Читать книгу Paper Conspiracies - Susan Daitch - Страница 6

How many stories could begin, “What are you doing here, you’re supposed to be dead?”

The door opens, light shines into the dark hall, and the curve of a cheekbone appears vaguely familiar. Other guests, innocent family members in the back of the room don’t notice the new arrival. You think it can’t be possible that he or she might only be visible to you. No, it can’t be. You shut the door, looking up at the transom, then down at the gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold to be sure no shadow has slid into the room.

The encounter might take place on the street, in a train station, a busy intersection, a back alley, you’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing here? What do you want from me? Leave me alone, please. You’re in trouble. Calling the police is useless because a history of guilt and complicity on your part isn’t entirely buried and forgotten. Could the likeness be only a coincidental double, not the real person, not the actual birth-certificate-waving human, not the citizen who might have made your life a living hell? That’s how I felt at work when restoring old movies. Shadowy figures assembled into frames began to look familiar, to hum and vibrate with amorous longings, embarrassment, coyness, the desire for evening old scores, or simmering with rage, they fade into an indistinct background.

A silhouette skating like a banshee over pebbled glass, a profile reflected in the rearview mirror of a parked car, I twisted around quickly, not believing it possible. Is that you? Wait a minute, let me be certain. I grew up the only daughter of two people who didn’t know where they wanted to or even could go, so they ended up in a small city halfway between New York and Montreal. Both of them, but my mother in particular, were not destined to feel at home anywhere. The idea of home stood on shaky ground: a house, an address on a steeply inclined plot of land on which sprouted a one-story house called a ranch but there were no palominos or branding machines on this idea of ranch. It was just a one-story house so you didn’t have to go up or down stairs. There were no grandparents, no uncles, aunts, or cousins. One distant cousin landed in Argentina in 1940, but his children were disappeared in that country’s dirty war of the 1970s, and he ended his life jumping from a balcony shortly thereafter. His letters, written in a hybrid of Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish were kept in a drawer along with tax forms, photographs, fliers for discounts at car washes. I was unable to read them completely, and no one was willing to translate his macaronics for me. In one letter I could make out Nokh a kish funa gonif, dezehl iber dayne tzende (If you kiss a thief, count your teeth) and figured someone was carrying on with someone they shouldn’t have, but the specifics of who was tangoing on the wrong street, I couldn’t make out. I’m not sure each page really revealed much anyway. The letters were murmured over when they arrived; a few years later my mother wept over them. Alone, sneaking the pages out of a drawer at night, I figured out some of the Spanish parts that referred to quotidian details of an increasingly frightened life, as if by burying the anticipation of death squads under details about a trip to the doctor’s, the fear might be buried, too. Houses broken into in the middle of the night, children going into hiding in country houses, in the jungle, in museum basements. My mother, a woman who fought chaos with chaos, snatched them from my hands, saying she’d heard all this before, and I didn’t need to hear it at all. When I turned fifteen, around the time the letters from Argentina stopped, she spent a lot of time wandering around a newly built windowless shopping mall looking for light switches (prices slashed), wrapping paper (after holidays), out-of-stock paint colors, and other semiuseless objects because you never knew when there would be shortages or how these things could become useful if flight or hiding became necessary. Both my parents were talented at putting mechanical detritus to good use: radio innards were used to fix the telephone, a turntable mutated into a gizmo used to stir prints in my father’s darkroom, a speaker made of plywood the size of a refrigerator box blasted music all over the house. As a child I was convinced they could turn a desert junkyard into a phalanx of robots. The one-story house became a vault for packages of jeweler’s screwdrivers (what if you have to fix a watch?), picture hooks (could pick a lock), rolls of tape of all kinds, and tins of sardines and vacuum-sealed bags of raisins with expiration dates from before the camera was invented. While my mother was preoccupied with this kind of shopping my father spent more and more time tinkering with electrical machinery and a homemade computer as big as a bathtub, with disks the size of dinner plates. Chaos reigned. No one would answer my questions. I only knew I was named for someone whose name began with the letter F, someone who was born in a town whose name was made up of consonants and couldn’t be found on any map.

My mother couldn’t use an oven and cooked quickly over a stove, burning pots and pans, throwing them out whenever possible. Food that was canned or frozen presented a language that, for all its simplicity, held hidden dangers, the breaching of food taboos. What was she seeing in the turquoise packaging of a frozen macaroni-and-cheese dinner? The bits of bacon rendered it inedible, and the whole thing had to be taken outside and put in the garbage. The staring into space got worse after my accident, which wasn’t really an accident at all, but a letter bomb directed at all of us. I was the one who opened it.

“Where will we go? Rio?” My father grew angry at my mother’s hysteria, useless and irrational, as far as he was concerned. “Shall we join your cousin whose children were dropped out of a helicopter over the Atlantic Ocean?”

“You’re always the last one to get it. You stay behind until the wolf is at the door, until his tail wallops the glass, and then it’s too late.” My mother dumped the contents of her bag on the floor, looking for her keys so she could make an exit. “Frances, were you going through my things again?” I’d just gotten out of the hospital and I wasn’t going anywhere. Half my face was bandaged over, my hair hung limply out from under white strips of gauze.

We weren’t going to go anywhere. My father had a stable job teaching biology in a high school. In the spring when he got to the unit on evolution a few of the English teachers who were creationists would somehow have sniffed this out and, during lunch, they would try to convert him, but in this task there lay madness. Perhaps they saw the classroom charts that mapped relationships between family, species, and genus laid out in green and blue lines like the veins of a leaf. In Darwin’s theory of natural selection they saw the cosmos reduced to chaos. The collector of beetles and carnivorous plants who rode a tortoise in the Galapagos opened the universe to random terror. This cracked my father up. He didn’t take the creationists seriously. He might notice them peering at him as he rode into the parking lot on his motorcycle, but he never described them in condescending terms. As far as he was concerned, the argument could be parsed into two obviously warring camps: evolutionists whose soldiers could refer to the Salk vaccine, the H-bomb (even though it had to be tested many times and even though it could be said to be a dubious achievement), walking on the moon. The soldiers on the other side drove their stake into ground with the solidity of the Everglades, and though they unfurled their banner with conviction, it was true, what did they have to brag about really? Galileo under house arrest because he wrote that the sun was the center of the universe? My father lit a Marlboro and tapped ash into a glass ashtray in the shape of the Apollo 11 rocket.

To my mother the creationists were nauseating, a grave affront. Pour water on them and they would melt into the floor in a plume of smoke. To her they were all complicitous bombers, and she longed for cities with narrow streets set at odd, unpredictable angles where the shadow of Nosferatu or a golem gliding across a wall would be as prosaic as meeting a friend in a café where you could talk about movies, plays, show off new clothes, and gossip in a language all your friends understood. Your feet made noise on the pavement instead of the silence of asphalt parking lots. After the letter bomb she embarked on fits of driving, traveling to the far-flung provinces of provincial life. On her journeys she discovered apple stands and strip malls, cut-rate carpet dealers and fish fries, public libraries set up in defunct churches, and covered bridges on unmapped roads.

My initial fifteen-year-old response was to try to blend into the town my parents had picked out of nowhere. I daydreamed in school, drawing relentlessly in notebooks, the margins of textbooks, on desks. I still have a few of those sketches of futuristic cities based on my mother’s stories of buildings honeycombed with crowded apartments which I imagined were Gaudí-like, glittering with tesserae, built like huge stalagmites. It was a means of imagining my way out. In the meantime I made an attempt to be anonymous, but the project was useless. After the letter bomb I realized it was impossible to hide behind ordinary clothes and straightened hair that only lasted for a few hours before it boinged back to its curly state. I went to Ravi Shankar and Nina Simone concerts, but if I cheered when she exhorted the crowd by saying if a few white men can run this country you can take over this university, nobody cared or noticed my enthusiastic response.

I encountered my own equivalent of the creationists. My classes were full of small-town boys, mediocre athletes with buzz cuts and monosyllabic names whose lives seemed fixed if not gated. My parents blinked and saw the lot of them crammed into Mr. Wizard’s Way Back Machine. All of them were the descendants of the Gaston who had joined the Children’s Crusade and all were ready to march on infidel-filled Jerusalem if their draft number came up. The letter bomb proved it. I wasn’t so sure. What happened when they, these boys who knew little of life beyond the next town, ended up in Vietnam, Beirut, the Persian Gulf? One bearlike boy who read Soldier of Fortune magazine bragged he would go to Afghanistan or Zaire, names he proudly mispronounced. The ingredients for explosives lurked in their cellar workshops, with how-to manuals hidden in drawers full of jock clothing; they were my suspects. I never knew exactly which one or ones created me, turned me into a target, one-eyed and angry, with no effective means of striking back at them. My parents who looked like Persians with Boris and Natasha accents made me an easy mark. My mother, in particular, was a sitting duck for mimics, and I knew it. Since I’d lost an eye to the anonymous letter bomb I was a sitting duck myself.

In school I had wanted to study Latin and Greek — as if dead languages might explain how images were first connected to words. I imagined hectoring mobs of things (lions, columns, arenas, aqueducts, toga pins, constellations) marshaled into categories: nouns, verbs, syntax — but my family insisted that I do something practical, so I studied the most insubstantial thing I could think of: light.

The job posting was the stamp on my ticket: Library of Congress Film Restoration Project, Paid Internship.

I was charmed by the idea of working in film, but intensely camera shy and happy to work as a kind of handmaiden to “the industry.” All right, I thought, at least I have a hand or an eye in something. Here, I wouldn’t be a target, wouldn’t be stared at, few questions asked, go on with your business, please. The process of learning how to put a brush to aged celluloid gave me a sense of professional identity, saved me from the night shift at a movie-rental shop with a large independent section, answering urgent questions about matrixchopsockeystarwarsdirectorscut. Now I had a hood I could pull over my head, a burrow, a bunker, a fallout shelter with a periscope.

I left for Washington at the end of the summer so my departure could be confused with going off to school, and it was still hot, but in a last gasp kind of way. Department store windows displayed artificial leaves while children on our street still ran through hoses and hydrants in brilliant fuchsia and purple bathing suits. My mother said good-bye at the house; seeing me wave from the window of a train was not possible for her. I kept looking out the car window all the way to the station, armoring myself against her resentment and despair, her sense of betrayal that chased me no matter how much my father, imitating Peter Lorre, said full steam ahead, Frances. Since we were early my father and I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the station.

“What do you think about Cuba?” he asked, stirring and staring into the parking lot.

“What do you mean, what do I think about Cuba?” My father, who was a very calm man, was making me nervous.

“They’re looking for science teachers.”

“You can’t go to Cuba. You’re a United States citizen. If you moved to Havana you’d never be able to come back.”

“I’ve left a lot of places that I can’t and don’t want to return to.”

“You’ve lived in Israel. You won’t be let in.”

“That was a long time ago. Maybe they won’t notice.”

“What about Mom?” The point I feared was that she occupied one of the places he didn’t want to return to.

“I need to get away from here. Between the creationists who guarantee me a life in everlasting hell, who think petri dishes are something you hang from a Christmas tree, and your mother, who mistakes family photographs for expired discount coupons and tosses them out, I think for me, personally, it’s time for a change.”

There was no arguing with him. I didn’t know if he would apply for Cuban citizenship or not, but I knew now that I was leaving, he would as well.

“I want to give you something before your mother makes a clean sweep of everything in the house.” He handed me a faded sepia photograph of a small girl, about four years old. I turned it over. On the back was written F. Baum, 1940. This was my father’s sister.

“So keep this in a safe place.”

Our conversation dwindled in the minutes remaining. Finally he dropped me at the station then went back to his machines. I didn’t want to get on the train, didn’t want to see him return to his mammoth computers, coverless radios, old turntables spinning wildly on the cluttered floor. By giving me this photograph I’d never seen, he was tearing some part of me away, as if to say, you’ll never be able to come back here, and you’ll never be able to leave. The train pulled out of the station, and the red brick apartment buildings, the flyblown variety stores already giving way to Kmarts and then Walmarts moved out to the horizon as if they were on conveyor belts, parts of changing sets.

In Washington in a cheap, hastily rented studio apartment I put my tiny aunt’s picture in a frame made in China and set out to learn the art of conserving film.

This kind of resuscitation required a steady hand and a life in dark rooms. When beads from a sweater bought in a thrift shop, for example, fell onto an editing table, jamming a reel, it was, for the actors, akin to an avalanche of glass. Every thread, hair, drop of coffee had to be kept out of the danger zone. In my position as assistant to a film archivist at the Library of Congress I wasn’t paid much, but I soon became a skilled surgeon of lost performances, an ambulance driver for long-dead actors.

What about my own ghosts? They lived and died in a town I never saw; they drank coffee in bare provincial cafés, had lives circumscribed by rituals and holidays whose meanings organized each year like shifting but predictable constellations. Yet when I watched movies and cartoons made before 1939 I couldn’t help but pretend to inhabit those faces known only through photographs, wondering if they had watched these too, and in that projection back, the ghostly clusters took on a mixture of strange and familiar features. Also, and this makes their summoning even more troublesome, they appeared horrifyingly modern, not part of someone’s acute but aged set of memories. The murdered live next door, or almost. You can’t say: look at their clothes, they belong in another time, because with their fairly well-cut suits and dresses in geometric prints they look as if they could live in the same cities I have lived in, travel in what are essentially the same kinds of cars, respond to the same news of elections and atrocities, although this is impossible. What I mean is they have become personalities I’m capable of trying on although I never met a single one of them. They died before I was born. If this sounds arrogant it’s only because they’ve been at my door persistently, despite my family’s need to look the other way.

The new city engulfed me, and I plunged into my job with intensity. Taking on the role of the animating but anonymous power that revitalized Buster Keaton as his eyes grew sadder and (I thought) more disillusioned, or pumping up a flimsy, short-haired Myrna Loy revealed an odd kind of romance I sometimes had with these images. Or maybe it was a case of antiromance, the romance of solitary, imaginary pleasures. I used to notice old men and sullen boys in movie houses and wonder how far removed I really was from them. What kinds of illusions did I labor under? It’s a job, I kept telling myself, one I felt fortunate to have.

“Hello, this is Alphabet Films, please hold.”

I pushed hair out of my eye. I had worked overtime and so was sleeping late. The call not only disrupted my sleep but the edgy equilibrium of a life lived in dark rooms.

“Hello, is this Frances L. Baum?” A man’s voice, respectful but authoritative boomed in my ear.

“Yes.”

“This is Julius Shute, director of Alphabet Film Conservation. You were recommended to me by . . .” Groping for my eye patch in the dark while he searched for the name of my current boss, a displaced Iowan who, though he had no complaints about my work, saw me as a rootless cosmopolitan who would soon move on, the phone slipped from my shoulder and fell into the space between the bed and the wall. I was alone, I didn’t need the eye patch, but felt as if a public event were taking place, as if this Shute were watching me sit up in the middle of a twist of bedsheets. “I’d like to ask you to consider working for me at Alphabet.” His muffled voice came from somewhere under the bed. In the silence while I felt for the phone, Shute continued to speak, filling the void. “Occasionally people are reluctant to leave the Library of Congress for West 22nd Street. Arbergast, that was who recommended you.”

“Yes, that’s my boss.”

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, Arbergast, a faultless technician with a phenomenal memory for film trivia which he regaled us with constantly, was greasing the rails of my move which, he believed, was inevitable. I managed to tell Shute I was interested in West 22nd Street, wherever that was.

“I’m traveling to Washington in a week to testify at congressional hearings on film colorization, and thought I could set up an interview with you while I’m in town.”

We agreed on a time and place, then I hung up as if nothing unusual had happened, but in my excitement I was completely unable to find matching socks. Mentally I began to prepare my answers to his questions, believing when we met he would back out of his offer as instantly as he’d extended it.

How did you lose an eye? Does it impair your ability to do painstaking work?

Am I wearing glasses?

No.

I see perfectly well with my left eye.

Responding to the usual second question and avoiding the first, I had learned how to be a master at evasive answers when they were needed. It’s difficult to say: a letter bomb and let it go at that. People want to know more. These kinds of bombs have been delivered in Rome, Istanbul, Argentina to scientists and governors but rarely to isolated high school students. I didn’t want to explain the arrests, the trial, senders not convicted. I knew Shute’s name had originally been Shulevitz, but his mother had changed it. In the name Shulevitz there might have been sympathy, but I was no longer looking for it.

