Читать книгу Panopticon - David Bajo - Страница 7

Café Cinema was busy. Klinsman sat at the bar, turned toward the floor so he could watch the Luchadors play the room. They wore business suits and their brightly colored head masks, just like Santo and Blue Demon in the old Mexican wrestler movies Klinsman had grown up watching on Channel 12. Klinsman liked this troupe. They were guerrilla theater, an improv combo of LA’s Culture Clash, Latins Anonymous, and Chicano Secret Service, but everyone knew them as the Luchadors. Sometimes they did scheduled events like this one, sometimes they staged secret impromptu events, and sometimes they blended one into the other. He had covered them seven years ago, one of his first assignments. It seemed fitting that he should cover them here, in the final week of the Review’s existence. Not much seemed fitting to Klinsman, so this was a rare moment. He wondered if Gina had given him this story as a gift, a bookend, a rare fit.

He sipped from his bottle of Tecate and guided the turn of his bar stool, imagining himself a kind of box camera, hollow inside, the images gathered, flipped, then righted. Los Abandoned played through the ceiling speakers, singing in their English-Spanish mix about being girls in barrios. Nada mio es fake. Veny tocame.

The club was lit more than usual so everyone could see the Luchadors mixing with the crowd in different ways, chatting, dancing, demonstrating invented holds, performing little spontaneous skits. The main screen in the back and the smaller screens over the bar were all showing Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis, sound off. It seemed as if the Luchadors, or their doubles, had leapt from the screens and come to life among the crowd. They had finished their live overdub of the movie, where they had made the immortals from Atlantis into corporate heads overseeing the maquiladores, the beautiful double agents X-25 and Juno into the two current state senators, and the zombies into consumers. From the start, as always, Santo was there to fight for the people, those who had not yet become zombies. Blue Demon, his rival at first, later joined forces with his silver-masked nemesis to wrestle X-25 and then finally the immortals. Now Santo and Blue and X-25 and Juno were loose in Café Cinema.

One of the Luchadors in a silver head mask was dancing with three women. The women were young and writhing wildly, flinging their dark hair. The Luchador was intentionally dancing stiffly, like Santo in his movies, a muscle-bound pillar of righteousness in his gray flannel suit, mask on.

X-25, in her orange pantsuit, danced vaguely with two young men. Her gaze was distant, her steps minimal, allowing her to scan the floor, the café, the bar. Klinsman stilled himself, waited to be swept over, maybe catch her eye. She processed him without a blip, her gaze passing just above him.

Klinsman turned back to the bar and smoothed the cool lip of his beer bottle over his eyelids. He stared down at the brass bar top and noticed a fingerprint, neat and perfect, in the center of a water ring. The fingerprint was long, including the whorls below the second joint. The imprint of the woman who had rested so primly, so intentionally on the bed in room 9 flickered inside the hollow of his camera-self along with the rest of the images he had just gathered. She swayed like thin, dark seaweed between the figures of the Luchadors, her hips nudging them, her hair curling around their necks, her spiral fists up before her breasts, dancer, boxer.

When he looked up and faced the bar mirror, he saw that one of the Luchadors had taken a seat beside him. He wore a Blue Demon mask and a dark business suit with a thin ‘50s tie. The tie had a silk-screened flying saucer and a ringed planet on it. The Luchador was trim, not like the burly Blue Demon from Channel 12, and the elegant bones of his face were outlined on his silk mask. His lips were full, pushed into lushness by the blue mask.

“You’re Del Zamora,” said Klinsman.

The Luchador stared back with no reply.

“I didn’t know you were with these guys again.” Klinsman tilted his beer but did not sip. “I saw you with them a long time ago. Here. You’ve done well since then. I saw you onstage at the Globe. And in Searchers 2.0.”

The Luchador nodded toward Klinsman’s Tecate. “How much you pay for that?”

Klinsman eyed the bottle as though assessing its full value.

“Four fifty. Plus tip.”

“Remember when you could get it in Baja for fifty cents?” asked Del. In the oblong opening of his mask his lips looked as soft and thick as sea anemones, supple and articulate with the tide.

“In Tecate,” replied Klinsman, “during feria they’d pour it in the streets. When I was a kid I loved the smell so much. The town reeked of it, hops baking on the sidewalks.”

“It looked green in the sunlight,” said Del, squeezing a tiny smile.

Klinsman cocked his head, stroked his jaw. “But you’re not from there. Or here. You’re not even a real Mexican. You’re mostly Apache or something. From New Mexico. Way back in Repo Man was when they turned you into a Chicano.”

“I’m not Zamora.”

“You are,” said Klinsman. “I have no doubt. The mask only convinces me more. Highlights your features. Your voice.”

“I’m Blue Demon,” he said, lips moist with the truth.