremists have been outnumbered by those who recognize that a congregation of obese countertenors might have some difficulty keeping itself unnoticed. Still, these fanatics persist in their efforts. This fellow Byx that you've told me about, he would seem to be one of the zealots. For them to concoct a little antilove germ and send it out into the world … it's all too possible. It would be their kind of choice: celibacy or certain death.”

In the midst of the tropic afternoon, I chilled at his words. I found this notion more nauseatingly hideous than nuclear annihilation. I could more easily contemplate the world going up in flames than the thought of our universal extermination insinuating itself so silently into the act of love. “They'd never do such a thing,” I protested.

“I wouldn't put it past them. Still, if you find that so hard to swallow, why believe the rest?”

“But you do believe there will be an apocalypse. Inside just now, you spoke of a dark age to come, a future when there might be no survivors.”

“Who can doubt it? We are surely a doomed species. Look with what ingenuity we destroy all we create. But this requires no grand conspiracy. Only our own twisted will. Perhaps it doesn't even matter if the end happens as a physical event.” He leaned toward me to whisper. “Don't tell the orphans I said so, but these great religious teachings really shouldn't be taken so literally. You see what a heretic I am? All artists are. We turn all things into metaphors—the better to play with them. What matters is that in some sense we are at war with all that is best in ourselves, that the forces of darkness and light here inside us can never be at peace until we have been shattered in the struggle. This is what makes us dramatically interesting. The end of man. To ponder this is all that art requires.” After a long pause, he added, “And to laugh at the idiocy of it all.
Vanitas vanitatum.”
Another pause. And then a silent, wheezy chuckle welled up inside him, finally growing to a choking guffaw. “Do you remember Stan Laurel's little film, where they tear the cars to pieces? And then”—he was fighting against his laughter to get the words out—“and then the suits … they tear the suits.” He doubled over laughing. When he caught his breath again, he leaned back against the wall of the bungalow, gasping. “That says it all.”