Paper Conspiracies. Susan Daitch

      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