Linger Awhile (2 page)

My eyesight was failing. Age-related macular degeneration was the diagnosis. The macula is that part of the eye which gives detail and depth perception. I frequently mistook flat surfaces for raised ones and shadows for substance. I always drank most of a bottle of red wine at dinner and that didn’t help. In the evening it was difficult for me to read with my reading glasses and images on the TV screen lost sharpness. In a surprising number of films there’s a bit where someone holds up a letter and I couldn’t read it unless I got up very close. If it was a video I could pause the tape but if it wasn’t I often missed crucial information. Sometimes people killed themselves or someone else after reading a letter.

I was having difficulty with colour too; the scene before my eyes sometimes seemed pale. It wasn’t cataracts – I’d already had implants for those. Dr Luzhin is my eye doctor. He looks like Lenin and strokes his goatee a lot. When I asked him about the colour problem he put drops in my eyes, sent me back to the
waiting room for fifteen minutes, then led me to the apparatus where you put your chin on the chin rest, shone lights of various colours into one eye and the other, and stroked his goatee. ‘What?’ I said.

‘There’s no change in your eyes since six months ago,’ he said. ‘This business with loss of colour, there is no defence against it. What you see is what the brain tells you you’re seeing. If the brain decides that the colour is going out of the world you’re going to see everything paler than before.’

‘Is there anything I can do about it?’

‘Get yourself a girlfriend.’

I waited and waited for word from Istvan but there was no news day after day. Then I began to see Justine Trimble where she wasn’t. If I looked out of the corner of my eye I saw her in the street, in the Underground and on buses in black-and-white. She always looked back at me as if she wanted to say something. When I looked straight ahead she wasn’t there.

24 November 2003. ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly …’ Right? General disbelief. But the Wright brothers suspended their disbelief. They believed that man
could
fly and the rest of it followed from that. Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible. Yes. I keep telling myself that. I’m Istvan Fallok and I believe that I’m going to reconstitute Justine Trimble from the magnetised particles of a videotape. I believe it because when I saw her on that video it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Wham, I was in love. Irving Goodman’s an OK guy and he’s in love with Justine too but if I can make this happen she’s going to be mine, not his.

Right, let’s get practical. Google tells me that videotape is composed primarily of three components: magnetic (metal oxide) particles, a polyurethane-based binder, and a polyester base material. Particles yes. Particles and waves. Diffraction gratings. Particles in suspension. Particles in a suspension of disbelief. Waves
of aggravation and frustration. Light comes through the grating as waves or particles. Interference patterns. Light. Justine on the video is made of light.

Wait a minute. Let’s think this thing through. Do I want to bring Justine to me or do I want to go to her? Not dead Justine but the waves and/or particles of her on the video? So if I go there, what then? Will I be the sixty-five-year-old me or will I be young like Justine? And western? With a pistol and a horse?

There was a name in my mind: Gösta Kraken. I had a copy of his book,
Perception Perceived
. I went to my shelves, stuck out my arm, and it leapt into my hand. So I knew it wanted to help. I’d flagged the page where he talks about being:

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

Thank you, Gösta. So it’s light and motion, blackness and stillness. Waves or particles? Waves
and
particles? Still, I’m thinking of it from her end. What about my getting to where she is? No good. Even if I could work out the translation of me into magnetised particles all I’d have is me stuck in
Last Stage to El Paso
. Endlessly. No, I’ve got to bring her to me. First I’ll have to scan the stillnesses and calibrate an electronic suspension of the black. Film runs at twenty-four frames per second; video at twenty-five and the black … Hang on, do I want the black? No, I don’t. Let’s back up and start again.

25.11.03. