The infernal, p.14
The Infernal, page 14
“My eagle!” I say. “Look what you’ve done to my eagle!”
Behind me, at the very limit of what the ear can know, I hear the paired crashes of machine and boy.
Or not a crash, no, just the faintest echo of disintegration, no louder than a dirt clod powdered in your own hand.
Khakis and open collars …
The khaki and collar regime …
Your Baghdad criminal element, or I mean, put plain, your Baghdad element, they see him, Jay, they see a low person, an FSU/Shippensburger, and they know what they see …
Jay the first cause, Jay a god of shit …
This burqa thing, I’m stifling, I told retired ambassador Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.
I have brought my understanding to this porta-potty town, I’ll undo Jay’s damage, unknot and abolish the khaki and collar regime, usher in a new era in the Green Zone, thus the world …
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where it would be straight up, and not just the Green Zone, our whole fallen world, set it on its ear, straight up …
Kerpow, it just came …
Boots …
Kerpow …
What it was going to have to be was boots …
Boots, don’t you see, boots just the thing, stamp out the khakis in the Green Zone, set the Green Zone on its ear …
Dark suits, too, suits and boots, straightaway establish it, brand myself, suits-and-boots man, rebrand the whole Green Zone a suits-and-boots zone …
Baghdadi criminals, Baghdad’s super predators, they want and need and beg for mental domination, it’s what they respect, culturally, you give them your domination and then and only then do they give you respect, culturally, so, footwear, boots, that’s what I had to get …
Domination what Arabs look for, domination and what and you know and let’s just say, cards, table, explicit sexual domination …
To be sexually dominated, Arab mind-set, Arab mental process, that’s how you get into all that …
But here I was, tarmac, without my brand, my boots, my suits …
Hume, what I need is an incognito …
A burqa thing, Hume, it’s the only way …
Outside there were photographers and dignitaries, I needed an incognito …
I sent Hume to fetch me a burqa thing, I’d hide myself in a burqa thing and remain in a burqa thing until I found it, the solution, a true-blue American outfit, not khakis and collars but something to press down on the Arab brain, something to squeeze the Arab brain, squeeze it good, and when the pressing and the squeezing were at an end, we’d have a whole new Arab brain, I told retired ambassador Hume Horan, I told retired ambassador Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.
Tarmac a full hour, then another, concussive waves booming against the fuselage, waiting for Hume, for my burqa thing …
Newsmakers and dignitaries, one by one they got whirled away, it never comes on a breeze, this Baghdad air, only in reeking blasts …
They got whirled into the river …
Bodies consumed by the river, by the fire in the river, each man a new mausoleum lamp …
What I’m dead set on in the Green Zone and what we’re gonna have, hell, high water, is success, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.
My sister should be here, she should be shooting the palace, the Chinatown soundstage is what the mess in here reminds me of, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.
We were a pair on the soundstage, same as Monaco or Trieste …
Last assignment she ever accepted, last photos she ever took, shoot the publicity stills for Chinatown …
Guy the studio’d lined up, he was dead, he’d killed himself …
Photographers incapable of clean suicides, each death a showstopper, and good luck getting those stains out …
Condi a photographer, Life, People, a party photographer, the studio called her up …
Faye thought of my sister because of the Life photo, and Faye called my sister …
Let me tell you about Chinatown, that’s where I met Jack, I told Clay McManaway and Donny as Jay led us through the palace.