Despite Julius’s eagerness to meet and his effusiveness about my work, I felt unprepared, a one-eyed amateur, a fraud who should back out of the interview, but lulled by the man’s voice, I was prepared to go ahead and make a fool of myself. Alphabet had an international reputation, and I wanted to move to New York.

One week later we met at a Greek diner. Julius disliked expensive restaurants. They made him uncomfortable. Any place with a maître d’ was like a hair salon with a perfumed atmosphere, as far as he was concerned. He needed to walk in and find his own place to sit. From a distance he looked like a young Frank Sinatra in thick glasses: angular face; calm blue eyes that drew you in, meaning no harm, interested in only you absolutely, but when one walked closer, sat across from him at a small table, one could see the fraying around the edges, and he was much older than a young anybody. You could still smoke in restaurants back then, and he did, with the kind of assurance that came from years of practice. But Julius was not overly confident either. Despite his accomplishments, his expense account must have been limited, or so his choice of the diner signaled to me. A man who meant business, who didn’t bother with the language of extravagant lunches, meals that stretched into the afternoon were of little interest to him. I was too nervous to eat anyway. My spanakopita remained a square brick on my plate, and although I tried to concentrate on Julius’s questions, as well as his descriptions of his business, my eye wandered to the revolving display of heavily frosted cakes ringed with glazed cherries, mountainous meringue pies, and other desserts positioned just behind Julius’s head

He was a man without a niche so he used expressions that would appear to give him one, to make him seem to be in the swim and a heavy hitter, sounding me out from the get go. He knew all about the films I’d worked on. I wondered if English was his first language. I asked him how his testimony went.

“Colorization is like tossing a ball into a cocked hat.”

The hearings had been somewhat controversial. Many celebrities and film stars had appeared. Julius enjoyed rubbing shoulders with them and denounced the colorization of old black-and-white films, a process he viewed with disgust and refused to undertake, no matter how lucrative coloring might be.

“Painting Barbara Stanwyck’s dress red in The Lady Eve, for example, sends a signal to the audience that she’s duplicitous. Let them figure it out for themselves.”

It was an argument I would remember when Julius and I would discuss how far to go in conserving a particular film.

“Even the word restoration represents a threat. To restore often means to impose someone’s idea of what a picture should look like, means a heavy dose of tampering, means this: going too far. Colorization, like putting arms back on Venus, is out of the question.” He turned around and asked the waitress for more coffee, then just as abruptly changed the subject.

“I grew up in Los Angeles. My mother worked in the costume department of Universal Studios,” Julius said, and I imagined the man I barely knew sitting across from me as a child careening around this or that set. “I stole a costume once from a stuntman who was doubling for Clint Eastwood in Hang ’Em High. It was a great cowboy suit with these Technicolor yellow suede chaps with green fringe. I wore the suit to school thinking other kids would pay attention to me. They did, but not in the way I imagined.”

He didn’t reveal what kind of attention he received, but because of this story I felt some affection for him, and this was a mistake. Julius knew how to elicit sympathy and attention, and my response, my laughter, made him comfortable, so he plunged on. Actually, I’d worked on Hang ’Em High, admittedly restoring only one section of the film, but couldn’t remember Clint Eastwood in yellow chaps. Perhaps the scene with that particular stunt had been cut when the film was edited. In any case I said nothing about it.

“She used to get calls from gossip columnists because actors, even extras, often made startling confessions during fittings, revealing liaisons and uncomfortable memories as if she knew magic words of absolution, as if she had the answers which, believe me, she did not. She was as good as they were at theatrical expressions of shock and sympathy that she recycled from the movies, and sometimes when I’m working on a film I see her raised eyebrows or hand over her mouth. The talent also spoke to one another as if she was invisible, and in this way more gossip was overheard. An uncle got me into the preservation business because they thought I was brainy and useless, but I learned from my mother. My telephone number is unlisted.”

Julius, a displaced Californian who took his profession east, was never entirely at home in New York where hundreds of miles of trains rumbled underground, where the odds of an actual earthquake were small, and business was conducted in dark rooms high above street level. He was constantly a bit bewildered, as if looking for a switch in order to turn on the light. Yet Julius could read damaged and deteriorating film history as if it were a large-print book. The old films became a pedestal he lectured from. Without me, you’re nothing, he’d say, and this always got a laugh from whoever was in the room.

Julius was meticulous, this I knew from his reputation, but ill at ease with responsibility, the kind of man who belonged nowhere and who had landed in a profession that only once in a while demanded he communicate with a live human being. He didn’t like the idea of exercise, was gym phobic, but every once in a while would take the stairs. Julius lit another cigarette but held it so his hand dangled over the edge of the booth.

“I don’t want to blow smoke in your eyes. Eye,” he corrected himself and turned red. I wasn’t annoyed, in an odd way his embarrassment and the dangling hand were persuasive.

Over the cash register a television was suspended. The Garwood case was being discussed briefly on the news. Garwood, a Vietnam POW — some believe he was falsely accused of treason. We stood up to leave, and I had my eye on that particular story when suddenly Julius kissed me good-bye awkwardly but deliberately. As he bent over I noticed he colored his hair orangey brown (against colorization but dyed his hair) and his eyes were shut. Somehow he made me feel I’d asked for that kiss since I’d laughed at his self-deprecating jokes. His implication was that there was more where it came from; still, I accepted the job. I guess at the time I didn’t mind all that much.

When I left the Library of Congress to work for a private company in New York I cut my hair so that no strand would accidentally fall across the frame, and I tried unsuccessfully to quit drinking coffee, which was making my hands shake a bit if I was tired. I made more money but still affected an appearance that combined seriousness with attention to certain kinds of ironic details, like narrow-waisted jackets that looked as if they’d been pinched from old movies and frayed trousers because I wore clothing until it fell apart. This created an image of studied slovenliness, as if my mind were completely on my work and not on the body I actually inhabited. A ten-dollar good-luck ring set with a square, magenta piece of glass was my prize possession until I lost it in a public swimming pool my first week in the city. No longer working with a large number of people as I had in Washington, and knowing no one in New York, I could go for days barely speaking to anyone. I felt like a prisoner in my own skin and began to wonder what the relationship might be between my sense of physicality, my vanity, all unacted upon, and my vocation that was so concerned with preserving the display of others.

The editing rooms of Alphabet Film Conservation are in the Mayflower Building downtown. You walk in through the main entrance, a double door centered like a mouth, windows for eyes. A sculpture, a large statue of Hermes built into its own recessed aedicule above the door; that’s the nose. Hermes is sinewy, his arms and legs an abstract collection of metal rods, yet in his winged cap he is identifiable as the god of rogues, gymnasts, and travelers. Other mouths: curving balconies, Gaudí-like but functionless flourishes since no one uses them. More windows resemble other pairs of eyes. How is an office building like a human body? Banks of elevators function like arteries, the furnace is a giant sweat gland, air-conditioning ducts are drawn-out branches of lung. The building directory located in the lobby might be the brain, flat and simple, tin and industrial felt, a banal yet practical mind.

Alphabet is on the fifth floor. The labs where the films are treated branch out from the reception area and offices of the director, Julius Shute, his assistant, and the accountant. The walls are covered with framed posters from a few of the films we have preserved: Go West, The Cameraman, Wages of Fear, Out of the Past, The Runaway Bride, and photographs of Julius as a boy shaking hands with Charlie Chaplin in one picture and Montgomery Clift in another. Julius believes that in the eyes of our clients these photographs are the equivalent of medical school diplomas.

Chaplin bent over to meet Julius’s gaze and smiled broadly, cane stuck out behind, yet this was an older Chaplin, perhaps tired of little boys, although perhaps not. Montgomery Clift playing Freud didn’t look happy. He may have been pressed for time, the shutter snapped, and Julius, a confused but polite boy, thanked him and disappeared back into the ranks of the crew. Peanut lights, 200-watt midget solarspot, stingers (a 25-foot extension cord), horsecock (feeder cable), Mighty-Moles, Mickey-Moles, inkies, tweenies, leekos, optima 32s, brutes, and HMI 6Ks. He could hear gaffers’ and electricians’ banter, and he ducked behind a trailer grabbing a doughnut as he ran. Behind the camera, behind it, not in front, stay out of harm’s way, kid. Do us a favor. Get that boy out of here. Keep him out of the light. And so they did. The photographs of Julius represent his history, and at the same time the images have the aura of standard publicity shots.

The waiting room also contains a Mr. Coffee, newspapers, magazines, and a few plants, but only a few, since the work done in Alphabet is performed in the dark. On a table near the receptionist are stacks of letters addressed to members of Congress and institutions representing the motion-picture industry, letters of protest against the colorization of old black-and-white films.

When she isn’t reading or answering the telephone, Antonya, the accountant and occasional receptionist, suggests that anyone visiting Alphabet should sign one or more of the letters and mail them to Washington and Hollywood. Washington and Hollywood, Washington and Hollywood, she repeats every

few hours.

Julius increasingly shaved days or weeks off the amount of time needed to complete a job. There had always been quarters of any given year when Alphabet wouldn’t have made any money without quickly turning around a number of jobs, but it was happening all the time now. The urgency was caffeinated and articulated in tones bordering on hysteria. Only Antonya was relaxed. “Deadlines have nothing to do with me,” she said when Julius wasn’t around, and plunged back into her martial arts books with enviable composure.

“He’s a compulsive gambler.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at this, girlfriend.”

Antonya showed me a log of accusatory letters from people who claimed Julius owed them money.

“Why did you take them out of the office?”

“I don’t know.”

“He doesn’t talk to me about this kind of thing. Do you listen to his phone calls?”

“Sometimes. Then he talks to himself. He’s pissed at Shylock this and Shylock that. One more thing about these letters, I figure these are the people who write letters, you know what I’m saying? There are others who made him loans who may not put their terms in writing, if you know what I mean.”

Antonya and I were having lunch at Burrito Fresca. Her cousin was a manager, and we got free meals when he was on a day shift.

“Shute’s got a son who’s always calling asking for handouts and whatnot, and an ex-wife who hates his guts.” Antonya splashed more hot sauce on her rice. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder how I ended up in this job. All I’ve got here is my cousin and my two kids.” She jerked her head in Luis’s direction. Apart from her daughters, aged five and seven, Antonya didn’t talk about her family very much. The one time she mentioned them was when we decided to get tattoos pricked into our ankles. She wanted to have a quetzal, half-bird, half-snake, painted permanently on her body. Alphabet was in a neighborhood that was no stranger to tattoo parlors, tai chi studios, boxing gyms, X-rated video stores. We simply went across the street during lunch. She persuaded me to have one done too, and although at first I had no intention of joining her, I agreed to get small wings on my ankles. We started out small because both our absent mothers would have exploded if they saw our bodies decorated with patterns that had no meaning for them. That was the only time Antonya talked about her mother, and I stupidly realized only after it was done just what tattoos meant to mine. For this reason I wore black tights the few times I visited her in Florida.

A stretch limo with smoked-glass windows pulled up in front of the Burrito Fresca, and a chauffeur opened the door for a man in a leather suit who ran into a yellow brick apartment building across the street. His suit looked like an ordinary business suit fashionable about a decade or two ago, but it was obviously new and the reference to another decade meant expensive irony — and it was leather. He looked vaguely familiar, maybe a man from talk television, some kind of actor, I wasn’t sure. Antonya swiveled around and stared as if to imply the oversized car and passengers were a mystery that had no business in our neighborhood.

“How can he live like he does?” She pointed with the stick of a purple-brown lipstick before running it over her lips, but I wasn’t sure she meant the man in leather or Julius, who teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. “Someday I want to make a film called What Do You Do? I’ll go into restaurants, knock on doors, ask people what they do for a living, what are their jobs, how do they afford to live where they live, eat what they eat, drive what they drive, and so on. I, personally, would pay money to see a movie like that.”

Antonya had little interest in old movies. The accounting job allowed her an H-1 working visa while she finished school.

“Méliès,” Julius said.

I opened the can. “Mealies,” I said.

Inside were long shreds of film, glutinous and flaked. Single reels looked like hockey pucks, gummy sweat exuding along the edges. These were rare films whose footage was almost obliterated, yet they continued to cling to life. Old silent films are the most difficult to preserve or restore. They are brittle, shrunken; images are distorted as if burned, or figures appear drowned under a bubbled, warped surface. The films’ perforations, round or straight edged with chamfered corners, won’t fit on the Steenbeck editing table whose teeth are designed to accommodate only film with the standard square sprocket holes. Unless the teeth are filed down, the machine will only shred the film. Prints have to be matched to the original, if possible, but in the case of some very old prints, no original has survived.

“Be careful with these. Remove the film slowly, as if you’re moving through Jello.” Julius spoke to me as if I was a child, and I winced.

“I’ve done this kind of work before, you know.”

Julius’s eyes were weak and strained so he himself could no longer spend long hours at the Steenbeck, although in his examination of films he still compared himself to a mortician who wouldn’t give up, there was always one more line to draw or bruise to cover. Ordinarily we worked in separate rooms and he left me alone once a job was assigned.

“Once I beheaded a horse and obliterated an actor known for upstaging everyone on the set.”

“Don’t joke with me, Frances. This is one of the most serious projects I’ve assigned to you. Blow this and you can start packing. This is a big job and the future of Alphabet depends on it being done right and both of us getting paid.” Julius took the can out of my hands and replaced the lid.

“What’s going on, what’s so special about these?”

“In 1907 fifty negatives were stolen from the New York office of Star Films. They were never heard of again.” Julius paused, bent his knees, then straightened them quickly in what seemed like a gesture copied from an introduction to a martial arts class, as if he were saying: beginners, stand like this. He often looked as if he were saluting another officer the way Erich von Stroheim did in Grand Illusion.

“What would thieves want with films of unassigned value?” He posed a question to which I had no answer.

“It’s easier to strip copper wires than to extract silver from film emulsion.” I didn’t really know what I was saying, but I wanted to give the impression of participating in the conversation. Not unique paintings, Greek icons, or antiquities from the Aegean which could be held for ransom, these bits were considered the medium of cheap thrills, worthless multiples, and in 1907 no international black market existed for pirated silent films. Why would anyone bother?

“When the lock was picked and the door to Star Films gave, the thief must have been surprised to find little more than chintzy office furniture.”

“How do you know what was in there?”

“I’m guessing, Frances.”

So perhaps like the thief who put a lot of effort into breaking into a bus locker only to find a chewed pencil, he must have wanted some kind of compensation for his work, and just as the pencil was pocketed, so too the films were probably stolen for the sake of taking something. Even negatives whose whereabouts are documented often disintegrate into chips of celluloid, shreds of landscapes and chopped-up figures, pratfalls and botched rescues.

“For the lost negatives of Star Films there was no hope,” Julius appeared to conclude. “There were rumors that the films contained coded military secrets. If people were looking for the figure in the carpet what did they expect to find in Méliès’s fantastic acrobatics? The design of a canon secretly outlined in an underwater fantasy filmed behind a large fish tank, a superfast trigger mechanism clandestinely outlined in the trajectory of a tumbler’s flips, troop maneuvers signaled in Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter?”

I glanced at the newspaper on his desk, comparing the language used to describe crude images fleeing across screens of security cameras to film molecules, particles of nothing eddying into the corners of drawers. Julius cleared his throat. “I’m listening,” I said. When a job arrived Julius often felt he needed to give the staff some history, some background tracing the provenance of the films, but now he was talking about some kind of espionage. When I asked him whether he believed there was something in these old films or thought it was just a rumor, he ignored my question.

“Leon Schlesinger, producer of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, managed to acquire many of Méliès’s prints, believing they would someday be worth a fortune.”

“When did he acquire them?”

“Probably in the late 1930s, after Méliès himself died.”

I imagined a man standing in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean on a day so bright he pretends he can see Easter Island, the Bikini Atoll, Honolulu, but not Pearl Harbor, not quite yet. He has his back to Europe, but a flood of refugees are working for him, so many that he occasionally feels he’s working not in Los Angeles, but strolling though the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin. Even the newly acquired Looney Tunes venture, even their comic castles are built on the pratfalls of the Méliès’s canon so there’s no getting away from it, no one can have his feet as firmly planted in the New World as he thinks.

