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,
