The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (6 page)

Laing stops for a moment, as if realizing for the first time that he had veered off track, or as if regretting that I had been sent here on assignment not to ask him about Aimee (and later A.) but instead about the unfinished Maya Deren film she had brought to him. He produces from a pocket a blue bandana that he uses to wipe at a spot or something (I don’t see a spot) on the table in front of him and I assume it’s a tick or a habit or something about who he is that lurks beneath the surface of who he pretends to be that is just now beginning to reveal itself in this small action. I size up the discrepancy between my
idea
of Laing and the Laing who sits across from me now and it’s clear to me that if he’s telling me the truth about these films then it’s a special form of truth, one that operates by its own uncertainty principle. It’s actually worse than that. It’s as if Laing himself—even though he’s right in front of me—occupies an uncertain space, or else makes that space uncertain, so that position and momentum can’t be known simultaneously. And then I think
about the missing children, and understand that this is how they exist, too.

Laing returns to the film.

“Hutton gets out to stretch, the 10
^th
or 12
^th
time that day judging by the bored look on his face. Puts his arms above his head. Reaches down to his shoes. Gets back in the car. Maybe not in that order, but close enough.

“Finally, as the sun begins to set in furious orange (the sort of orange that’s such a hot image that it threatened—and if Aimee were here she’d say the same thing—to burn up the projector from the inside) the back car door opens and a man slides in. Hutton knows him as Hector. Dressed entirely in white. Large hands. Full beard. The whole scene is shot reverse-shot, just back and forth, Hutton in the front seat, Hector in the back.

“‘Well,’ Hector says. ‘How’d it go?’

“‘Good, I guess. Nothing happened.’

“‘Was something supposed to happen?’

“‘Well, I thought…’

“‘Just a joke, Hutton. Of course something happened. Now tell me what you saw.’

“‘From memory or…’

“‘If your memory’s good, then just tell me,’ says Hector.

“‘… because I jotted down notes…’

“‘Of course you did. As you should have.’

“‘… and I could read…’

“‘Like I said, Hutton, if your memory’s good then just tell me. But if there’s some fault in it then read me from the notes.’

“‘… the notes…’

“‘That you said you jotted down.’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘I could…’

“‘Read from your notes.’

“‘… find some fault.’

“‘In?’

“‘My memory,’ says Hutton.

“‘Even though it was just from this morning.’

“‘But that was…’

“‘Not such a long time ago, Hutton.’

“‘… under different circumstances.’

“‘Than what?’

“‘…’

“‘Than what, Hutton?’

“‘…’

“‘Hutton.’

“‘… than…’

“‘Than what?’

“‘Than now.’

“‘Of course, Hutton! Of course they’re different!’

“‘You weren’t here.’

“‘And that’s why I need you to tell me what you saw.’

“‘If only…’

“‘Hutton. Enough.’

“‘If only it…’

“‘Had been what?’

“‘Clearer.’

“‘I understand. And so.’

“Hutton opens a small green flip-spiral notebook provided to him by Hector that morning. His jottings are mundane, trivial:
boy falls off swing, 10:20
;
low-flying plane & everyone in park looks up, 11:07
;
two men in sweat suits argue in street, 11:30
;
Hector crosses street in distance, 2:35
… These are shown, I think, as inserts. Hector says something like ‘Do you mean you saw
me
cross the street at 2:35? Is that what this says?’

“‘I think so. It looked like you.’

“‘Would you say I crossed the street in order so that you would see me?’

“‘Yes, I’d say,’ Hutton replies, ‘right up there,’ motioning to where the street forks into the boulevard.

“Hector leans forward in the backseat. He points through the front windshield: ‘There?’

“‘About there, I suppose.’

“‘Drive me up there, Hutton,’ Hector says abruptly, leaning back in his seat. ‘Drive me to where you think you saw me.’

“Hector starts the car, adjusts the rearview mirror so that he can see Hector, pulls forward along the curb. The sun is very low now. The earth is disappearing. This is conveyed,” Laing tells me, “by some weird red line that suddenly appears horizontally across the screen. That line, that wavering line, somehow suggests the disappearance of the earth. The very earth itself as well as the conditions that made earth possible along with any thought of humanity. This is something that both Aimee and I felt, as it seemed to drain the space we were in of meaning and while it’s true that my library office was never the same after that red line appeared it may have had more to do with what was going on secretly and magnetically between Aimee and myself than with the line, which after all was just something projected on the wall.”

Laing pauses, as if deciding whether to lie to me or not, and I say this because—and listening to the tapes again now makes this clear—rather than pause or hesitate when he was about to lie he sped up, as if the speed of words could waterfall on ahead of the rotten ideas they signified, or as if that knife formed by the angle of the sun on the motel room floor had been anything other than something conjured, some warning to me but not a warning from Laing, but rather from the dead field next to the motel where, if this were a film that had lost its way, the bodies of some of the children were buried would be revealed in a series of cuts that would strobe across the screen, depicting first
Laing’s room, the throne chair splashed in blood, followed by a shot of the motel from a distance, followed by the field with the buried bodies framed by the motel in the very near background, followed by a final shot of an X-ray version of the field, with the bones of five or six small bodies, some intertwined as if in forced embrace.

“‘Here,’ Hutton says, stopping. ‘You crossed right about here.’

“‘From which side?’ Hector asks.

“‘From left to right,’ Hutton says, gesturing. ‘From there into the park.’

“‘And you’re sure it was me.’

“‘It looked like you.’

“‘Of course.’

“‘I thought that was part of the assignment,’ Hutton says.

“‘The assignment.’

“‘Why I was here. To notice something unusual, out of the ordinary. Seeing you at 2:30—when you said you wouldn’t return until evening—was unusual.’