“My mother worked with some Schlesinger people, of course.” Julius cleared his throat again. “When Schlesinger died, his widow kept these films locked up. For years she sat on the Dead Sea Scrolls of cinema, allowing only limited access to Maronites in sunglasses, but finally the archive of prints was released.” Julius waved at stacks of cans and boxes labeled in French and English. I’d seen A Trip to the Moon, but the others were new to me. He pointed to one box as if it contained a bomb.

“These Méliès films have come from all over the world, Frances,” he turned to me. “Do we have enough Wet Gate in stock for this job?”

“We can’t use Wet Gate on these films.” According to the label on the can, The Dreyfus Affair was made in 1899.

Sometimes I’m convinced Julius had a penchant for slickness in all its forms, that his apartment was coated with Formica and shellac, mirrors partially framed by cutouts from soft-core pornography printed on coated paper. As director of Alphabet he always preferred an image with as little visual static as possible, and so Julius loved Wet Gate, a substance that fills in abrasions and scratches. But Wet Gate, slippery and odorless, was no blessing. Every treatment has its risks, and it had been recognized for some time that old films treated with Wet Gate began to take on a Wet Gate look: images processed this way became too perfect and too sharp, as if photographed yesterday. Some felt it was a kind of fluid amber, but the image preserved underneath wasn’t necessarily true to the original.

“Drawn flames may be more believable when applied with dyes and chemicals than when photographed. We’ve seen it happen.” Julius preferred the synthetic choice more and more often. Like overheard conversation you repeat to one friend after another, the dialogue you invent may actually sound more realistic. “A little artificiality can enhance the image and restore accuracy,” he argued.

“1903, 1907.” I pointed to can after can, reading the dates out loud. “We agreed to interfere as little as possible in films made before 1940.” I shook my head in an attempt to make Julius appreciate the gravity of his decision. Some of the cans had notes on them, a short catalog of the other labs the films had passed through. The notes also described how they had been treated and what had been done to them. He held up a film labeled The Dreyfus Affair.

“Captain Dreyfus was tried in-camera.”

I told Julius I didn’t know what that meant.

“In a private, closed room, judged by a committee, not an open court.”

“A secret session.”

“Yes. Listen, no one remembers the Dreyfus trial, but I’ve got a lot of money riding on this project. And pay special attention to the last few feet of film.” Something had slipped. Julius Shute, known for his meticulousness, a conservator committed to each and every film, no matter how obscure the subject, now had glazed eyes. What was he hinting? Alphabet was in trouble and could afford to cut a few corners with multiple payments due, the exigencies and urgencies of the present were shoving Dreyfus and Méliès, Chaplin and Keaton onto a short moving sidewalk and out the door to make way for the next late blockbuster in need of a quick fix.

“Am I looking for codes about nineteenth-century military maneuvers, secret weapons munitions, buried treasure?” As a believer in signs, portents, conspiracy theories, the existence of the thing under the bed, I wasn’t being entirely sarcastic.

“Tell me first if you find anything unusual at the ends of the reels.” Julius was dead serious, his voice dry as bones.

He picked up his papers scattered on the table. Julius seemed oddly calm, like a man so sure of himself as he emerges from his personal helicopter that he forgets he shouldn’t get in the way of the blades when he stands up. Maybe it was a sedated kind of tranquility. Before leaving the room, he repeated the deadline for the restorations, and then I was left alone. It was night by the time I cleared my desk of previous projects and was able to turn to these very earliest of short, silent films. Instead of The Dreyfus Affair, one of the films Méliès made based on an actual event, I unspooled one of his “preconstructions,” those fantastical films that first introduced the idea of special effects.

Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter. A man, a pedestrian with good intentions, is unable to find someone who will light his cigar. He gestures to people on the street as if asking: puts his cigar in his mouth, pushes his face slightly in their direction, but he is ignored. Flaneurs, boulevardiers, and streetwalkers either don’t understand his gestures or think he’s deliberately offending them in some way — since there was no sound track, I was just guessing. Desperate, he creates a double of himself who will light the cigar for him. This one I liked. There are times when it’s impossible to ask anyone for anything, all you can do is rely on yourself, split yourself in two. On the street, you’re too paralyzed to get a word out, everyone passes you with extreme hostility: Who are you? Who do you think you are? Don’t interrupt me with petty needs such as an inquiry after the time or directions. I don’t like your face. Get lost!

In the dark, huddled over a light box holding a magnifying loupe, looking over a strip of film, I talk to myself. What happened to these actors? You’re supposed to be dead, I tell them, you came within an inch of being taken out with the trash years after being lost, stolen and forgotten, lying around in a warehouse or a Looney Tunes archive. They were filmed in a glass house, Méliès’s Star Film Studios on the outskirts of Paris, a building whose interior I imagine as frozen yet full of potential for movement, a structure like the Visible Man who could be assembled and studied, organs glued together or snapped apart. Open jars of paint are blood cells, and Georges Méliès himself is iris, retina, and cataract. Under his critical surveillance set designers who fabricate volcanos, lunar surfaces, underwater wrecks react to his criticism like nerve endings about to explode. I’ve had it, Georges! Piss off! The Oedipus of early cinema, Méliès destroyed many of his films himself, behaving like those long, flexible pencils you see in joke shops that can be bent around to leave a trail of erasure rather than a line of words. What am I looking at? A girl travels to the North Pole in a vehicle labeled Aérobus de I’ingénieur Maboul.

“Hello, is this Frances L. Baum?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Jack Kews of Omnibus Film Archives, London. I’m calling about a film entitled The Dreyfus Affair, which I believe your company is working on.”

“What did you say your name was?” He had said it quickly, as if sneezing one word run together, and he repeated his name just as fast.

“What do you want to know about the film?” I had just gotten to work and was surprised to get a call this early in the morning. I hadn’t yet shut the blinds in my studio or even visited the Mr. Coffee machine. A half-eaten orange lay beside the unused Steenbeck; I hadn’t looked at a newspaper or spoken to anyone in the office.

“I’m in New York, and I’d like to take a look at the footage in your possession.”

“I’ve never heard of Omnibus Film Archives, London.” If this place really existed, I would have known about it.

He rattled off an address that meant nothing to me. His voice sounded youngish, but the Cary Grant mid-Atlantic accent and the politesse of a stranger asking for a favor frayed, and the voice betrayed its American roots. “While Méliès was shooting The Affair, the man who played Dreyfus disappeared, maybe was killed, and I think there are some answers as to how and why in that footage.”

“Whatever you’re going to discover, it’s old information, and you’re talking about a thirteen-minute silent film in terrible condition. It’s not going to tell you much.” Taking off my shoe I rubbed loops into the carpet pile with my left toe. “Anyone alive in 1899 would be dead now anyway, and whoever murdered him would be long gone as well.”

He paused for a long time as if deciding what to answer, then I heard a long, drawn-out yes.

“Look, I know about you and I know about your work, Frances. A film sputters into life; it’s silent, black and white. The figures move in the choppy, disjointed fashion customary to films made in 1899. They wobble and jerk from the rue du Bac, past shop windows crowded with mannequins: half men in high-collared shirts and headless women in long dresses like fluted columns. The crowd turns down a street filled with cheap theaters, garish posters cover the walls with images of acrobats, huge, gaping, laughing mouths, freaks, and so on. Entrance tickets are only a few centimes, and there are a fair number of choices. Which one does the crowd pick?”

“You’re giving me a lot of detail for early cinema.”

“Stay with me, Frances. The crowd descends on one theater in particular. Guess what? Méliès’s The Dreyfus Affair is playing. Because we’re not in real time, but in collapsed film time, the mob is swept in and out of the theater in seconds, but they’ve seen the film, you can assume that. Now they realize Méliès thinks Dreyfus is innocent, and so the mob is enraged. No, he’s guilty! Even the subtitles appear in the jagged lightning-line typeface that indicates urgency and wrath, but maybe even terror, too. Faces are angry, screaming, distorted from grimacing. The jerky figures are yelling, throwing rocks. Angry at the film and the man who made it, they’re rioting: smashing windows, breaking into fisticuffs. When the crowd disperses a man lies murdered on the street, apparently trampled to death, but as the camera closes in you notice a neat wound that would indicate he’s been stabbed.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Half-afraid he would hang up, I held the receiver close to my ear so I could be sure to hear his answer.

“I made up the film I just described, but after the 1899 screening of The Dreyfus Affair there were riots in the streets; people were trampled to death. The film was banned in France until 1950, and no film could be made about the trial until 1974. The death I just described to you, however, was deliberate, not a random thing, not simply a man who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I believe that after the riots Méliès filmed a second ending that revealed what actually happened to that man and disclosed the identity of his assailant.”

“And you believe these scenes were tacked on to the reel in my possession?”

“Yes.”

I knew something of the story behind The Dreyfus Affair but didn’t really understand how this subject could turn what had previously been a form of cheap popular entertainment into something so incendiary. It was as if an invention associated with gum balls, pinballs, barkers, and shills had traveled to the province of cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails, and did so in little more than a wink. I was skeptical.

“The owners of Looney Tunes were curators of the remains of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused, or the real spy, Esterhazy. They made films in which ducks and cats fall off cliffs, are smashed against doors, and bounce back completely. Looney Tunes was as far removed from the intrigues of a nineteenth-century espionage trial as possible. They wouldn’t have been interested.” I imagined cans of film stored in a safe, next to diamonds wrapped in flannel sleeves, securities and bonds, the deed to the house, and a will tucked into a manila envelope, accumulating dust and controversy.

“Just because they owned it doesn’t mean they watched it. It’s in bad shape and can’t be threaded up on any old projector. Even if it were to be screened you have to know what you’re looking for.” He had a point. It was unlikely Schlesinger or anyone else had looked at the film after 1899.

“I can’t just spool to the end. The film is so fragile I have to examine the whole thing first, and I have others I’m supposed to work on before I get to it.” I had opened the can and seen the condition of The Affair. It was possible the end had deteriorated beyond repair. “Give me your number and I’ll call you when I get to it.”

He then hung up on me.

How can you know what’s at the end of a film if you’ve never seen it? I said into the dead phone like some Dagwood Bumstead jabbering into a busted old rotary. I felt oddly numb, as when a relative or friend puts the receiver down, terminating the call with no warning or polite good-bye and you’re left wondering what kind of toes you inadvertently stepped on. Who was this Jack with a husky voice who knew my name and what I did? I imagined a man in a T-shirt with holes around the neck, tanned arms, leaning in a doorway and pinging rubber bands into a wastebasket across the room as he spoke.

I pushed the Dreyfus can aside as if it contained a long dormant explosive that could be sparked again at any unpredictable moment, tried to forget about the call, and went back to work on Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse.

A lewdly winking sun is about to swallow a locomotive when gradually an eclipse with a female face overshadows eyes, nose, and mouth. I began to think about what men did or had done to them in these films, and who or what was assigned a female identity. Comets, selenites, keys, houris, and musical notes were female. An advertisement for Parisian, Love on Credit came to life and the figure of a sinuous woman chased a few men around the set. Devils, astronauts, deep-sea divers, scientists, and planets were usually male, as well as travelers and most of the main characters. Men had things done to them, women were the agency of vexation. Women were more mutable than men, more susceptible to transformations that appeared painless, unlike the men whose bodies split or whose heads exploded. Men were tricked over and over with nothing left to do but raise their hats in order to scratch their heads. There were exceptions to this theory, but on the whole I would say roles were divided along those lines. Whether the stories were driven by the travels of a central character or by plot, the victims and travelers alike were generally men.

By evening I needed to rest my eye and took a walk down the hall. When work is slow Alphabet rents out some of the extra editing rooms. There are ten of them lined up on either side of a short corridor, each one behind a numbered door. They are rented out like any other kind of office space, and none of the doors are completely soundproof. Finding one’s way down the hall, listening as each sound track runs into the next, is like walking past a series of apartments whose doors have all been left open so that arguments, conversations, polemics, and shouting matches can be heard, one after the next. I used to walk to school past one house and then the next, and even if they were dark and locked up, as I walked past I knew what went on in a few of them. In this house a bully slept, a girl who picked her victims at random but with the finality of a court sentence. With the sound of gravel underfoot, breath misting on a cold early morning, I ran past hoping she wouldn’t be sitting on her screen porch or playing with her dog, an oversize highly strung dalmatian named Teency. She didn’t use her fists like scrappy or tough girls, but was a master of the taunt delivered in private when no one else was listening; each one was something you could take home with you and worry about like a time bomb that would go off in bursts over and over.

You and your family are always right there where the money is.

I’m going to do an experiment. If I drop a quarter will you pick it up?

Next door was a man who shot deer and brought them home, strapped to the top of his car. We watched from across the lawn while he smiled and called out to us to take a look at this or that beauty. I imagined they bled all over his garage.

There is a basic confusion concerning the newsreel film. They said that Lumière invented the newsreel — it was actually Méliès.

I stopped and listened. The sound track was in French, but someone was translating the dialogue aloud into English.

Lumière photographed train stations, horse races, families in the garden — the stuff of impressionist painting. Méliès filmed a trip to the moon, President Fallières visiting Yugoslavia, the eruption of Mount Pelée, Dreyfus.

I knocked and opened the door. Someone froze the frame. On the screen a woman’s face peered out from behind stacks of Mao’s little red books. Two annoyed faces turned in my direction.

“We were told we’d have complete privacy and quiet here. This is the third time we’ve been disturbed,” a woman in black-framed glasses snapped at me. “I paid good money to rent this space. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to have a question to ask or something to announce as soon as they get to this door.”

“I was walking by and I wondered who was talking about newsreels and Lumière.”

“Jean-Pierre Léaud in Godard’s La Chinoise.” She pushed her glasses up on her head in exasperation at my stupidity and pointed to the screen.

Before I could thank her for the information and apologize for the interruption, I was pushed aside by a delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant down the street. He expressed frustration and in his agitation had nothing but blind disinterest in the image on the screen that held us transfixed. He had gotten lost and was sure the food in the bags he carried had gone cold.

“We ordered Mexican!” The Godard people rolled their eyes in disgust at our collective ignorance and slammed the door in our faces.

We stood side by side in the hall. He was silent, holding the cold food by the edges of the bag as if it contained a dinner he would spend the rest of the night trying to deliver. I walked back down the hall with him, noticing he’d left his bicycle leaning against Antonya’s desk. Had he chained it outside the Mayflower it might have been stolen, but she would be angry that he’d left it parked against her desk; its handlebars had been shoved into her papers, causing a miniature landslide. I didn’t know where she’d gone. The waiting area was empty, and books and files had been put away as if she were preparing to leave for the night. I moved his bicycle away from her desk while he dialed the restaurant. It turned out the delivery was for Alphabet City Typeface. We looked it up, and I directed him a few blocks away. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to work and watched him until the elevator came. Antonya emerged from it just as he pushed his way in. Turning off her computer, putting the last of her papers away, and jangling her set of keys, she collected her things and asked me if I would lock the door after her.

A moonlit deck is a woman’s business office. I recognized Barbara Stanwyck’s voice. Walking back down the hall the sound track of La Chinoise was followed by sounds of gunshots in dry air — a Western, I thought, and then from the next door came English accents and rainfall implying a jungle or a London street, it was hard to tell what the situation was. A faucet dripped somewhere, a real drip, not a recorded one, and out a corner window as I turned down the hall I could see lights beginning to come on as night fell. Again I was reminded of walking down the middle of a silent, empty road when it began to grow dark early, and just when there seemed to be no one in any of the houses for miles in any direction, I would hear a dog bark and a girl’s voice ring out.

I began to unspool The Dreyfus Affair. I knew the beginning of the story. In 1894 French intelligence discovered that someone was selling military secrets to Germany. Only a high-ranking officer with access to this kind of information could have been the agent of the espionage, and Alfred Dreyfus was accused. I unwound carefully, setting up the film: on the Steenbeck Dreyfus has just been arrested. He is taken into a room that resembles an office. He writes while a man with a faintly obscene-sounding name, Major General du Paty de Clam, dictates. I know that the paper du Paty holds in his hand is a letter that Esterhazy, the real spy, actually wrote. It was delivered to him via the “Ordinary Track,” a night cleaner who retrieved it from the trash at the German embassy. When the two letters are compared he will indicate that the handwriting is identical, although the lines weren’t the same at all. Dreyfus is handed a pistol. Go ahead, do it, kill yourself. He refuses and is taken away at gunpoint.