Jack, he’d just come from Vegas, or was it Ren TTQ6D530=X0NFW YUVCOV
I thought, Nicholson, yes, the drive to the desert, to the Middle East …
I thought Nicholson, the drive to death, the living death …
I had just seen The Passenger, and I loved Jack as I’d never loved any other, and so when my sister got the Chinatown gig I was her passenger, her tagalong …
Jack loved the desert, just loved it …
We made it to the soundstage, me and Condi …
A deep feeling for the desert, is what Jack said he had, a real deep feel for the people of the desert …
I was trying to get in close but lackeys were filling the soundstage with umbrellas, reflectors, tents, domes, shooting tables, with each step toward Jack a union lackey would roll a bin of apparatus right over my toes, and they just kept coming
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each piece of apparatus set on its own trajectory by a union lackey, vectors complexly cut through by other lackeys in white pants and T-shirts, all these lackeys moving with a complex and intercutting grace, never slowing, never hesitating, when I moved left they blocked me left, when I feinted right they blocked right, Jack kept talking, this swarm of men and apparatus cutting through and past itself burst into laughter yet again, me I had no idea what Jack was saying and I couldn’t even see him anymore …
I made a dash for it, parked myself in the mathematical center of the room, Jack up front and straight ahead, an explosion of laughter and Jack turned, I got caught in that stare, you know the stare, I mean have you ever seen Jack just stare at something …
He stared me down, laughter built, he was saying something, saying it to me, at me, over and over, a 1929 Rolls-Royce roared right through the soundstage and shrieked to a halt between us …
I went to find Condi …
Poor Condi …
Here’s where Condi’s skill set was and here’s where this job was, way up above it, is what I was thinking …
Apparatus, lackeys, Jack and Faye, oh boy this’d be good, my little Condi, the accidental photographer, the tagalong …
Pop me some corn, brother, because any second now she’d be found out for sure …
They’d find her out, my Condi …
She wasn’t up to it, uh-uh, and she’d be found out …
Any minute now she’d be found out …
No, wrong …
Wrong …
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Fact, total pro, cool as the pillow’s other side, my Condi …
Fact, stars, lackeys, apparatus, props, two shakes and it was all in order …
She moved all that apparatus and personnel, or orchestrated its movement, the pro, the master, two shakes …
And soon they were shutting down the soundstage, the apparatus was dispersing, hugs from Jack and Faye, hugs for Condi, a hug for me would have been nice, but hey …
I’d doubted her, my foundling, my Condi, and I’d been wrong to doubt her …
What was wrong with me, that I’d never dreamed that for my sister …
To never dream like that for her, when we’d been foundlings together, when we’d fought side by side, fought and clawed against the whole world …
Driving home, Condi at the wheel, I asked her, So how’d it feel, hugging Jack like that …
The highway, the cliff side, the moon in the sky and a second moon busting itself in black water, she didn’t speak …
The guardrail still busted up there, still unrepaired since the accident, we sped right by it …
I’d been driving them, Mom and Dad and Condi, the night before, and I’d swerved into the rail …
The night before the shoot, after the call from Faye, we’d been driving as a family to Five Easy Pieces …
Five Easy Pieces, we said we’d see it as a family to celebrate Condi’s job, catch one with Jack in it, give her a taste of Jack, give the whole family a taste …
We’d been driving to see that one, and I’d hit the railing …
But I hadn’t broken through …
I was drunk, but I wasn’t blackout stinking drunk, and so I pulled the wheel at the last moment …
One day I’d break through, but then, no …
Maybe that’s what Condi was thinking about on the ride back from the shoot …
How I hadn’t broken through that night, but one day I would …
Back home, the vineyards, she parked beneath the porte cochere, tires crunching on the macadamized driveway, she killed the engine and we just sat there …
Her hands folded in her lap, I took one of those hands in my own … How’d that feel, taking those photos, I said …
It felt good, Jerry, Condi said …
I bet it did, sure looked like it did …
Well, it did …
Inside I poured us drinks, no, she didn’t want a drink, she said I’m going down, second basement, don’t disturb me …
She said, Don’t touch me! Don’t you touch me …
She locked herself in the second basement, the dark room, came out a week later, hair wild, eyes and teeth wild, wreathed in the solder-like stink of developer, of her own sweat and filth, she handed me a sheaf of photos …
Look what I’ve done, Jerry …
They were all new, I told Donny as he unpacked my things.
They were classics, I told Donny as he unpacked my things.
These were the new classics, I told Donny, and how often does it happen, a classic no one’s seen before gets put in your hand …
Art History with a Special Photographic Emphasis, that’s one of my Harvard degrees, or I mean Yale, I’ve curated exhibitions in São Paolo, Stuttgart, Beijing, and Sydney, written monographs and articles, I’m a foremost world expert on the photographic arts, no exaggeration, and these were great photos, they were the very greatest …
I’d foreseen failure, humiliation …
What we had on our hands was some world-historical art …
Diane Ladd, Faye, those photos of the two of them …
That final photo, how they just cling to each other, two women, one young, one old, clinging to each other in a photo like that …
Diane, Faye, a backlit window, two women clinging, it’s right up among the greatest photos ever …
Diane, Faye, how they crouch within a circle of light that seems to expand then slowly turn as you try to make sense of it, that embrace, those arms encircling and also repelling, a radiance by now almost blinding, it can’t touch them …
Faye stares past Diane Ladd, Diane Ladd stares past Faye …
If only Diane Ladd would look up a fraction of an inch, or Faye down, their eyes would meet, but their eyes can never meet, they burn with the same spell …
Brady and Curtis, Gardner and Riis, this photo surpassed them all as world-historical art …
It’s why they had to be destroyed …
The studio and Polanski, even Jack, they all agreed, eliminate them, do so at all costs, they’d only make the movie ridiculou1JHD0R0X
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Chinatown was a fine movie, the best that year, but by no means a great movie, and the photos would undo it, tug a thread and it’d fall to pieces, a cheap joke …
Faye and Diane Ladd didn’t want the photos destroyed, but who listens to Faye or Diane Ladd …
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studio men came, confiscated photos, negatives, men in dark suits with earpieces, Mom and Dad let them right in, pointed out for them the likeliest hiding places, under the hate-puckered eye of our housemaid, Hattie …
My sister, my Condi, watched from her window, fourth floor, as her great work burned, then hurled her camera by the strap, she hurled it out and down …
It landed bang in the barrel where the photos burned, damn good shot, sparks flared up …
After that, we would both move on, me and Condi, though not yet …
Condi had thrown out her camera, she hadn’t moved to Harlowton …
I’d decided on public service, I hadn’t entered public service …
Our parents still alive, Mom and Dad, who’d scooped us up …
In another year it would be public service for me, for Condi, Harlowton, our parents dead, but for now we were suspended between our old lives and what was coming, we hadn’t yet broken through, I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases …
The old life, it wasn’t over …
And yet it was …
My sister hurled her camera into the burning barrel in the macadamized driveway, and the old life was over, I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases, Hume Horan and Clay McManaway scouring the Green Zone for boots.
