Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

She hesitated, chewing her lower lip. “It’s what keeps me alive. Making movies, maybe that seems frivolous these days. But in art everything is frivolous. Or deadly serious.”

There were deep fissures in her makeup; he realized she was older than he had first thought. Her eyes were a clear sky blue. It wasn’t until she reached to adjust a light box that he saw the makeup hid scars, the gouged marks of petra virus.

“You’re right.” He looked away. Speaking was an effort; he plunged on, as though scaling a peak that seemed impassable. “Where did you study?”

She slid into a swivel chair in front of the editing table, pulling aside the folds of her artfully tattered dress. “University of Chicago. I started in social anthropology—ethnobotany. Then I went to NYU for grad school. Knocked around for a while, finally got a grant to make a television film about the Sami—my mother’s American, but my father’s from Finland. Do you know who they are? Laplanders, you would probably call them, aborigines. They call themselves Sami. Those who are left, ” she added. “I wanted to make more films. Only of course they do everything with computers now, so there’s no audience for location films. Not to mention who goes to the movies these days? So, I had some friends who were in a band, and I managed them for a while. They did okay, and eventually I got this job at Agrippa. Figured that was it for the movies, like, forever.

“But then, I found a patron—a very rich patron. He had a project he was interested in. He’d seen my film.” She laughed. “He may be the only person who ever saw my film! He wanted to know if I would be interested in his project—”

She indicated the anarchic mass of tapes and photos and film equipment. “All this? It came from him. He’d gathered all this stuff to make a documentary, but he didn’t have time. So he asked me if I would film it for him.”

She paused and looked pointedly at Jack. “And—of course—you did.”

“No fucking way. Not at first. It was—it is—a horrible project. The first time he showed me some of the archival materials, I—Jesus. It was—”

She turned in the swivel chair and began to thread a strip of film into the Steenbeck. “It was like seeing films of people at Auschwitz. Or Chelmno. Horror. It was pure horror.

“But then I got curious. I looked at the stuff he’d collected, all those photos, old film stock. He’d already transferred a lot of it to disc or tape, so that made my job easier. Yeah, for the money; but there was more. It just—it became important to me. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, I think, and make people look at them. Even things that people don’t want to see, or read about or listen to. Especially those things.”

She bent and slowly began turning a dial. There was a whirring sound. Across the screen images flickered. Black-and-white, some grainy, others sharply focused. Blurred faces, scarred as Nellie’s own; objects that might have been machinery or aircraft or broken umbrellas. He spent several futile moments trying to find a coherent narrative thread in the film, before realizing that it was nothing but hundreds of still frames strung together; thousands of them.

“I had to do it.” Nellie’s voice grew strained. “He knew that I would, in the end. And he paid me really well. Maybe it would have been better if he hadn’t—if I hadn’t taken the money. But I did. And he gave me all this”—a wave at the editing room—“in exchange for this.”

Abruptly the whirring stopped, and the streaming images. A single black-and-white frame filled the screen. It seemed to be some kind of glass bottle or pickling jar, the photograph enlarged so that its contents looked grotesquely out of scale. Nellie leaned back in her chair so that Jack could see more clearly.

He gasped.

The jar was not out of scale. It was huge, and it held a man. He had been bisected from head to groin. Viscera floated in murky formaldehyde beside his upheld arms, and it was still possible to discern a grimace upon the distorted features of one side of his ruptured face. On the spongy white palm of one hand characters had been inked or tattooed; not numbers but ideograms. Above his broken skull his hair rose like ragged black flames.

Jack felt as though he had been dropped from a great height. His mind raced crazily trying to create some fathomable explanation for the photograph. There was none.

“Unit 909,” said Nellie without looking at him. “Have you heard of it?”

Jack shook his head.

“A secret Japanese research project to create biological weapons during World War II. They were headquartered near Dzoraangad, in Mongolia. The Gobi Desert. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians. Some Europeans and Americans, too. They were experimenting with bubonic plague, with nerve gas and anthrax and cholera. The Geneva Convention had banned biological warfare, so the Japanese figured this must be some pretty intense shit. In 1937 they formed Unit 909. They were trying to come up with new pathogens to use against the United States in the war. They did all kinds of shit—even sent balloons across the Pacific Ocean, to drop canisters of plague-bearing fleas in the United States. Two years ago they found the remains of one of the balloons in Utah.”

Her hand touched the controls. Once more images began to move across the screen, but slowly. A chamber empty save for a screaming child. Human heads floating in tall jars. White-clad surgeons standing around a table where a man sat upright, his mouth an enlarged O of pure anguish: his chest had been sawed open, and one of the doctors held something darkly shining in his gloved hand. Rows of men and women marching across a blinding white plain. Rows of lockers with Japanese characters written on them. Rows of human feet. An infant’s hand with needles protruding from the fingertips. A half-inflated balloon dangling from a scaffold. Teeth.

“‘The human capacity for barbarism is, seemingly, bottomless.’”

He thought Nellie had spoken. But it was her voice on a soundtrack, harsh and disembodied. A minute’s worth of motion picture frames danced jerkily. Badly scratched black-and-white film showed the same screaming child depicted before, now glimpsed through an observation window. Smoke began to fill the chamber; at the same time, a door swung open and a woman ran inside. Her mouth opened and closed in mute agony as she covered the child with her own body, trying to save him from the gas. In the corner of the frame a shadowy hand moved, camera operator or one of the watching torturers.

“‘We sons of pious races,’” a man’s voice recited as the screen went black.

Across the bottom screen letters appeared. Night Voices in Tegel, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The frame filled with words written in a fine, runic-looking hand.

“Leonard.”

Jack was not aware that he had shouted until he saw her drawn face beside him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

He stumbled to his feet but she caught him. “Lie down, you should lie down—”

Nellie half dragged, half carried him into the room with the futon. He fought her in avid silence, feeling as though he had lost his mind; then suddenly collapsed onto the mattress. He knelt there weeping in the near darkness, his breath coming in savage bursts. With a soft cry he fell upon the futon, and slept.