Sitting in the dark watching Dreyfus stand in a prison yard, I felt as if I were at the beginning of a tunnel, and somewhere at its end were black and white figures, mute, moving stiffly, who didn’t know that mustard gas, dynamite, and the airplane were about to be invented. Touching the negative by the edges I held the brittle film up to a light. Dreyfus’s face was faded to an almost featureless disk. The film, once considered too explosive to be shown in France, was about as sturdy as cigarette ash. I had nightmares about film breaking down at a crucial scene, the rest of it disintegrating in the can. At that moment my hands weren’t the most steady they had ever been.

The telephone rang. I jumped.

“Hello?”

The line went dead.

I tried to picture Jack Kews. He called from an identical dark room, sat leaning back in a swivel chair, feet on his desk displacing papers, books, reels of film. He chomped on a Cuban cigar, laughing too hard at his own jokes, wrapping the telephone cord around his index finger. He called from a park bench, binoculars around his neck, subway map in a back pocket because he’s new to the city. He called, like Groucho Marx, while eating crackers in bed, and wanted me to come join him. He called from a tattoo parlor, the same one Antonya and I had recently visited. He pays cash for tattoos of ironically kabbalistic significance winding around his arm and across his back, so I’ll have a way of identifying him when we finally meet. So I can be sure, even with his shirt off, that Jack Kews is really Jack Kews.

Look, I know about you, and I know about your work, Frances.

What did this Jack know, and how did he know it? In what crowded auditorium had I unknowingly brushed against a stalker? Perhaps he knew about my father and the creationists, he knew Julius was three months behind paying for the electricity that kept us in business, perilously close to not meeting even Alphabet’s small payroll, needing a small fortune in cash by the fifteenth of the month or down the hole we all would go: Charlie Chaplin, the Godard girls, Dreyfus, free lunches at Burrito Fresca. Did he also know Julius was an aficionado of dark rooms in the worst way? Julius, slow to figure out how bad things really were until the creditors carried out the furniture, would say everyone is entitled to their own private worst ways.

Jack was simply a disgruntled employee of Looney Tunes.

Jack knew who delivered the bomb that took one of my eyes, or he had been the errand boy himself.

I’d had too much coffee and turned the call into one of those dreams in which something is chasing you, some creature, some threat you will never outrun, and the corridor down which you flee stretches out, getting longer and longer. It could have just been a crank call, right? I tried to shift my focus to the job at hand.

The Affair tugged at my shirtsleeves. I was afraid to spool too much of the film, yet while it was eating me up with curiosity, I ate up the idea of the actual trial. What I remembered was the saying that some people, had they not been born what they were, might not be on their own side. The trial said, among other things, that you can try to hide a Shulevitz inside a Shute, but it might not work out. My parents didn’t really talk about other cities they’d lived in, and I didn’t talk much about them either, but all those unspoken histories were packed away, little signifiers of identity ready to burst out uncontrollably, more embarrassing or painful for the fact that they had been hidden than for what they were. And what are the boundaries of embarrassment anyway? Where is it for the person ahead of me in line who turns around for a second then turns around again, for a teacher I tried to impress, for all those who stare, who can’t help themselves? When they’re aware I’m conscious of their gaze, they look away. Instinct precedes compassion, and you may hope compassion will overtake and educate instinct, but this isn’t always the case. What I look like betrays my identity as soon as I’m asked: How did you lose an eye?

I turned off the light table and opened the blinds a crack. It was night; the street was almost empty apart from a woman looking under the hood of her car. She slammed it shut, wiped her hands on her pants then walked to a phone booth to make a call. In profile she looked like a Roman senator with short gray hair. It was late, but even from the fifth floor I could read her expression. She was annoyed. She wiped her hands on her trousers, thrust them into pockets looking for change, then got back into her car, rummaged around in the glove compartment, and slammed back out of it again. Under a streetlight, she pounded the telephone. She couldn’t have been more irked. I stretched my arms over my head, went back to the film. When I turned from the window I noticed a note had been slipped under my door. At first I thought it might have been another take-out menu, or an angry note from the Godard people, but the envelope had my name on it. I unfolded the paper, creased into thirds, and read:

Dear Frances,

There is some information you might need to know as you work. In 1937 Méliès was asked to write his memoirs for an Italian magazine, Cinema, but what he wrote was in the third person, as if actualities, the brass tacks of daily life, coffee cups and ashtrays, belonged to someone else.

(When riots threatened his film production company and assassins plotted to kill him, he continued to work on his preconstructions. Resolute and resilient even in the face of imminent shipwreck, he searched for the trick card somewhere up one of his sleeves or the rabbit that could somehow be pulled out of a hat. He believed he would bounce back even if bouncing back meant working in a toy shop in a train station. He watched people loitering aimlessly, drunkenly, or as they rushed past; he looked at each with curiosity as if awaiting some cheerful metamorphosis.) I’m making this up, but you get the idea. If no object in Star Films was stuck to its identity, if everything was continually metamorphosed into something else, then perhaps the author and producer of these transformations, Méliès himself, didn’t want to be pinned to one identity either. The distant third person was a stand-in. For a man fond of cryptography (especially cases where one set of words becomes a substitute for another) and jokes with names, this makes sense. Are there more traces of biography in the actualities than in the preconstructions?

Both Méliès and Dreyfus had granddaughters named Madeleine, but there are no other similarities between them that I’m aware of. Georges, drawn in by his cousin Adolphe, was sympathetic to the Dreyfus cause, supportive to the point where he had to break off with his brothers. Although the trial did divide families, Méliès was a public figure, and therefore easily victimized for his position as a Dreyfusard. Many were ridiculed: Émile Zola; Femande Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer; Prime Minister Clemenceau, and others found their caricatures on postcards, posters, painted on chamber pots, printed in newspapers and on the boards of children’s games. They were the butt of all kinds of cartoons. Like Zola and the rest, Méliès was a physical target, easily recognized, the first film celebrity to have to go into hiding from the press. He acted in most of his own films, as you know, but what you may not know is that he also had a double, a man who played Méliès as a kind of stuntman. This man who looked like Georges was the one who had to take the fall time and time again. A head explodes, a deep-sea diver is swept away, a figure explores the polar ice cap in a hot space suit, all of these were filmed using a stunt double for Méliès. Méliès made films after 1899. We know he wasn’t murdered, but the double, his substitute, never appears again.

Yours truly,

Jack Kews

I opened the door, looked down the empty hall. New reasons to be afraid, came the voice of an actor from behind one of the doors. The note could have been lying on the floor for hours, but I’d only just seen it. No one answered when I called out. Sounds came from behind the Godardistes’ door, but they didn’t respond to my voice. Everyone else had left. I shut the door and leaned my back against it.

I put the note on top of the light table. It was typed on plain white typing paper. The J of Jack’s signature vaguely resembled Julius’s Js — he began his capital Js and Ts with the same broad hook at the top, a kind of roof supported by the stem of the letter — but the Jack Kews, the sneeze that remained, had a different slant and bore no resemblance to Julius’s handwriting. Jack’s K was angular, and Julius’s capital K always had a loop in the center as if lassoing a pole. I turned the note upside down and put a magnifying loupe over Jack Kews. The J looked like a fishhook or a nose seen in profile. (Du Paty de Clam had said that if the bordereau, a detailed note or list, matched Esterhazy’s writing then it would only prove that Dreyfus himself had produced a good forgery. Esterhazy had lied so many times that when he admitted to having written the bordereau, no one believed him.) I didn’t suspect Julius. He wouldn’t, I don’t think, have tried to scare me in this way, changing his voice, leaving an oddball note, a few harebrained conclusions deduced from Méliès’s memoirs. The office tricks Julius played were blatant and obvious slapstick, like coming to work in a gorilla suit when we were preserving an old print of King Kong.

So maybe there really was a Jack Kews, inquisitive but skittish, a man who supposed, as did Julius, that these films might not be as harmless as they appeared. In spite of Jack’s belief that this bit of silent film had caused riots, looting, vandalism, murder, there was nothing incendiary left in The Dreyfus Affair that I could see. Whoever Jack Kews was, those two down the hall might have seen him. While looking for me, he probably knocked on their door, turning into one of the Tom, Dick, and Harrys the women referred to with such annoyance. I wanted to ask them if they remembered what the other interlopers had looked like, but was afraid to knock on their door again that night. I walked past it instead and tried the entrance to Alphabet just past the corridor of editing rooms. The front door was unlocked, just as I’d instructed Antonya to leave it, but I decided to secure it now. The dark hall, the sound of a running toilet coming from down the corridor, unlocked stairwells where anyone could do anything were all ominous in the range of possibility they offered. I sat at Antonya’s desk, pulled out a telephone book, and looked up Kews just in case that London business wasn’t true.

Kew Gardens Florist

Kews, F

Kews, Lilly

Kewshansky, Tatiana (probably Tchevshanska, originally)

Expensive black leather coats tight around their bodies, the Godardistes approached. I put the telephone book back in a drawer and spun around in Antonya’s chair. They were leaving for the night, carrying bags of tapes and speaking to each other in loud, emphatic voices. They were in agreement in their disgust and disappointment about something or other. The illusion the two women presented as they walked toward me was that the carpet had been transformed into a conveyor belt. As if on a people-mover found in airports, they appeared to glide effortlessly in my direction. I was a motionless sitting target until their hip bones abutted Antonya’s desk, and, assuming I was the receptionist, they handed me the key to their room along with a bag of detritus from their Mexican dinner. I threw it in the trash on top of Antonya’s junk mail and day-old newspaper.

“There was no garbage can in the viewing room,” one said with a slight French accent.

I apologized as if it were my job to provide furniture and services, then asked if they could describe anyone who’d interrupted their work besides myself and the delivery boy.

“Short, sort of a goatee, moustache, and wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a jacket and underneath his jacket he wore a sweatshirt turned inside out.”

“What did he say? Anything?”

“Wrong room.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. He knew he had the wrong room and he left us in peace, which is more than some people have done. Can we leave these tapes with you? We don’t want to carry them around all night.”

“No. I’m not the concierge. You should have locked them in the editing room.” They headed for the elevator, smoking, fuming, chattering like monkeys, brittle, hard as nails. Dreyfus waited for me in the editing room, shackled to a prison bed, and I didn’t know exactly what to do with him. Why was this worth saving? I could smell the coil of old nitrate film lying dormant in a can as it had for years and feel its crumbly slickness under my fingernails, but could make little connection between the life of a man delivering take-out food who had been smuggled into the city in the trunk of a car with holes punched in the top for air and the value of saving old film. Some part of me remained unconvinced.

I step into the shoes of the man who shot deer, tied them to the back of his car, and waved with glee at the people who stared at him in disgust as he drove down the interstate. As if by knowing this neighbor well and by playing with his children, I have more than a glimpse into a life organized around utilitarian motivation; more than a passing acquaintance with a house dominated by the maypoling twins of hunger and satisfaction, one continually chasing the other. There is no room for history, no reason to preserve the feeble or antique. Why not melt the films down for boot heels? This is a dangerous and actually false confession for someone with my job, but sometimes the cobwebs stick to my hands, the reasons elude me, and for a moment I’m watching deer cut from the back of the car or truck, fascinated by torn fur, looking over the surface of the carcass for the evidence of the wound. This confession might mark me as a slacker who sees only futility in the project at hand, but I’m not, I’m very good at conservation and very careful. I would never rub out an actor or a scene, despite jokes to the contrary and perverse temptation.

Why bother with Dreyfus taken away at gunpoint? Are new Dreyfuses born every day? Julius traveled to Paris during the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and returned with Charlotte Corday and Marat cigarette lighters for everyone in the office, as well as condoms printed with pictures of Robespierre that he only claimed to have and showed to no one. For the anniversary of the trial will there be Dreyfus (innocent) lighters and Esterhazy (guilty) condoms, already torn and punctured with sneaky pinprick holes?

Julius was yelling into the phone. I needed to talk to Antonya, but we both listened to him instead. It was unavoidable. The door to his office was open. Antonya was circling want ads with a yellow highlighter.

“Listen, Ratner, you have my deposit just in case, but what I’m saying to you is we’ve got a big contract here and as soon as that payment clears I can catch up on rent.”

Pause.

“La Société de la Preservation du Cinema. That’s who’s got the contract.”

Pause.

“Yes, I’m pronouncing it correctly.”

Pause.

“I know. I know I can’t pay you with celluloid.”

Pause.

“Look, Ratner, you can’t impound my equipment. I’ll never be able to pay you if I can’t work.”

Pause.

“Well, suit yourself.”

Pause.

“You have a point, but if I don’t pay my electric bills and the power is turned off I can’t work either. My company vanishes into paperwork. I declare personal bankruptcy, and you get zilch.”

Pause.

“I know someone else will pay three times what I’m paying in rent, but if Alphabet goes Chapter 11 you better collect top dollar from whoever moves into this dump next. We’re the last in the industry, Ratner. For your information what I do is a dying art.”

Pause.

Julius looked up, saw us listening, put his hand over the receiver, “He just told me to take my extinct horseshoes to Williamsburg — not the Brooklyn one, but the one he heard is in Virginia.”

“You’re no Trump, Ratner, you’re a small-time dinosaur yourself.”

Pause.

“Listen, Frances, prepare yourself,” Antonya whispered. “He’s already spent that contract money he’s talking about. Don’t count on being paid anytime soon. I do the books, so I know. There isn’t any Société paying for this job. It must be some other outfit.”

“Frances, how much longer on the Méliès job?” Julius called out to me, hand over the receiver once again.

I held up seven fingers although I really wasn’t sure how much longer it would take. Julius frowned and kicked the door shut.

The sound of breaking glass interrupted my concentration on a scene from French Cops Learning English. Thinking the noise came from a nearby sound track I tried to ignore it. In the Méliès film four French policemen were learning bilingual puns. The teacher wrote on the blackboard What a fair fish! One of the police responded by writing Va ta faire fiche as if that were the French translation. Then she wrote Very well, thank you. He replied by writing Manivelle Saint Cloud, holding a chalkboard up for the audience to see. The end of the film was chaotic. Four English girls, clearly actors in drag, invaded the classroom and sat on the policemen’s laps, danced with them, and then the whole scene degenerated into wild cartwheels and gymnastics. The sound of things being thrown around persisted.

I looked out my door toward the reception area. The door to Julius’s office was open, and a man I’d never seen before was screaming at him. The room was in disarray. Tables overturned, papers scattered. One of Antonya’s martial arts books had been thrown down the hall and lay a few feet away from me. She was out of the office, perhaps at lunch or doing errands, the whole place seemed deserted, as if the man knew when Julius would be alone or nearly alone. The telephone lay on the floor, disconnected. It would not have been possible to plug it back in and call the police without drawing the intruder’s attention. The only way out of Alphabet was past him, so I was trapped. The man was small and well built, bug eyed. I could make out a pierced eyebrow and elaborate multicolored tattoos of intertwined snakes and ferrets crawling up his forearms. He was scary in the way a rodent is scary: it could run up your pant legs, your dress, it could gnaw into you, you wouldn’t be able to stop it, so you inch your way down the wall, trying very hard not to provoke the creature or man, whoever he was. Then I noticed that he had a knife in his hand, which somehow seemed more dangerous than a gun, which would at least have made some noise. I reached for the Mr. Coffee, not knowing whether I could hit him over the head with it, but then he turned, took it from my hand, and smashed it against the wall, holding a large, curved shard up against my only functioning eye.

“You have three days left. That’s it,” the man said to Julius. Then he left without saying a word to me.

I reached for the phone, but Julius caught my hand.

“Don’t call the police.” He picked his glasses up off the floor with dignity as if the intruder had been nothing more than a phantom, a film projection, something that never happened and should be easily forgotten.

“You’re okay.” This was not a question. “We can get on with our work here and not mention our visitor to anyone.” Julius shut the door to his office, and I wouldn’t see him again for a few days.