It’s all these little nods going person to person, these smiles, these—pardon my language—these pert little shit-eating grins. The tension in those smiles, something almost giddy. When the news came, they still had us out in the hallway—us that would be fuchsias and them that would be yellows and greens—the news came, traveling one to the next, and as it did so a magnificent buzzing happiness swelled in that dim, mahoganied corridor. It was like November all over again, but this time out of a clear blue sky. If just one of us had started to applaud, we all would have joined in—I’m sure of that. I think we were afraid to break the spell. You see, we were all children in that moment. We had been grown-ups mustered for a grown-up event in a venerable midtown hotel, then the news came and we were children standing under an open sky in the summertime, blue light falling all around us.
It was only when they started the sorting process and the lines solidified that the grins got tighter. And then I understood—the flip side of ourDXGPP8JSQRK SNWTGP 1OM J272OX F-
our childish joy. Or theirs, I should say, because it was no longer mine.
We’d known, to put it simply, that this news would not be taken well by our opponents—that it would seriously piss them off-—and that, more than anything else, is what had made us giddy.
Hasn’t it been clear for some time now? That their unhappiness is our greatest treasure, just as ours is theirs?
We had known, on some level, that this was not an honor that had been earned. We had known that the Swedes understood the same. And that right now, half a world away, the Swedes—those demented and mischievous Swedes—were grinning along with us under the same sky of giddy blue.
Eight years, Reagan gets zilch, you breeze in and they’re handing them out at the coat check.
What, we wondered, would the crazies do with this?
Could you imagine how ape the crazies would go with it?
Every day the crazies look at you, and the crazies go ape, but has there ever been one to make the crazies go as ape as the one we just caught wind of?
And all of this was delicious.
But as security rifled handbags and patted down and wanded, the knowledge was turning around on us—on them—and it was no longer joyful. Lists were chec1XXTP MI1 TXCH 6IAD/F XM OMKTP=O
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wristbanded. Yellows and greens sent one way, the main hall, and fuchsias the other, for the backstage VIP, which is—if you’ll permit a sidebar—less than ideal for one in my situation, as you can see. If only I’d let them know I was coming, they said, they’d have made arrangements. But I didn’t mind. They parked me up on this rampless landing, and it was the ideal spot to take it in. Now that I was no longer a part of the happiness, I could see with great precision what those smiles were being subjected to, the degree of torsion exerted behind each one.
Because where we are childish, our opponents are much more childish. And while we are gentle children, with at worst an insult book or peashooter in our back pockets, they are dangerous children, with sticks and stones and bike chains.
I listened to the sounds of the urban choir through the stage door behind me, and I watched you work the room—watched not from the mighty berth of my Rodem Universal, but from this nursing home reject they put me in—and that I did mind a bit, though I understood their logic.
They want to keep you safe.
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I watched you move from person to person with that wonderful way of yours, that bearing that’s regal yet so calm and relaxed, just short of folksy, and I watched all of them wait their turn, these wealthy people and power brokers, several dozen fuchsias smiling and strutting between tureens and chafing dishes, filling their plates, waiting their turn or carrying themselves in the afterglow, strutting and pecking like storks.
One after the next, they all shook your hand.
They’re almost frozen now—it’s changed as we’ve been talking. Have they all lost their appetites? Did they already eat their fill?
It’s just you and me up here shaking, me in this chair with this face—this grotesquely damaged face—and you bending slightly, a tall, slim, and handsome man, and I’m so afraid that they won’t be able to help themselves.
I’m afraid that they will turn their stork faces up at us at and laugh.
This meeting, which I had so long deferred, holds a terror for me—central to that terror the very fact of the repeated deferrals. All those days I showed up at the high school or VFW or municipal park and left again without shaking your hand. Without even once watching the speech.
