Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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The Rooftops

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We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead.

(Sophocles, Antigone )

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God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.

(Shakespeare, Hamlet )

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[EXT. San Francisco Roof Tops (DUSK)]

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We open already in pursuit of something ineffable: the outline of a man Jimmy Stewart is chasing. We briefly see this man’s face in soft focus and shadowed, but, because we are not ready for it (how could we be? we have no context; we could ask “Will this be a main character?” but our next question would then be “In what?”) and because we never see it again, it might as well never have been shown. Can you remember what he looked like? Even after watching Vertigo fifty-plus times, I have no mental picture of him. Why is Stewart chasing this man? We will never know.

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In Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly , “Fred” (a pseudonym), an undercover police officer whose identity is kept disguised by something called a “scramble suit,” investigates himself , the person inside the “scramble suit,” Bob Arctor, a drug addict living with two other users, one of whom has informed on Arctor, precipitating Arctor’s investigation of himself. To make matters worse, Arctor has been given an adulterated form of the drug Substance D, “Slow Death,” which is causing his brain’s hemispheres to operate independently of each other, so that, as his investigation of himself progresses, he begins to see himself as someone else: “Bob Arctor,” suspect, as opposed to Bob Arctor, self. It is at this point in the book that the informant’s identity is revealed, to Arctor and to us, but, though things appear to be coming to a head, Dick chooses to then turn Arctor into a vegetable, incapable of even the most rudimentary investigation, and has the book follow him into this new passive state. The ensuing chapters are pastoral, as placid as the preceding fantasy was paranoid. It is an unusual choice, to say the least. Reading it, I felt sure each of the last twenty pages would bring a return to the frantic suspicion of the first two hundred, instilling in the reader, me, some sense of wholeness, of closure. Instead, I got banal scenes in a rehab center and on a farm, scenes that could have come from any of a thousand other novels, I felt, just not this one. And though in those scenes we find out what Arctor was supposed to find out, it is, for these last pages, as though we are reading some other book entirely, as though we have escaped from one narrative into another.

I was reminded of the end of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust , in which Waugh’s protagonist, Tony Last, in the middle of a nasty divorce in England — which story we have been following for two hundred pages — decides to go on an expedition to Brazil for which he has no real background. Such a turn of events would seem strange enough in the context of the story we’ve been following, but things get even stranger when Tony’s guide disappears, stranding him in the jungle. Tony nearly dies from disease and starvation, but is rescued by a man known as “Mr. Todd” who keeps Tony alive on the condition that Tony read Dickens aloud to him. The chapter had originally been a short story of Waugh’s, “The Man Who Loved Dickens,” and it is hard not to see its metamorphosis into the denouement of A Handful of Dust —a domestic drama if ever there was one, and as far away from an adventure tale as a book could be — as an utterly bizarre, grotesque deformation of the deus ex machina .

That term, deus ex machina , comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica , where Horace uses it as a criticism of the manner in which many Greek dramas were resolved. It may refer to an actual machine ( machina ) called a mekhane , used to lower actors onto the stage or allow them to fly above it. The terrified actor, partially blinded by his prosopon and strung up above a stage (made of stone, it should be remembered), attached to a system of pulleys and beams creaking from overuse, awaiting his one appearance on stage, destined to provide the play with the only sense of resolution or closure possible. He will need to get his feet under him and keep his chiton out of his own way if he is to have any hope of appearing godlike, not splitting his lip, shattering his kneecap, or losing yet another tooth. He opens his eyes: his own thin, frail ankles, the sock just barely clinging to his toes, straining to slip off and float slowly to the stage, the stage below, other actors crossing below him, trained not to notice this weight suspended above their heads — he must have hung there and wondered how it could possibly go well.

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Some children born with damage to one of the brain’s hemispheres show few or even no developmental difficulties; hemispherectomies (the removal of one of the brain’s hemispheres) are almost exclusively performed on children because children have a much higher degree of something called “neuroplasticity” than do adults. Because of this neuroplasticity, the missing hemisphere’s usual functions can be accomplished by the remaining hemisphere. Difficulties seem to arise much more often later in life, when a hemisphere that has already been assigned certain functions is damaged. Cases where one of an adult’s hemispheres is damaged have led to anosognosia (the inability to recognize one’s own disabilities), aphasia (word-memory loss), and prosopagnosia (face blindness), as well as a host of other disorders. Whatever faculty has been disturbed by the damage cannot be replicated in the other hemisphere, or else can only be tortuously, circuitously replicated there. Again, though, damage to the same area of the brain, provided it occurs early enough in life, may not have any effect at all. One can only miss what one has already experienced.

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A Scanner Darkly ’s “scramble suit” projects a seemingly infinite number of different facial features in front of the wearer’s face, one at a time but constantly changing, in randomized combinations. Though the intention is to hide the identity of the person inside the suit, the effect must also be extraordinarily unnerving — anyone who has seen Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s “If They Mated” will know just how disturbing facial features from different people brought together in the same face can be. Imagine it: always changing, always throwing up new combinations. How could you even talk to such a thing? Because these facial features have been taken from living (and once-living) human beings, their number cannot be infinite. Mathematically, it is a certainty: the “scramble suit,” if allowed to go on operating long enough, will eventually betray its wearer. At some point in time, all of his/her features will be displayed, together. Perhaps the real intention isn’t to hide the wearer’s face at all — even though it would only be displayed for an instant, surely that would be enough time to cement the suspicions of anyone who knew the person inside the suit. Perhaps the real intention is to make that area of the body so hideous, so inhuman, that no one would ever think to look at it long enough to notice such a thing.

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To a mind accustomed either to a predominantly psychological literary form, like the modern novel, or to a classical style of regular and logical narrative development, the sequence of scenes in a play by Shakespeare is likely to appear capricious and arbitrary. Like the relations between the various episodes within an individual scene, the relations between scenes are often determined by other than narrative concerns, and we will have no difficulty following the logic of a Shakespearean play if we keep this in mind.