I was shaking too badly to return to work that required a steady hand, and so I sat at Antonya’s desk for a few minutes. My impulse was to start cleaning up, but this was a crime scene, and it needed to remain untouched, even if the police were not to be called. When Antonya returned she called the building’s janitor. Asking no questions about the cause of the mess he proceeded to clean up as if minor indoor tornadoes happened every day. As I watched them from my doorway I considered how it might be a good idea to start looking for another job.

Everything in Dreyfus’s world was fixed, stable, he was set on a particular course until his own personal letter bomb was found in the trash, conclusions were drawn and never entirely withdrawn in some quarters. But the accusations leveled at him weren’t completely the result of confusion over handwriting. The army targeted him because they believed he belonged to a rootless tribe and that nomadic nature, according to his accusers, was inherited, not learned. His allegiance to the army must therefore be unreliable. Of course he was the spy. Who else?

It was only a matter of time before apartment walls, furniture, books of family records and photographs all went up in flames. In the scheme of things Field Marshall Pétain and Pierre Laval were only a few decades away, so his stolid, solid life was doomed anyway. It’s easy, looking back, to speed up time so it all passes in a blink. Méliès was busy constructing what it meant to see, record, to bear witness, but he too was threatened by erasure by that same blinking mechanism that reduces years of quotidian misery to the half life of a twinkle.

Stuck in traffic, I daydream. I could be anywhere, bouncing from city to city, my path traced by an animated dot on a turning globe. Driving down Sunset Boulevard, boulevard du Montparnasse, or the Cross Island Parkway approaching the Throgs Neck Bridge, I’m traveling in an unassigned city, a city that becomes a character with arms, legs, hands, and feet of clay. This borough is the head, the people on this block will spill out and clog an artery, this corner was torn up and never rebuilt: the city, an amputee, erases itself. From a distance, it’s a candy city, apartment towers look as if made of waffles with Life Savers water tanks perched on rooftops. I drive closer to them and the metaphor of sweets falls on its face. Barrackslike buildings near a train depot have been gutted, fire escapes and catwalks dangle from crumbling walls; ailanthus, sumac, orange hawkweed, and yarrow grow out of the wrecked foundations. An area of warehouses is transformed into expensive apartments: the city rewrites itself.

The radio is on, tuned to a talk station. General Schwarzkopf, the host says, and a caller picks up the topic, responding with the general’s nickname, Stormin’ Norman, he agrees, the Bear, but his voice has nothing to do with the view from my car window and I listen indifferently. Image, meaning, plastic: I look at my work as three choices, three pools to dive into, and usually I pick the third. Assessment and repair of the material is my job, but meaning often throws me for a loop. For the Dreyfus job, repairing 780 feet of incendiary film (thirteen minutes, the longest of the lot), I have found out one or two things about the trial of Alfred D. The windows are open as I drive, the radio is on, and I think of another soldier involved in the Dreyfus affair, the German attaché, Schwarzkoppen, who carried on a long affair with Madame de Weede, the wife of a Dutch diplomat. Schwarzkoppen was flirtatious, handsome, a lover of men as well as women: in a careless gesture he tore her letters into twenty pieces later collected by a cleaning lady who became known as the Ordinary Track. He and the Italian attaché, Pannizardi, had a mysterious informer whom they called “Jacques Dubois” after the swindler who proposed to sell them “smokeless gunpowder.” The swindler, Dubois, was actually Esterhazy, the real spy, also known as D or Z.

Dubois = D, who was really Esterhazy also known as Z, not Dreyfus, at all, therefore D = Z.

The incriminating letter signed D signaled Esterhazy. Panizzardi wrote to Schwarzkoppen under the name Alexandrine, calling him Maximilienne: My darling all yours and on the mouth . . . Yes, little red dog, I shall come for your pleasure. I would be capable of stuffing a meter of swaddling in you and all the fourteen-year-old commandants if needed. Their letters are now stored in the archive of the French Ministry of War in a file dated February 1896. Were they a pair of comic bunglers, a Laurel and Hardy of the foreign service?

I pass a car with children fighting in the backseat and a rusting Dodge Dart, windows open and the driver tapping her steering wheel to a turned-up recording of “Bitch with an Attitude.” On my radio the host makes a smooth transition from the war in the Persian Gulf to the need to punish countries who support international terrorism. He speaks of them in terms of badly disciplined children who must be kept in line because they don’t know what’s good for them. Metaphors of weakness, femininity, lunacy roll off his tongue without, it would seem, second thoughts, rehearsal, or plan. All of his speech has the impression of being delivered off the cuff. Hello, you’re on . . . Welcome to . . . A caller points out that America had been pouring military assistance into Iraq for many years. Desert Storm, the caller says, seems to her to have been a very bad idea: misguided, all about oil, really. He cuts her off. You’ve always had people like Patty Hearst around. People who are easily duped into believing revolutionary rhetoric. So-called revolutionary. Implying the caller is one of these, a woman easily fooled, he savors his own cynicism. Whatever happened to Stephen Weed? he asks with a fat laugh. His voice has a cunning, know-it-all, yet slightly self-deprecating tone. It smells of old socks and tickets to the game. I imagine he weighs five hundred pounds, a moon face behind the microphone. No one ever sees him. The traffic moves more quickly, and I turn the radio off. Pigeons or gulls fly overhead in patterns of boomerangs and lotuses.

So far Méliès himself has appeared in many of the reels, especially notable as the leader of the Institute for Incoherent Geography. In this role I imagine him sitting in the passenger seat as I drive. He whistles along with the radio, comments on passing scenery, directs me to turn left or right. Let’s get lost, I say.

“Hello, Frances? It’s Jack. Have you gotten to the end of The Dreyfus Affair yet?”

“No, no yet, but I have a theory about the murdered man.” I suggested the German and Italian attachés. “Both Panizzardi and Schwarzkoppen knew that Dreyfus was being framed by the Army General Staff, so it’s true some would have wanted them dead. Perhaps the dead man was one of them.”

I took another swallow of coffee, suddenly aware of Jack’s breathing on the other end. It was slightly wheezy as if Jack had asthma from time to time.

“Do me a favor, Frances, I don’t have much time; try to unspool the rest of the Dreyfus film.”

“Would you like to come in and see the first minute? That’s all I’ve worked on so far.”

There was a pause filled by a little more wheezing.

“I thought that’s what you wanted, to see the film.” I really wanted him to show up but was trying not to say so. It would have been very simple, just ask, but I was afraid he would outright refuse if I did.

“I do, yes, that’s the idea, but I need to be alone with it. I know how to work a Steenbeck.”

“I can’t allow that. Why can’t we meet? Have we already met? Do I know you?” I leaned back in my chair, put my feet on the editing table.

“I’ll call you soon to arrange a time for me to view the film,” he repeated.

“Impossible without me present.” I enjoyed having what I thought was the upper hand and, now intrigued, wanted to goad him into a meeting, but he was also beginning to make me feel nervous.

“Then this is the last time I’ll be able to telephone you.”

The second, much thicker note arrived a few days later. It was leaning against my door.

Dear Frances,

Some notes:

At the beginning of the affair Dreyfus was nearly released for lack of evidence. History hangs by a drying thread. Meeting at the Section of Statistics the generals covered up for the real spy by inventing documents, and they blocked evidence that would have been damaging to them by claiming that national security was at stake. National Security is a phrase one hears echoed over and over. Let me give you some examples. (Note: what was eventually to be located down the street from the Section of Statistics on the rue de Lille? The famous waiting rooms of Jacques Lacan.)

1972 Break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. At first that case, too, looked insignificant: a matter of small potatoes, lack of evidence to prove otherwise. The trail that led to the president began with initials written in the burglars’ address books: HH and WH. It was difficult to get anyone to talk. “There was a pattern in the way people said no.” The bungled felony appeared to be just a case of five flat-footed burglars, and there was no need to investigate further. But as history now knows, secret cash funds whose purpose was to sabotage the candidates and activities of the other party were eventually traced. The expression “dirty tricks” enters the language in a new way. Also the words “double-cross” and “ratfuck.” The trial goes beyond middle-class lawyers and irked FBI agents. Connections revealed through an examination of checking accounts, telephone and hotel bills led to the Committee to Re-Elect the President and from there to Mitchell and Haldeman. Nixon supervised extensive cover-ups, had documents fabricated, lists shredded, and so the unmasking of bigwigs required a great deal of perseverance. Again secrecy was maintained on the basis of the claim that national security would otherwise be at risk. The notion of shredding became linked to the word cover-up. HH stood for Howard Hunt, who besides working for the CIA, wrote spy novels.

1981 El Mozote, El Salvador. American-trained soldiers massacred over seven hundred civilians, mainly women and very young children. The Reagan administration denied the story and tried to discredit the New York Times and Washington Post reporters who visited El Mozote and wrote about the murders. No one in the State Department ever asked to see their photographs, and so with a clear conscience they were able to release a statement that declared that “no evidence of a systematic massacre” had been found. Because it was necessary for American military assistance to continue, every attempt was made to smear the reporters. They were accused of invention, of hallucination, of being dupes of guerrillas who didn’t speak English. Years later forensic anthropologists found the bodies of 131 children under twelve years of age who had been bayoneted, shot, and hung. The anthropologists determined that the children had been lying on the floor while someone stood over them. Few, if any, had been buried.

One can, as in the Dreyfus case, manufacture anything, and create the context, the circumstances necessary for a story to be believed, and in a lake of whitewash submarines will float. So while The Dreyfus Affair languished in its can turning into jagged crumbs, residue, and grit, forgers were at work producing letters, doctoring photographs, smearing Zola, who publicly accused the generals of being “diabolical artisans” who “committed outrages against humanity.” His language may sound overblown and heavy handed (in fact it was said in criticism of his writing: “A naked crime is a hundred times more horrible than a crime clothed in adjectives”) but he got the result he was after: attention. When a judge who had been in the army’s pocket convicted him on charges of libel he fled to England during the night under the name Mr. Pascal.

Perhaps the murdered man at the end of The Dreyfus Affair was the man who knew too much. It’s a fact that Zola had many enemies who desired his death, but the murdered man isn’t EZ — that isn’t how he died. Was the man a friend of Zola, someone who might have aided and abetted him in his escape and therefore became a target?

1987 Iran-Contra Affair or Contragate. The National Security Committee operated as a kind of parallel government, setting up illegal deals to continue funding the Nicaraguan contras or “freedom fighters” who burn fields, starve out families, murder children. The hearings revealed an “underworld of arms dealers and financial brokers into which Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North and his fellow National Security Council staff members descended” (“Reagan’s Band of True Believers,” Frances Fitzgerald, the New York Times, May 10, 1987).

1897 Felix Gribelin covered his googly eyes with dark blue glasses. He was about to enter a public urinal in the Parc Montsouris. A man whose long, drooping moustache would not have set him apart from any number of other middle-aged men in the Paris streets that spring, he didn’t need much of a disguise but felt the dark glasses were important, if not essential. Gribelin was the archivist of the Section of Statistics, an agency something like the FBI, but he didn’t approach the arranged meeting with Count Esterhazy as if it were all in the course of an ordinary day, because it wasn’t. He had been summoned by the General Staff for this appointment, and he had to carry out their wishes.

Gribelin was startled to see a large woman exiting the small stone building just as he was about to enter. Her face was veiled, and she opened an umbrella to shield herself from the rain. He turned to look at her back and the folds of her skirt as she disappeared, making her way through the park. Despite the somber tailoring of the woman’s clothing there was something gaudy about the way she put herself together. Her green brocade jacket was very bright as well as close fitting, and he had seen many rings on her gloved hands before she opened the umbrella in his face. He assumed she was a prostitute, but what he didn’t know was the woman was actually Major General du Paty de Clam. Once she was out of sight, Felix entered the urinal to find the Count leaning against a tiled wall, coat unbuttoned, humming a tune, waiting for him.

As long as they were determined to condemn Dreyfus, the real spy, Esterhazy, had only a slight chance of being convicted, and he was arrogant with the knowledge that although guilty he was almost untouchable. They needed him, and the deeper the General Staff dug in asserting Dreyfus’s guilt, the more they needed him. The Count was fortunate that the letter signed D found in the garbage at the German embassy had been misattributed to Dreyfus. Had the D been assigned to a Drumont or Deroulede or d’Ormescheville, Christians all of them, the outcome would not have been so clearly in the Count’s favor. Du Paty de Clam was powerful, a man who arranged convictions, promotions, a man who moved without restraint, a man so confident of his position that he could wear a dress, and no one could say I have the goods on you, a man beyond blackmail.

In the dim urinal, made considerably murkier by his dark glasses, Felix made out the shadowy form of the Count. Water dripped, gaslights sputtered, the tile smelled of chlorine and salt. The two men shook hands. Du Paty had told Felix that national security issues were at stake in the Dreyfus trial and therefore the conviction must stand. Esterhazy made Felix a little uneasy, which was unusual because after all his years with the Section of Statistics, few people did.

Just as du Paty’s General Staff was an agency of parallel government arranging deals in public urinals, creating evidence of crimes where none existed, so too was Oliver North able to manufacture the fraud he was the architect of, or perhaps he genuinely believed in it. His project, however, operated on a global scale, getting one group of thugs to bankroll another. Again, North’s testimony was bracketed by deletions and assertions that “national security issues were at stake.”

1992 John Lennon’s file is still sealed. The FBI claims national security is at stake.

Do you see what I’m getting at? Méliès wrote: “The scenario is simply a thread intended to link the ‘effects’ in themselves without much relation to each other.” In other words the individual stories are less important than the parallels they represent. The who’s, where’s, when’s and why’s might be interchangeable. The scenario is a means to the end. Evidence of mistrials and cover-ups, the forgeries and lengths of shredded documents are only a series of similar patterns. Yet all these machinations make a mockery of even the notion of gullibility. I want to believe what you’re telling me is true, I yell childishly at the radio, television, and microfilm. I want to believe the lives of John Lennon and Salvadoran children were corrosives eating away at a filigreed and imperiled democracy, but face it, Frances, don’t you find all this a little difficult to swallow?

Some “national securities,” so important at the moment, turn into exercises in clownish paranoia, the butt of curatorial or custodial jokes in a museum of ancient history, and while some conspiracies deflate when subjected to the pinpricks of the late twentieth century, others are born and gain momentum fed on underground springs. It was believed Napoléon died from stomach cancer. We know now that Napoléon died of arsenic poisoning.

Méliès’s slogan was Star Films: The World Within Reach. He really believed any event, from kidnapping to a flash of lightning, could be caught and preserved, made accessible through the camera. It was an optimistic slogan. I think he was saying that because of the camera, the truth couldn’t be perverted. Little did he know.

One thing I should add, someone stole the two books on Méliès from the New York Public Library. Settling down at the Donnell branch I called for the books only to find they were long gone, so most of what I’m telling you about him was learned while I worked at Omnibus. When I arrived back in the States I thought I would have access to more information and may yet, but so far I’m coming up empty handed. Not only are the books missing, but I’ve found microfilm tampered with by someone armed with pins and needles keen on riddling the strips with strategically placed pinprick holes and minute slashes so that any information I sought was rendered inscrutable. Most references to him have been poked or sliced out. When one of the books I searched for was found, the sections about Méliès had been torn out, replaced by chewing gum, tissues, or nothing at all.

Last week I was followed from the library into the subway at Broadway and 66th Street. It was early evening, just past rush hour, but the underpass that connects the downtown and uptown sides was surprisingly deserted. How do I know I was followed? I don’t, but I think I was, although I heard no footsteps. A figure came up suddenly from behind me, and an abrupt blow to the jaw almost knocked me out. I didn’t get a good look at her, but I’m certain it was a woman. She was a pro and moved quickly and gracefully like a figure from a Jackie Chan movie. Punjabi dance music floated down from the news kiosk on the subway platform just up the stairs above my head and the sounds of tabla and sitar threaded in and out of my consciousness until I was able to stand up and make my way to the stairs. I groped toward the sound, comforting and familiar from my years in London. Finally I reached the steps, damp with spilt liquids, and sat down again, my head in my hands. I swallowed my screams because this is a crime I’m unable to report. I’m here in this country illegally although I was an American citizen at one time and suppose I still am. I held my arms against my stomach rocking back and forth, unable to go to the hospital for exactly the same reason. No one paid any attention to me. When I was able I made my way onto a train although it was going the wrong way. My wallet was gone, which means someone has my address and Alphabet’s. My assailant knows I’m living in New York, and I worry about you as well. They surely know you have this film and that you are working against the clock to preserve it.

