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