“In the film
(movie
as Aimee called it; she thought
film
was snobby) it’s fully dark now. Hector has lit a cigarette, and Hutton can see him in the rearview mirror, the orange glow illuminating the vague shape of his bearded face. A distant siren wails.

“‘Hutton,’ Hector says, tapping his cigarette ashes outside the open backseat window, ‘let me ask you something.’ He pauses. ‘Let me ask you this: what if who you saw wasn’t me, but someone who looks just like me?’

“Hutton thinks about this for a moment. Turns the question over in his mind, it seems, wondering if it’s some sort of trap. The movie conveys this in a secret way, making you complicit in the act of moral defilement that gives rise to omniscience.

“‘Looks
just
like you…?’

“‘Let me put it another way,’ Hector says. ‘Hutton: are you not unhappy?’

“‘I am not.’

“‘Not what?’

“‘Unhappy,’ Hutton says.

“‘So then you are happy. Can we reliably agree on that?’

“‘I’m afraid not.’

“‘You’re not happy?’

“‘That’s right,’ Hutton says.

“‘And you’re not unhappy?’

“‘True.’

“‘For God’s
sake
, man! You’re neither happy nor unhappy.’

“‘I’m afraid I’m neither. It’s the bodies.’

“Hector pauses and sort of pulses on the screen, as if there was a strobe light inside of him,” Laing says.

“‘The bodies, Hutton?’ Hector more says than asks.

“‘The ones out there,’ Hutton replies, pointing weakly at the camera, which means of course that he’s pointing at Aimee and me, us and our world on the other side of the screen, or wall I should say, the white wall of my cramped library office where we were projecting the film.

“There must have been missing footage because the movie cuts—cuts as if slashed across the eye with a razor—from that moment to a shot depicting Hector, who has left the car and is running down the boulevard. The film jumps to life in a new, revolutionary sort of way, the colors more vibrant (even though it’s night), the camera movement more aggressive.

“‘Follow me! Hutton!’ he screams. Hutton starts the car, turns on the headlights, follows Hector as he runs, impossibly fast it seems, faster than any movie camera can follow, down the boulevard, his white suit glowing like phosphorous, until he comes upon another man, also dressed in white, also running, and Hutton trying to follow as they cut through quiet side streets and down dark alleys, in Hutton’s mind a slow realization blossoming (though again I don’t remember how exactly the film conveyed this) that he is being led into some trap, some
circumstance from which there will be no escape, and the longer he follows Hector and the Hector look-alike—now indistinguishable in the night in the uncertain glow of headlights—the more trouble he’s in, the deeper into some metal-melting maze, and that is why, at the last moment, Hutton turns the wheel in the opposite direction of the men he’s following, makes his way back to the familiar highway, and drives in escape-mode at impossible speeds. This part is shot from the backseat, where Hector had been sitting. The highway is blocked by flashing lights—either a terrible accident or a police blockade—and so Hutton takes an exit ramp that leads onto a service drive and then into a neighborhood littered with broken glass bottles. We hear an explosion or a gunshot and quickly realize, at the same time Hutton does, that one of his tires has blown. He stops the car beneath a tilting streetlamp and then notices that all of them are tilted in the same direction and when he gets out of the car he realizes why: the wind here is so strong and steady that over the years the street lamps have slowly bent, and his coat blows up over his head from behind, blinding him for the few moments it takes for there to be a slow dissolve from the backseat of the car to an angle and position across the street from Hutton. The style has shifted again and now the camera movements are slow and steady and as he stands there in the night beneath the streetlight we—but not Hutton—can see the man in white, who is either Hector’s doppelganger or else a person who is similar to but not quite a duplicate of Hector, crawling (it seems like he’s crawling) in the deep-focus, back part of the frame, behind Hector. Aimee can’t help laughing at this point, and I remember that somehow her laughter broke the movie’s spell for me right then and there, so that the anarchic, maniacal chase that followed seemed somehow to be a letdown, even though, thinking back on it now, talking with you, it was a remarkable sequence.

“So, Hutton turns suddenly, as if alerted to Hector’s double by the implied audience watching the film, and takes off on foot
after him, the camera tracking along smoothly behind and sometimes beside him like that remarkable opening shot from
Touch of Evil
. It’s only after around five or six minutes of Hutton running and breathing hard as if right on the heels of Hector’s double that we realize that Hector’s double is actually nowhere in sight. What has Hutton been chasing all this time? He leans over to catch his breath, the palms of his hands on his knees. There’s a bright flash of light that’s sourced from what appears to be right outside the left part of the frame and Hutton reacts by reaching into his shoe or sock and pulling out what seems to be a gun, because that’s the most logical thing for it to be. But it’s not a gun, or rather not the sort of gun we’ve ever seen before. It’s more like an insect in the shape of a gun, with a barrel or snout that resembles a needle or a mosquito proboscis and it seems to droop (
melt,
Aimee had said at the time) and Hutton has to shake it violently before it holds its shape. He takes aim at whatever it is off screen and the gun or gun-like object he’s holding appears to be breathing, or expanding and contracting in a way that suggests breathing and then, just when he’s ready to fire, there’s another flash of light and then another and he drops the gun and steps back from it as if it’s the gun itself that has caused the flashes. This is when he makes an obscure decision that hints at the apocalyptic ending sketched out in Deren’s notes. Instead of fleeing, Hutton steadies himself and steps with great care and grace toward the source of the flashes. But the camera doesn’t move or follow. Absent of any human beings or action, what we’re left with is a static shot of some buildings in the distance, in the night, and the sound of the wind. I remember that Aimee said
Look, here it comes
and I expected blood or something worse to fill the screen but instead it gradually voided out, the creeping blackness filling everything and that’s how it ended, in a consuming blackness that plunged the room itself into the night.”