Yours truly,

Jack Kews

I remember watching the Watergate trial on television. The screen flickered. Our reception wasn’t very good. Howard Hunt with his pencil moustache. Liddy with his burned hand and love of Nazi propaganda films. Round-eyed Maureen Dean, a name with rhyming parts. We sat around the kitchen table watching. I remember the scene as if it were evening although it may have been during the day, and because I was very young I probably didn’t know exactly what was going on. Houseplants and lumpy pottery made in grade school framed the talking heads. When a television commentator expressed shock, I had a sense of imminent catastrophe and shame, but it wasn’t personal shame, and I didn’t know who to attribute this shame to. Everyone sitting around the table talked back to the television.

“A thief. I always knew it.”

“Magruder,” my mother said, “like the sound a flat tire makes slapping the road.”

“If they don’t want you to know something, if it’s really big and ugly and makes them look bad, don’t think for a minute the thing will surface on national television. Don’t be naive,” said Mr. Levine, a neighbor who was considered an alarmist but one with interesting theories about conspiracies that he even exposed to children. As he paid you for mowing his lawn he might explain the connection between former president Johnson, an unlabeled complex of cinder-block buildings down Route 2, and a Coca-Cola commercial which co-opted sports imagery. “It’s a racket,” he would always say. There were no guns in his house, no freezer full of deer parts and bloody footprints on the concrete garage floor, and he refused to vote.

Paty de Clam. Patsy de Cline. I put the letter into a desk drawer beside the first one and reached for the telephone, then replaced the receiver without dialing. The notes didn’t threaten or harass, they only proposed schemes like those hatched by the long-dead man down the road, links between assassinations of popes and presidents, between the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Aldo Moro, as if suicide, shooting, and kidnapping were all hatched from the same committee, a cartel shrouded in secrecy that exerted power over every unconscious citizen. As I fit the film over the viewing machinery and examined each crumbling frame, I was afraid of what I might learn, but if I learned anything from my mother staring into space and my father plotting against those who believed Adam and Eve were parentless, it is that there is no safety to be found in pretending the facts aren’t staring you in the face.

Even up on the fifth floor a fly had somehow gotten into Alphabet, and I watched it collide with the strips of venetian blind. I shut the door behind me and walked down the hall, letters in hand. Felix the Cat was being restored next door. The jingle, played at the beginning and at the end of the cartoon, was repetitive on its own but run over and over as the film was spooled back and forth, the lyrics could easily become the kind of episodic torture used to drive someone mad. I knew it was the actual cartoon that was being played not something spliced together or borrowed and used as a weapon in an imaginary setting, but the knowledge didn’t keep the song from being any less penetrating. As I walked past Julius’s office I could hear him talking loudly. Antonya sat with her feet on the reception desk, writing notes in the margins of a book on martial arts. Her glasses were pushed up on her head; replacing them in order to look at me she peered through black-rimmed eyes and lenses smeared with hair gel.

“Did a man come in this morning, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, jacket, sweatshirt turned inside out?” I asked her.

“No, but I’ve only been here an hour. The temp who comes in while I’m at class might have seen someone yesterday.” I showed her the letters.

“A crackpot.” She only glanced at them, then shrugged in dismissal, but she did call the agency, got the temp’s number, called her home and left a message anyway.

“Why don’t you leave Kews a note asking him to knock next time so you can actually shake hands.”

“I don’t want to shake hands with a stalker who doesn’t want to meet me anyway. He writes about old magazines and Napoléon.”

“What if he thinks he’s Napoléon?”

“Look in the book. Did Julius have an appointment with Napoléon yesterday?”

With a twist Antonya turned the appointment ledger around so I could read it. He had meetings with a woman from the British Film Institute, a man from Kodak, a pair of researchers compiling a catalog of silent Westerns, a man who had a collection of films made on early cameras, the Mutigraph and the Mirograph, and the list went on. Jack Kews could have been any of them.

“Why don’t you go to the police?”

I shook my head. Could you spell Méliès for us? they’d ask, the note having been sent to another department in order to determine what kind of old typewriter had been used to produce it. The female officer might open her drawer for a second and I’d be able to see a glint of handcuffs, keys, unused chopsticks, Rolaids and Juicy Fruit. Perhaps Kews had a record, a police file that could be called up on a computer that would reveal a past I’d no knowledge of: tax fraud, armed robbery, credit-card and identity theft. I would lean over the screen and try to read what he’d been apprehended for: resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, loitering with intent, blocking the entrance to a church.

“Whaddaya think? They’re going to issue a restraining order for a phantom or place a guard at the door?”

For a moment she reminded me a little of Mr. Levine, the man who had watched the Watergate trial with premonition and enthusiasm, the man who saw the figure in the carpet, who thought everything was a swindle of some kind. With very little information she could construct cathedrals of imagined crimes, and yet Antonya was only humoring me.

“You got nothing better to do than worry about some couple of notes that don’t even make sense?”

My explanations, stories about surrendered sunglasses, aimless trips to shops, emptied drawers that had long been cleaned out of anything meaningful, all these statements were left half-finished, stuttering. For Antonya the way to keep ghosts at bay was to figure out how many free meals you could tolerate at Burrito Fresca, because if you could put away a certain amount of money each week, you might hope to return to the city where your family had disappeared. She calculated and didn’t reflect, taking a pragmatic approach, losing patience with my stuttering and obsession with the Dreyfus trial.

“Could he be charged with trespassing? He wasn’t even seen for certain. Any messenger could have delivered the letters.”

As far as I knew the police had never been to the offices. I imagined them arriving on the fifth floor to dust for fingerprints. They’d pick up copies of anticolorization letters stacked in the reception area, not with the intention of mailing them, but only to file away somewhere. They’d tell me that as long as my life wasn’t threatened, there was nothing they could do. It was just a prank, sweetie. I went back to work.

At six o’clock Antonya knocked on my door. The temp had called back.

“She remembered only two visitors who didn’t have appointments: a woman who inquired about renting an editing room, and a man who claimed to have rented space, but he left a few minutes later, saying he had forgotten something. He didn’t return while she was here.”

Three days later the following note arrived by mail:

Dear Frances,

I changed my mind. Meet me at La Chinita Linda’s at 7:00 this Tuesday. I have short brown hair, wear glasses, beard, and moustache. Will wear a black T-shirt and a plaid jacket.

Yours,

Jack Kews

I tacked the note to the bulletin board above my light table, my eye wandering up to it when tired of examining and preserving the fleeting images of tiny men and women. Dreyfus read a letter from his wife, Lucie, and looked as if he would disintegrate with anguish. The prison as Méliès had designed it in 1899, gray and minimal, looked very modern. The emptiness of the prison cell wasn’t the result of film-stock degeneration; the film at this point was in good shape. Lucie’s letter, a surprisingly stark white square, fluttered to the ground. I worked on this scene all afternoon until my eye began to hurt. Toward the end of the day I showed the third note to Antonya.

“He didn’t ask what you look like.”

“So he knows. It’s not like the notes are responses to an ad placed in a personals column.”

“He knows your name, too. You better watch yourself. You want me to come with you?”

“Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound offhand, but Antonya was right. What did I really know about this guy?

Jack Kews was a fin-de-siècle Terminator, programmed, relentless, fixated on the twists and turns of a forgotten trial, obsessively cracking bilingual puns, pretending he’s Georges Méliès disappearing around corners and reappearing already sitting in your chair when you open your door. On the other hand, why me? I was such a bit player in this. Why target the restorer of an obscure silent film? It was as if by setting his sights small, as if looking for a toehold, a footnote might be produced that would alter the course of the story or change how its meaning might unravel.

I locked Alphabet for the night. Offices had long ago emptied out, and the deserted Mayflower Building would make anyone jumpy, but after the notes from Kews I felt prone to hearing footsteps, seeing shadows down the halls, and catching silhouettes against doors when clearly even maintenance workers and guards had gone home. We stepped into the night. The air smelled like overturned earth, but dirt that was full of metal filings, asphalt, and loose parts of archaic machinery. A road crew worked on part of the dug-up avenue, steam from pipes or Con Edison ducts partially obscured their legs so that the workers’ heads appeared disembodied, floating above the street.

We stopped in front of an appliance store whose display window was full of televisions, an entire wall of televisions turned to different channels. The one in the center was not tuned to any particular station. It was broadcasting pictures of us. A video camera had been set up to look at the street and transmit the picture to a monitor so you could see yourself and the scene behind you as if you were on television. Antonya and I stared into the screen while she combed her hair, our breath misting in the cold night air. I stepped to one side, my image reflected over a baseball game. There was no sound piped outside, the window display wasn’t a segment of a Tower of Babel; there were only pictures.

My father used to take me to these kinds of stores, concrete shells with deep-discounted appliances arranged in long rows or grouped into a square as if a kind of model room. We didn’t buy much in them, they were more a source of ideas. He used to love to take cars and machines apart and put them back together again. Spinning parts of the clothes dryer became a turntable. His workshop was a hospital for darkroom timers and short-circuited ceiling fans. Scores of radios were taken apart, their tubes and wiring, like miniature futuristic cities, transformed into other, more powerful radios. At night he would drink black coffee, listen to Jean Shepherd broadcasts from New York City, and laugh to himself.

In another window all kinds of telephones were on display. Some were ordinary dial phones, the kind not seen in years; some were gag phones. One instrument was in the shape of a pair of lips, another contained push buttons embedded in a silver high heel, a third was a clear plastic telephone with a green neon light running around inside it. Maybe Jack Kews slept with a green neon telephone beside his bed. He might proudly show it to guests as a symbol of an ironic sense of humor. Those who possessed a telephone designed to operate from a pair of red plastic lips or a fake shoe might at least feel sure of the direction their day would take when they got up in the morning; they would feel no chagrin at refusing to answer questions they didn’t understand, and if their day turned into a nightmare they might have the strength of their convictions to tell everyone who crossed them to piss off. Antonya took one last look at herself on the screen, traffic halting in the background, and we crossed the street to the restaurant. A neon palm whose trunk blinked and buzzed sheltered about half the letters of La Chinita Linda, but its three fronds, once the shape of the Great Lakes, were out.

It was a few minutes past seven so we took a booth, ordered tea, and waited. I sat facing the door, watching everyone who entered. At twenty minutes past seven a man in a Mets cap appeared. He swiveled his body to the glass counter from the door as if his shoulder was attached to its hinges. Leaning against the register he told the cashier that he was a homeless veteran looking for work; if they needed a dishwasher, he would be happy to wash for them. He spoke in a loud voice, but the woman didn’t answer him. She only shook her head. He took a handful of toothpicks and left. At 7:45 a group of thin young men entered wearing black suits with narrow ties or black leather jackets and sunglasses although night had fallen hours ago. They rolled up their sleeves to reveal tattoos of barbed wire, birds with talons exposed, and other designs I couldn’t make out. Crowding into a booth, they seemed to know everyone who worked in the restaurant and spoke to them by name. One waiter looked nervous, another shrugged.

“Maybe they’re related to the owner,” Antonya said, watching them push sunglasses up on their heads and light each others’ cigarettes. They were brought plates of rice and soft-shell crabs without any one of them looking at a menu or ordering.

It grew dark outside. La Chinita Linda’s window reflected nervous colored light from the inconstant palm. At a nearby table a child held a hand over one of the lanterns placed on her table, causing her fingers to turn red and translucent. Eavesdropping on a man sitting at a table to our left we observed the fact that he shared noodles with a blond girl easily less than half his age. In a tutelary voice he described the endings of French irregular verbs, leaning close to her, chopsticks pointing to lines of print on a piece of paper, probably leaving trails of sauce.

“You can see by the ending that it’s almost regular, but then there is a corruption here.” He had a thin, lined face, long curly hair, a stagy accent.

“Who gives language lessons in a Cuban-Chinese restaurant?” Antonya whispered. The man was doing most of the talking while the girl, about sixteen, giggled. He turned red but kept talking: je, tu, il, elle. Although we were obviously staring he paid no attention to us. We weren’t sixteen.

“I have a nightmare,” Antonya said loudly. “I’m stuck in a bridal shop during an earthquake, and I’m suffocating in red lace from bridesmaids’ dresses. That’s how I’ll die.”

The man looked startled and stopped talking for a few seconds. I laughed but at the same time, strained to see if Kews might have come on the heels of this group or that couple, but no one resembling Jack Kews entered La Chinita Linda as far as I could tell. It was possible he had seen Antonya and left, but since we were sitting in a booth, it was also true that he might not have been able to glimpse the back of Antonya’s head at all. I tried to determine if the top could be seen from behind and decided it just about could. Or he might have seen only me but guessed from my gestures that I was talking to someone. I played with the small lanterns on our table. A boy behind us was drumming on the table with chopsticks, impatient for his dinner. Antonya asked for a beer, then as we got hungry we ordered salt-and-pepper shrimp, red beans, and brown rice.

“If he hadn’t given himself a beard and moustache, I might have guessed he was one of the women who came in last night. Jack Kews might be Jackie Kews,” Antonya said, “might be a woman.”

Antonya was annoyed with those renters of editing space who complained about the noise from the air conditioner as if she could stop the moaning sound issuing from the vent and could do so with nothing more than a pocket screwdriver. She was annoyed with people who asked for the key to the bathroom every twenty minutes when she was trying to do the accounts, she was impatient with Julius’s debts, with me, with people who reserved space but who canceled at the last minute, costing the company money, with letter writers who didn’t show up. Money flowed out, not much trickled back in. Preparing to take offense as soon as anyone called or walked in to Alphabet made her efficient. Antonya wanted to hang up on those who wasted her time. People yelled at her through the telephone receiver: “What do you mean you don’t have any editing rooms?” or “I need to speak to Shute right away. It’s urgent. I can’t hold.” Killjoys and crackpots fueled by what seemed to her a false urgency over saving old movies made her life miserable.

“Julius will never learn the old dead have to make way for the new dead.” Actually, I thought he had come round to doing exactly that. Antonya, however, wasn’t convinced Alphabet’s backwards mission was such a lifesaver tossed to a drowning man. What did any of this crumbling film and archival narrative matter? At the same time she was saying: New Dreyfuses are born every day. Or are they?

Washington and Hollywood. Washington and Hollywood. She recapped lipstick and pens, clipped shut mirrors and notebooks, dismissed the bicycle messenger service with professional finality. Pulling the beard off Jack Kews or pasting it back on, either way wasn’t going to make or break her days. Julius’s lawyer had handled Immigration and Naturalization for her, but that in turn meant she couldn’t legally work anywhere else.

“You better hope Alphabet stays afloat.”

She shrugged.

I played with empty cups and bowls, stacking and arranging them as if they were futuristic architectural models. The backs of our legs stuck to red vinyl seats. The plastic was printed with an ice-cube pattern, but La Chinita Linda’s, with only a plate-glass window, grew hot from the kitchen. Despite the cold outside, ceiling fans spun uselessly above us. Antonya looked at her watch. We both had other things to do. Jack Kews wasn’t going to show up that night. The palm tree that looked like a map of the Great Lakes sputtered overhead as we left.

My hands had the sweet raisiny smell of old film. I’d been working a long time at the Steenbeck. I stood up to stretch, closed my eye and walked into the hall that lead to the waiting area and Antonya’s desk. I knew where I was going, or thought I did. I looked like a sleepwalker. My hands hit a fur wall. I opened my eye.

“Who the hell are you?”

It was Judy Holliday back from the dead. I mean, it was the former Mrs. Julius Shute in a short fur coat. Mrs. Julius had had some work done, but when looking around the office she wore a my-husband-is-a-bum expression. Her face was tight, eyes sunken, mouth like a stretched-out red rubber band. Yet Mrs. J. was no dummy. She spoke five languages and read several newspapers every morning. On her right hand, which flailed in my direction, a topaz the size of a cough drop glittered.

“This is Frances Baum. She works for me,” Julius said while showing her to the door.

“Does she always play hide-and-seek in the office?”

