Nicholas Rombes - The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

“I followed A. out of the apartment, chasing her down the stairs and out into the Martian Chronicles sunlight (it hadn’t been this bright for weeks) as she cut across the street and headed toward the sloping greens of West Park, where just the previous week a boy had been knifed to death. As she trailed away in the distance I had a feeling that the shoebox contained something dangerous — perhaps a bomb that was set to go off at any moment — and that’s why A. had fled. It’s true that the events of the past few hours (Kristeva’s reversed book cover image; the darkened apartment draped with blankets to keep evil from seeping out; the Lynchian split edit, followed by A.’s escape) had really disoriented me, and I finally gave up on A., and sat down, out of breath, on a park bench beneath the doomy shade of an enormous oak tree. Beside me was a thin homeless man staring into what seemed to be a worn and crinkled empty brown paper bag, the sort of which that mothers and fathers pack their children’s school lunches in.

“‘Oh Sailor, honey, I hope seeing that girl die didn’t jinx us,’ Lulu says in Wild at Heart , unraveling a complete universe of truth with the pull of a thread. The movie is a weird sort of triumph (of the sort you don’t want to claim) because it balances so precariously on the unpoliced border-fence between sincerity and irony that periodically rises up and something important happens. What a terrible (‘I hope seeing that girl die…’) and honest thing to say. By this time, I was desperate, and the park bench sagged and the old drunk beside me seemed to have completely lost himself in that paper bag, as if the whole history of the universe was in there, reduced to the size of a pea. The shoebox seemed to vibrate there on my lap, like a dying wasp, and I imagined opening it right there and unleashing a terrible fury and blaze that was meant for some apocalyptic future, like some carefully erased sentence slowly re-appearing across the page. My hands trembled at the thought of opening the box, not so much for what I would find inside but for the irrevocable action of it all, and now comes the moment when I must tell you what A. said to me back in the apartment, standing in the impossible shadows near the table, just before she grabbed the shoebox off the table and shoved it into my hands. Don’t let on you’re being watched , she said.

“Of the several things A. told me in her apartment the two that sent a chill up my spine and that continue to haunt me were: Don’t let on you’re being watched , and Here, it’s yours now . It had grown dark very suddenly, and I left the park bench with the box and walked alone back toward A.’s apartment where I had left my bike. I cut through the old part of town, with its crooked alleys and hidden art galleries and stopped at Zeno’s — where once the bartender had taken pity at just the right moment in my life, a moment when nothing but the pity of a kind stranger would have saved me — and ordered a cold beer. There was a baseball game on the television (the Mets losing to the Braves as usual, whose Tom Glavine that year worked like a terrorist on the mound) and the light in the thin bar was the darkest of oranges, as if an enormous door to hell were cracked open only a hair. I found myself thinking about Julia Kristeva again, just like that, and how that black and white photo of her on the cover of Powers of Horror seemed like a dire warning to anyone who cared to notice. The bartender (Bill was his name, I think) read my mind (although that was part of his job and the duty of every decent bartender around the world) and set another glass of beer down before me on a fresh white napkin, embossed with some symbol that seemed familiar but that I couldn’t place, just as I had finished my first one. He had the old eyes of a man who, it seemed, had suffered the deepest and most painful sort of betrayal, and for that he was our comrade, the comrade to all of us who came to his bar.

“ Don’t let on you’re being watched , A. had warned. Watched by whom, and why? There was a moment — and I’m just remembering this now — when Laura Dern in Wild At Heart glances at the camera, not in a self-conscious, ironic way, but in a desperate and serious way, as if she understood — too late — that the film she was starring in was nothing less than a long unfurling celluloid secret message.

“At some point during the night the professor who had vowed never to teach Faulkner to northerners came in to Zeno’s, stinking of gin, wearing a ridiculous, immaculately fitted, dusty three-piece suit, damp with sweat beneath the armpits, and tried to strike up an argument with me, calling me ‘boy’ in his exaggerated Southern accent and whispering sexual insults about the bartender. He left after I refused to open the shoebox for him, which by that time — it must have been two or three in the morning, because the insects in the trees outside were screaming at a resurrection pitch — I realized that the baseball game was not yet over, and that it was into the 17 thinning, and that it would not be over until I left. Except that I was afraid to leave the bar. Literally afraid. I understood now the meaning of A.’s warning about being watched: now that I had the shoebox, I was no longer alone. In those moments — just before I left the bar — I remembered one more detail from A.’s blackened apartment, which was this: the dampness of A.’s eyes that suggested she had been crying, crying because she understood that opening that shoebox would be like breaking the seal to the blanket-covered window in her apartment, letting some terrible blank darkness seep in.

“David Lynch has said that ‘I did not feel that Blue Velvet was so strange — in fact, I always said that it was my most normal film. It’s an American picture.’ In one of the deleted sequences, ‘Dinner at the Williams’,’ (the images are included on the special edition DVD) Sandy (Laura Dern) and her boyfriend Mike watch television with Jeffrey in the basement. In one frame, Mrs. Williams (Sandy’s mom) brings some dessert in on a tray. In another frame, after Mike pretends to leave the room, Sandy and Jeffrey lean across their couches, the blackness of an open doorway behind them, and talk about the Dorothy Vallens case: ‘I’ve found out some things,’ Jeffrey says, ‘nothing really for certain. There are some strange people involved,’ and in those lines there’s a recognition that ‘nothing really for certain’ constitutes an entire method of knowing. Or not-knowing. The detective’s job is to move forward toward the unachievable, collecting and arranging clues and evidence and testimony in the service of some truth — any truth — that will make sense of the monstrous actions of others.

“When A. handed me that red shoebox, which to this day remains unopened on my bookshelf, she committed a monstrous action, and that’s why she ran, ran away from her dark apartment with curtains not to keep the beasts out, but to keep them in. That’s a mystery, right there, akin to when, in 1947, Albert Einstein, in a letter to Max Born, expressed skepticism about quantum entanglement referring to it as ‘spooky action at a distance.’

“ Spooky action at a distance. David Lynch’s split edits, where the sound arrives before the image that creates the sound, is some distant cousin to this spooky action. And A.’s action that day — handing me the box while saying Here, it’s yours now —was in itself a weird sort of time-space game of tag, making me ‘It.’

“But was I ‘It’? And if so, just what did that mean?

“I walked out of Zeno’s bar, finally, and the night greeted me not with the terrorizing blackness that I feared but with soft air and the smell of honeysuckle. Before going home, I made my way back up to A.’s apartment. In the distance, in the moonlight, I saw my bike. I could tell that it had been moved by someone, for it was leaning against a different tree, but even this didn’t spook me, because I understood now that my life, for some uncertain time, would be marked with small, strange occurrences like this. Carrying the shoebox beneath my arm, I approached A.’s apartment in the dark, positioning myself so that I could see the window from which the blanket had fallen. I leaned against a tree, set the shoebox at my feet, and lit up a cigarette (the first one I had smoked in years) given to me by the bartender as one of his small gestures of camaraderie. And then I waited. For what? For something to happen at the window, of course, like in any good detective story. I learned as a child never to stare for too long into an animal’s eyes, as it might awaken or provoke some dormant violence, and I thought about that as I watched the window. Was I provoking something? Was the window alive in some inscrutable way, in the same way that Julia Kristeva’s face was alive on the cover of Powers of Horror ? ‘The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable,’ Jonathan Edwards preached, in his own unintentional way predicting modern film editing.