Paper Conspiracies. Susan Daitch

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