Before Julius could answer she went on. “Look at this place. I don’t know why I ever bought into your half-baked ideas.”

“There’s nothing half-baked about Alphabet. It’s an industry, an art.” Julius grabbed her by the elbow and steered her toward the elevator.

“Fine, now I want my money back . . .” Her voice trailed off as the door shut.

“Frances, a word.” He tipped his head toward my room as if to say, the jig is up. Inside the editing room he looked at what I was working on. I threaded up Divers at Work on the Wreck of the “Maine,” one of Méliès’s actualités. This one had been tricky because Méliès had shot through layers of gauze to give the effect of swimming under Havana Harbor.

Julius squinted, then frowned.

“These prints should reflect the original with all its granularity and visual static,” I defended the careful hand I’d taken in the restoration.

“Then the image on the screen will be nothing but grain. There won’t be any clear picture, only fountains spilling piles of black and white M&M’s. No clear picture. Maybe a hand or a face will appear once in while if you’re lucky.”

“The Wet Gate look has become less desirable, Julius. You know that. These films aren’t supposed to look as if they were made yesterday.”

I loved the archaeology of these crappy prints, and when making a copy of a film I photographed the whole surface, preserving whatever was there, including the dust and fingerprints. This was information Jack Kews would want, but that Julius, for reason of profit, wanted to get rid of. I wanted to race to the end of the film, but because it was so terribly fragile I had to proceed one frame at a time.

“Relying on what the film looks like to the naked eye is important because the emotional punch may matter more than the quality of the image. Don’t paint the dress red.” He stood very close. I inched away but kept talking.

“Noir films, for example, should retain scratches and grayness. Sometimes you want a rich gray scale; it depends on the subject. Comedies, we’ve agreed, should have sharp black and white contrast.”

“Apart from Dreyfus, most of these are comedies,” Julius argued. “Frances, you don’t understand. These films have to look clear and crisp, yes, as if they were made yesterday. Otherwise, the client will be unhappy with our work, and according to our contract we won’t receive the last half of the payment due us. This isn’t the subsidized Library of Congress. I told you, I’m sacrificing Dreyfus in order to keep Alphabet afloat. I don’t care if you have to use so much Wet Gate that Dreyfus has a halo at the end and flies up to fluffy clouds above his prison on Devil’s Island. Frances, my life depends on this.”

The heathered gray soundproofing that covered the studio walls loomed as if the walls were slightly tilted and pushing in on me from all sides.

“What are you saying?”

“I want The Dreyfus Affair to have a happy ending. The guilty verdict is impossible to believe because he was so clearly innocent. Over time, for those who care to dig and sift through forged documents and trial records, it will look only more absurd. Eventually if the trial is remembered at all, many readers will stop at the evidence which points to innocence and close the book.”

Julius wouldn’t tell me who bought the Looney Tunes archive, but he did tell me that what we had in the office was the last known copy of the Dreyfus film. Few living people had ever seen it, he believed. Certainly all the original rioters were long dead.

Of course, I doubted his claim. He couldn’t be certain this was the only copy of a rarely seen and, as far as he was concerned, barely documented film. Besides, written descriptions of the film must have existed in a book or two. If the film were to convey the astounding assumption that Dreyfus went free without the trials he did have, ammunition was taken from those who would charge the prosecution with fabricating evidence, of in fact protecting the real spy. Julius didn’t see it that way.

The innocent verdict, Julius explained, is a victory; history as it was meant to be, not a whitewash of the guilty, not in the least. He wanted to pull one bit of victory/success out of the morass of prison cells, firing squads, nooses, gas chambers, even if it was a fantasy. Delirious, sleep deprived, “Why not?” he said. “Who can it hurt?” Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.

“It doesn’t just make me look better,” he whispered. “It doesn’t just save the business from bankruptcy. I have a bigger picture in mind. There are, as you know, revisionists who say now we know, now we can say it: Alfred Dreyfus really was guilty all along.”

I’d been up so long assessing the damage done to Méliès’s rockets landing in the moon’s left eye that I’d almost agree with Julius if he told me my parents had finally seen the light, joined the creationists, and were now burning classroom charts connecting amoebas, eventually, to man.

“You can’t reshoot a scene from over one hundred years ago. You can’t rewrite history.”

“Cut the end. Cut the guilty verdict. Dreyfus’s case was so convincing the audience will assume he was found innocent without seeing the verdict read. Cut the degradation scene where his sword is broken, cut the scene where Dreyfus is returned to prison after the trial. Just cut all that footage. We’re on a deadline. Say it was too screwed up to save. No one will ever know. What does it matter if a few French generals and their henchmen are given a whitewash? Dreyfus was innocent. Everyone knows it. Let it go at that. We’re just taking a shortcut to get to the same end result.”

“What if someone asks what happened to the end of the film?”

“There wasn’t any viable film stock left to unspool. I’ve been offered a lot of money to change the ending, and that’s what’s happening.”

I had visions of Julius deliberately damaging the film in the middle of the night, squeezing chemicals from an eyedropper onto the film so as to look like natural erosion, mimicking the corrosive nature of the passage of time and humidity, blaming an archive that used improper storage.

Julius was sweating slightly, like he’d had way too much coffee and just wanted to get on to the next task at hand, regardless of how outrageous the suggestion he had just made was. I asked him if he was trying to lose his business or change history or both. He just kept talking.

“Before Disney took over Times Square there were these booths where you could talk to women for a dollar. I not only liked to go into them, but I wondered about the other men, like myself, who paid a dollar for what didn’t amount to much, really. Was there some kind of fusion between my interest in degenerating film stock and what many would have considered degenerate practice?”

“Julius, why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe what I’m saying is that sometimes what the client of the moment wants trumps what a long-dead director actually shot. It happens. Also, we need to get paid as quickly as possible.”

There was a boy who stood so close to me in a film preservation class that there was barely a molecule of air between our sleeves. We shared editing tables, joked about rewriting movies and adding Godzillas where they didn’t belong. I thought he was just a work buddy, but then I wasn’t so sure an arm was just something for reaching for the next canister. I wondered what he saw in me, and what projection of his fantasies I might have been. Images of a one-eyed woman were too obvious and unbearable to think about.

Hey Cyclops, what makes you think you can be so choosy?

I pretended to examine the Méliès film in which a man was turning himself into a cigarette lighter, and in the silence Julius walked out.

I could make two copies: a doctored version for Julius, an accurate copy for myself. One of the two I would clean up, using gallons of Wet Gate, drawing into the emulsion if streaks of rain or lightning bolts had faded, but in the second copy I’d leave every mark, scuff, and crack. The negative can’t be read with the naked eye, but with copies I can experiment. There is no master, no original. After five copies, degradation of the image makes it unreadable. The Air Force once tried making numerous copies of surveillance films. What they were left with proved Julius’s M&M’s theory. After a certain point you get diverticulation, the emulsion falls off. Russian satellites or Iraqi tanks disintegrate into bottle shapes and tin cans, a Méliès-like transformation from signifiers of harm to pedestrian bits and pieces: an unwitting but complete conversion of swords into plough shares.

“Hello, Frances?”

“I was waiting for your call. What happened? You stood me up. Don’t ask me for any more favors. You can take your exploding heads and buy yourself a watch.”

“You weren’t alone.”

“So what?”

“I didn’t want an audience.”

“Are you two years old, or what? I don’t know anything about you so I brought a friend.”

“While in prison one of the General Staff’s star forgers in the conspiracy to frame Dreyfus, a man named Colonel Henry, slits his own throat.” Jack resorted to Dreyfusspeak.

“How do you know that’s the scene I’m working on now? The print is very worn here. His razor emerges with a grand sweep, an arc of light. Henry’s body is so blurred and grainy, the image gives the impression that a disembodied arm has appeared from foggy atmosphere and severed a head which has already been guillotined.” I backed up the film, thinking I might have missed a figure entering his cell. “Now he’s only sitting at his desk writing a letter to his wife.”

“Doll-like and unseen, Madame Henry will be capable of hysterical courtroom outbursts when the judge, Bertulus, refers to the late forger, Henry. The mystery of Henry’s suicide, never solved, was that a shut razor was found in his hand. Had he slit his throat himself he would have had no time to calmly shut the razor, lie down, and prepare to expire.”

Then the phone went dead.

“The Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt gave an elaborate costume ball in their house and garden in Paris. The theme was white; any costume was admitted but it had to be all in white. A large white dance floor was installed in the garden with the orchestra hidden in the bushes. I was asked to think up some added attraction. I hired a movie projector which was set up in a room on an upper floor, with the window giving out on the garden. I found an old hand-colored film by the pioneer French film-maker, Méliès. While the white couples were revolving on the white floor, the film was projected on this moving screen — those who were not dancing looked down from the windows of the house. The effect was eerie.”

Man Ray, Self Portrait, 1963. Courtesy of Jack Kews

The snippet had arrived in the mail along with the usual kinds of advertisements for film equipment and personal inquiries about specific jobs that I occasionally receive at Alphabet. Colonel Henry’s suicide splashes over a skirt. One of Méliès’s heads explodes at an elbow. A rocket lands in someone’s eye. Apart from the Dreyfus film, which is somewhat stark, these films are crowded, packed with images. Méliès nearly always filled black space as if he had a fear of emptiness. No cave, room, door, fireplace remained black for long, sooner or later something would emerge from it. In The Conquest of the Pole, a huge figure eats the explorers, but the barren tundra is soon inhabited when the monster throws them up again. I stood in the dark, relatively empty room. I waited for Jack Kews or anyone to burst in. Nothing happened.

I worked through the night to try to reach the end of the film, but there was too much damage, and it was slow going.

After Henry’s suicide Dreyfus leaves Devil’s Island, returning to France for a second trial at Rennes. Although a great deal of evidence to prove his innocence has been established, he will again be found guilty, but for the moment there’s still hope. He lands at the port of Quiberon in Bretagne. I held the film up to the light. A storm has been brewing. The forks of lightning that were hand drawn on the film have all but disappeared, only traces of them remain. Figures of Dreyfus and his guard ascend steps leading to the quay. Sailors, probably sitting on the floor, sway back and forth as if they’re rocked by actual waves in an actual boat; otherwise the scene is gray and static like a nineteenth-century sculpture garden.

Prints from the 1890s are very dark. I turned out the light and laid the carefully unspooled strips across a light table. I wanted to jump ahead, but the storm needed repair. Too many frames had degenerated to dotty atmosphere, pointillist and vague. As creditors threatened and Alphabet’s accounts had the dry heaves, Julius wanted all these scenes dissolved. Kews, on the other hand, sent notes and left messages: preserve what you can then cut to the epilogue.

Louis Kahn wrote that a boy walks around the city and the city tells him what to do with himself. Architects may not be the only ones who look at the exterior of buildings and the layout of streets, parks, and bridges as a kind of visual or tactile guide indicating appropriate behavior and suggesting what to do next. I think his theory about walking around the city works well for girls, too. During lunch I went to the public library. The main branch was just a few blocks from Alphabet, its steps already littered with fallen leaves, and its hours reduced. Others on their lunch breaks brushed the detritus aside in order to sit on the steps and eat hot dogs, slices of pizza, drink sodas, and stare at the street. As I climbed the steps, I felt I ought to have been watching the street too, balling up paper wrapping and reading headlines over someone’s shoulder, yet I continued up the steps with a sense of purpose, aiming toward computer terminals and the smell of binding glue. The process would take about an hour. I looked up Artificially Arranged Scenes: the Films of Georges Méliès, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, All the President’s Men, the testimony of Oliver North and other transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings published in book form, and a biography of John Lennon. I handed my list to the librarian, but he came back empty handed. None of the books were on the shelves. He checked the computer and told me the same person had taken each out, and all were overdue.

“We’ll send him a postcard to see that they’re returned. Try us again at the end of the week.”

“I think I know the man who took them out.” There were hundreds of thousands of people with library cards who might have taken out these books. “Jack Kews.”

“Look under Zola.” The librarian spoke with a Russian accent. “J’accuse. You want I should look it up for you?”

“No, it’s a man’s name.”

“This I can not tell you.”

Light bounced off the librarian’s glasses so his eyes were difficult to see, and he winked at me. I couldn’t wink in return. Dust motes floated in the air above his black and gray hair.

“Jack Kews.” I repeated his name. No one was watching us. Awkwardly, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and slid it across the worn wooden counter.

“A fine,” he turned to a woman behind the counter who suddenly turned to look at a computer screen. After consulting an index card, the librarian wrote Jack Kews’s address and telephone number on a piece of paper. So I entered a silent deal or bargain with a man who hated his job, who wanted to sabotage the head librarian, who mis-shelved books.

A frieze ran around the hall, a leftover from when the shelves were organized differently and the images on the wall directed the reader to the area he or she searched. Egyptian figures, Greek gods, elm trees, elephants, whales, knights, birds in flight were markers of a now obsolete and long-abandoned visual lexicon. There was no place in the frieze for a symbol for books on microchips or superconductors.

The librarian, used to the complicated tenses and acrobatics of Russian, might find the expansiveness of English — the way it absorbs words and sentence constructions from all over, New York English with all its accents, dialects, and to say nothing of all the pidgins — chaotic, impossible to take seriously beyond what’s required for the job. Why not subvert the hard-to-pin-down order should the opportunity present itself. When asked about the disorder he created he looks at the frieze circling the hall and states the obvious. At night all the illustrated creatures come down from their respective perches and mix things up.

“Whatever you want, babechik. Books disappear every day.”

I tried to fix a noncommittal or businesslike expression on my face while in fact I was nervous, as if I’d been caught defacing a book and stood captive at the librarian’s mercy.

“Remember he can’t just hand them to you. He has to return them to us first.” He looked into the distance at a woman who was putting books in her bag until it was quite weighted down. “Mr. Kews always looked like he was stealing books from the reading room. We noticed he put books in his jacket as if he was thinking about stealing, but he did check them out.”

“Is there any particular day he comes in regularly?”

“No.”

The librarian walked over to a cart, pulled a book out, and handed it to me.

“He returned this one a few days ago. It hasn’t been re-shelved yet. You know, at first I thought Kews was one of these, because others come and ask questions about him, then I don’t see him anymore. Now if you will excuse me.”

Trying to look as if I didn’t understand what he meant I took Captain Dreyfus the Story of a Mass Hysteria from him and found a seat at a table. The room was nearly empty. The stacks and carrels were without any sign of industry; no sounds of writing or pages being turned were audible. A man sitting a few chairs to my left snored over a paper, arm stretched out across the table, glasses abandoned a few inches from his hand. Before beginning the book read so recently by Jack Kews I turned it over and over, finally opening it to the acknowledgments then thumbing through the first fifty pages. About a third through Captain Dreyfus the Story of Mass Hysteria, one line was marked.

While the rigidly restricted investigation by General Pellieux went droning on, the legal blinders making it [the trial] like the study of a book whose pages could not be opened. . . .

There the marking ended, but in the margins someone had written: I would like to open this book.

Méliès was taunting me, saying look at me, choose me, you’ll be seduced, entertained as you never have been before, and you won’t regret it either, not for a minute.

I picked up other cans and read the titles written on their labels, one after another: Pharmaceutical Hallucinations, Dreams of an Opium Fiend, Delirium in a Studio (Julius had said it was based on a Delacroix painting), Scheming Gambler’s Paradise, Melomaniac, Dislocation Extraordinary, A Terrible Night, Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter, Four Troublesome Heads. Not all the hockey pucks would unspool. You can easily give up or try to soften them, then make copies as quickly as possible. It’s like Russian roulette. Once unsealed they disintegrate rapidly because the base is breaking down. Unrolling film is like following a map that might break diagonally any minute. The strips are so brittle they snap if you so much as look at them. You put the pieces back together again with mylar. Dreyfus, the American invasion of Cuba, and dismembered body parts are all mixed together. Where is the real Méliès? Does Méliès ever turn to the audience or to his workers as they hammer and paint, does he ever turn to them and say, Sorry, I don’t feel like myself. Threatened by bankruptcy and violent family members, I can no longer make sound decisions, but keep the camera rolling anyway. The mixture of despondency with bursts of gallows humor reminded me of the moments when my mother used to quote Max Lieberman’s remark on the subject of the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg gate: “You can’t eat as much as you would like to throw up.”

The next note to come in the mail was a series of cartoons, unfolding like an accordion as I slit the tape that bound them.

They were drawn on the backs of postcards, one attached to the next. The postcards were tourist attractions from Paris: the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Les Deux Magots, the Champs d’Elysees, the Musée d’Orsay, the pyramid in front of the Louvre. The cartoons on the back were drawings of Emile Zola in New York done in ballpoint pen. He went to the top of the Empire State Building, visited the Lower East Side and the Fulton Fish Market. I wouldn’t have recognized the figure and buildings; they were drawn with very simple lines, but each tableau was labeled.

Jack lived in Brooklyn. Not in my neighborhood but in a building much closer to the river. There was a parking garage on one side of it and a laundromat on the other. Above the laundromat were the offices and classrooms of a technical school, and Antonya pointed out Styrofoam heads looking down at us, wigs pinned to their scalps. To the left of the laundromat was a Mail Boxes Etc. A man strolled out of it, walked to the front of Jack Kews’s building and positioned a milkcrate with his foot so he could sit on it as he looked through his mail. I wondered if the man was Kews, but he had white hair, was clean shaven and wore a pork-pie hat. He looked our way but didn’t speak to us as we stepped into the entrance. The hall was painted half-red, half-yellow, and its mailboxes were battered, the little doors swung off their hinges. Tenants probably rented the boxes next door in order to receive mail. We pressed a buzzer labeled Kews. No one answered, but Antonya pushed the front door. It was open. We walked up five flights of stairs and knocked on number 5B.

“There isn’t going to be anyone home if he didn’t answer the front door bell.”

“It might be broken.”

I knocked softly. Antonya knocked loudly. We heard nothing, standing in silence for a few minutes until a voice from behind a door across the hall called out to us.

“Hey girlies, girlies, come over here. You looking for Jack?” Antonya jumped.

From a crack in the door we could see a face pressed against the door chain. He smiled like the Coney Island laughing boy, aggressive and intimidating, an attempt to entice and threaten at the same time.

“Jack’s not in,” he told us.

“We know.”

“Do you know where he is? He owes me money. I lent him fifty dollars. Jack’s here from London illegally, you know,” the nearly disembodied voice croaked.

“Jack went to England years ago to avoid the draft. He had a low number like two or something.” He laughed to himself. “So he left, then he came back, and now he’s here, or he was here. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he owes me money.” The man rested his chin on the chain. “Another woman was looking for him yesterday. I told her the same thing. She could have been a nofky, or a ghost sent from immigration, from the police, or she could have been his girlfriend for all I know. It’s nothing to me what happens to him now that he’s skipped out. She could have been sent by a ghost of the draft board. Hey, be all that you can be in the army.” He snickered and sang off key. He appeared to salivate, white foam collected at the corners of his mouth, and although we only saw a sliver of him, it seemed that he was completely naked.

“What did she look like?”

“Like you, the one with short hair.” Antonya, who had been standing behind me, stepped out of his line of vision, almost slamming her back against the wall beside his door so he couldn’t see her, but I was the one with short hair.

“I can’t go out regularly, see, or I’d try to find him myself. I’m in a wheelchair. Jack used to help me out when the mood suited him.” He must have been supporting himself somehow, braced on shelves or ledges on either side of the inner jambs so he could stand.

Antonya rolled up a five-dollar bill and put it up to the man’s face. He opened his mouth so the could clamp the bill in his teeth, then he turned his head to spit it out somewhere behind him.

“Why won’t you open the door?” I asked out of a perverse streak to see if he could be completely unleashed.

“Nothing doing, girlies,” he said with obvious contempt, then the door slammed in our faces, and that was that. It was getting late, and we had to get back to Alphabet.

Downstairs by the mailboxes we looked at the labels beside the buzzers. The name on 5C was Lewisohn.

“What’s a nofky?”

“A prostitute.” It was a word I hadn’t ever heard during my childhood, not that I could remember. As an adult I was driving somewhere downtown with my mother when we saw a woman in a red dress with Christmas gnomes and reindeer printed along the bottom. It might have been made from an old tablecloth.

“There’s Dell, the alte nofky. Do you remember her?”

“No.”

“She was the school secretary, but she had another life.”

“How did you know?”

“I heard.”

Then I guessed what the word meant. She said it with some sadness as if beyond meaning prostitute the word implied that anyone could end up wearing dresses made from tablecloths and think no one noticed.

The way my mother said the words alte nofky meant, as I remembered, that we all conceal something — a past, pretensions, something, and we deceive ourselves into believing that we do so with success. An alte nofky lurked inside Lewisohn, Antonya, Julius, me, the librarian in impenetrable reflective glasses. Jack Kews was a stew of hidden identities. Maybe it was time to give up on him.

When I got back to the office I checked the postmark on the last letter he’d sent me. The print was barely legible, but the zip code looked like the same code as Alphabet’s. It must have been mailed within a few blocks of the Mayflower Building. If he had gone to Spartacus, a few hours’ drive north, I couldn’t imagine when he would have mailed the last letter, but there were enough gaps in the correspondence so that I wouldn’t have been able to account for his weekly movements even if I’d saved all the envelopes. He might have had someone else do the mailing for him. He led me to believe he had been following me around for a long time whether we came from the same city or not. I shook the stack and a small postcard I hadn’t seen before fluttered to the floor.

A twelve-year-old girl goes missing in Paris after this riot. Méliès is suspected. Star Films is searched by the police who overturn volcanoes, the North Pole, and the moon looking for her.

This was written on the back of a postcard from the 1939 World’s Fair. The date was circled, and he didn’t have to tell me of its significance. Never entirely dormant, the furies stirred up by the trial were in 1939 given an opportunity to boil over again. I propped it up in front of the can containing the newly preserved A Terrible Night, in which a man was attacked by giant bedbugs. There is no peace in his bed, no possibility of sleep, only aggravation. He hits them with a broom. Tough luck. When is a bug not really a bug? My bed was haunted by an insect who sent notes, who held up a corrupting mirror, who wouldn’t let me treat the Dreyfus film as a job like any other, who wouldn’t let meaning be. To everything I did he seemed to say, you think this is precious stuff? It’s all been recycled. These shadowy, grainy figures left the refuge of the literal and abandoned the realm of the simple pictorial situation; he nudged them out. You think it’s just a strip of plastic, he seemed to be saying in his notes, think again. He loomed over the sheets, laughing and pinching. I would like to have blown up a frame of the traveler haunted by bugs and tacked it to my office door, but Alphabet wasn’t going to have a door much longer.

Dial 1-800-HISTORY.

On the television screen children in shorts and T-shirts stuck their heads into pillories while a voice overdescribed colonial forms of criminal punishment. Men wearing wigs pounded anvils, and women, also in wigs, smiled back at them. A family in tennis whites was transformed: mother and daughter swished from stable to parlor in long dresses, father and son suddenly carrying lanterns instead of camcorders, braids grown down their backs. My eye ached. I had nothing to do, so I reached for the telephone.

Thank you for calling Colonial Williamsburg. All our reservation agents are busy at the moment. We take your call very seriously. Please stay on the line. This message will not repeat.

The man next door hammered into our adjoining wall while singing along with the radio. Telephone wedged between ear and shoulder I reached for a pencil, but as I listened to him sing and as I considered the deadlines I faced at work, the idea of a colonial village where tobacco was harvested but no one smoked, a place where slaves smiled, baked bread, and walked unhindered by chains made me anxious. I’ve got you under my skin, my neighbor sang. Pocahattans played by students on summer vacation handed the villagers what looked like pemmican and peace pipes, then held out their hands and were given, in turn, strands of glass beads. The colonial family was buying the Chesapeake Bay. Terrified, I hung up the phone, then fell asleep.

Waking a few hours later I could now hear my neighbor’s television through the wall. He was watching Entertainment Live from Andrews Air Force Base, singing along with Bob Hope as if his heart would break. I didn’t want to interrupt his pleasure, but during a commercial for L’Oreal Eye Defense I banged on the wall. He turned the sound down, but it was still impossible to sleep.

I had become conscious of men in crowds, found myself turning around to see who was behind me, and felt a little haunted by the fact that Jack knew what I looked like while my image of him was blurry and vague; he refused to hold still for the camera. He knows what you look like, Antonya had said, his letters, his quotes from Man Ray’s memoirs were little fluttering baits at the end of a line. He was taunting me, terrorizing me into finding him. Jack could have been anyone, the kind of person who faded into the woodwork, going unnoticed unless you knew where to look, or he could be daring and flamboyant, right there in front of you, an irritant in the public eye all along.

Perhaps he was someone I grew up with, but I never knew him. This new possible Jack tapped me on the shoulder and jerked his thumb north, to indicate that other, much smaller city I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Had we ridden school buses together, stood in line at the Great Adventure or Storytown? Had he snickered when others called me Hawkeye, and by snickering so included himself in their group? There had been no surprise smart alecks at my school. No one who would grow up to drop notes about Méliès under my hard-to-find door. If there was someone who had pretended to be Orwell writing about the Spanish Civil War between shifts at Mr. Subb’s I think I would have known. Still, I could imagine Jack in a diner, sitting cross legged in one of the booths, shunned by everyone, even the few who protested the war. Had he been one of those who dealt drugs bought in the projects, exploded illegal fireworks, shoplifted from time to time? The boy, Jack, turns around. He’s been kicked, beaten, glasses on the ground, Orwell tossed in the gutter. He’s teased, gets angry in turn, sets fire to some derelict building in which an illegal squatter is accidentally killed. Never convicted, Orwell smiles and offers him an escape. He wears a beret to school, which is a big mistake. Life gets worse for him. The beret is grabbed, fit over a Frisbee. It flies through the air, little felt tag stiff in the breeze.

This time the note contained a Xerox of a letter that had been printed in a newspaper, but the margin had been torn off so that where it had appeared was impossible to determine.

January 13, 1969

President Richard M. Nixon

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President,

As I watched my draft card burn last night I imagined what it would be like to be an herbicide, say, Agent Orange. Okay, here we are in Vietnam, and I am a molecule of exfoliant, floating toward a banana leaf, dissolving through it, landing on a woman’s arm, eating through bone, finally resting on the ground, burning a monkey’s paw, or searing a snake as one or the other passes over me. With a wind I drift into a rice paddy, and anyone who eats me becomes a mutant and has mutant offspring for many generations. As a molecule, or if I really were a molecule, I would want to thank you for putting me to work in such an exotic setting, and I would ask you what more could I do that would be as mindlessly destructive of innocent civilians and verdant jungle? Advancing up the food chain of weaponry I might prefer to be a mine, a piece of shrapnel, a bullet or a bomb. Unleashed in the middle of a firestorm I aim my pointed head at bamboo huts because you never know, there might be tunnels to Moscow underneath. I pass through walls and limbs as if they were no more substantial than crackerjacks. I’ve never had so much fun, but I’m none of these things. My card is burnt. I flush the ashes down the toilet.

I write to accuse, to point a finger at you, Henry Kissinger, and the other architects of this degrading and inhuman war. We should let the people of Vietnam decide their own future. I am writing to you to express alarm and outrage over the war. We have no right to be there. Like the bully on the playground who gets his own way by force, not by compassion or by engendering reason among others, nothing can be won or achieved because there is nothing to win by bombing Vietnam into the Stone Age. American actions in Southeast Asia are nothing short of genocide.

Yours very truly,

Jack Kews

A man (Jack Kews?) stared at me as I looked in the window of the appliance store next door to Burrito Fresca. Children were making faces at themselves in the self-broadcast television. I stood to one side so I could watch them and myself while they rolled their eyes back into their heads, stuck out their tongues, and called each other names. There were two of them, and the one who clearly had the upper hand was quick to goad the smaller one, taunting while her friend lagged a little, mesmerized by the process of seeing herself reflected on a regular television. See, this is you. This is what you look like. Someone who resembled my idea of Jack walked behind me. I turned around quickly, but as the man crossed the street he darted around a truck. I couldn’t see where he went, and traffic prevented me from following him. By the time the truck moved, and I was able to cross the street, he was gone, leaving nothing but an afterimage. It hits you between the eye and the eyeball, Louis Kahn also wrote, but I couldn’t remember what it was. The thing that hit me between the eye and the eyeball might have been an afterimage of a running Jack Kews, might have been Méliès’s lost negatives, might have been a bottle of Wet Gate smoothing the abrasions and scratches so that everything looked as if it were shot yesterday. 1-800-HISTORY turned out to be a useless number after all.

I went back to Jack’s apartment building. I didn’t think he’d be there, and I was right, he wasn’t, but the man who had read his mail in front of the building stepped out of Mail Boxes Etc just as distractedly as he had done the last time, stumbling and looking around. The hour was the same. He looked in my direction as if he recognized me as well. It turned out he was the building’s super; he lived on the ground floor and had keys to every apartment.

“I’m looking for Kews in 5B.”

“Haven’t seen him in weeks. Did you lend him money? One of the other tenants wanted me to break the door down because he was owed.” He stuck a thumb in a belt loop of his plumber’s pants, creating structural stress on the pants. There was a distinct possibility they would fall even further, perhaps down to his ankles.

“No, but I’d like to talk to him.”

“A lot of people would like to talk to him.”

Anticipating this, I reached into a jacket pocket and handed him a twenty. Jack’s building had a way of reaching into wallets.

“You know, this is highly irregular,” the super said as he gestured for me to follow him upstairs. “But I haven’t seen him in some time. It’s worth checking out. Once we had a tenant who ate rat poison. Didn’t find the body for days, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a suicide or an accident.”

“Somebody was forced to eat poison?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Well, no, sorry. I don’t think I do.”

“Suit yourself.”

Holes had been punched in the walls and dry plaster crumbled from them, yet the surrounding surfaces seemed damp and shiny as a result of a glossy red paint job. I heard a child’s voice screaming as we approached one apartment, and I banged on the door shouting to whoever it was to stop. The super grabbed my hand and told me the screaming wasn’t what I thought it was. We reached the entrance to Kews’s apartment. Even from the outside each door in the building bore the marks of a history of bolts and screws, presumably associated with locks, installed and then removed by successive tenants.

“It was the only time anyone died while I worked in this building. There were a lot of aliens here at the time. Some of the women were forced to do things, you know what I’m saying? One woman discovered the art of rat poison and thought that was her ticket to freedom. So what I learned is, it doesn’t hurt to be nosy once in a while, but don’t bang on that door,” he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment where the screaming had come from. It was quiet now. The pants shifted about an inch lower. “If a stiff’s in here, we would’ve smelled it, but’s still worth having a look, you know.” He took a last gulp from a bottle of orange soda and deposited the empty on the floor beside Jack’s door. Taking a key from a back pocket he unlocked the door and flipped a light switch.

Jack lived in a one-room apartment with a small kitchen stuck into a kind of alcove. A bathtub with ball-and-claw feet jutted out from beside the sink, but the first thing I saw was that his bed, pushed against a wall, was wrinkled. I walked over to it, put my hand on the dented pillow while the super made a beeline for the dripping tap. The sheets still felt warm. There was only one window, and although it faced the street, light was blocked by the adjacent building whose bay windows projected further out, encroaching on the sidewalk. It was mid-afternoon and very cold. The room darkened quickly.

While the super looked under the sink I walked over to Jack’s desk, which had been positioned in front of the window. Photographs of Jack with various people and photocopies of articles had been taped to the walls. I glanced at one about POW Garwood, falsely accused of something I couldn’t make out. Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds. Radio Hanoi. . . . An article about mining strikes in England, written by Jack Kews, was tucked into a beat-up copy of Zola’s Germinal. I had to be careful the super didn’t catch me snooping. The articles were eclectic, and the walls’ contents made the room resemble that of a student writing papers for an array of classes that might not, at first glance, have much to do with one another. A jar of Wonderbond Plus glue and a staple gun lay on top of some papers, and enclosed in a paperweight was a scene of a hillside with a shovel stuck into it. When I shook the plastic bubble, snow fell. The desk served as a kitchen table as well. A plate of fried eggs and toast lay to one side, on top of a pile of books. I touched it, and to my surprise the food, too, was still warm.

“You sure you haven’t seen him?”

“I’m not always sitting out front. He could have left while I was next door picking up mail.”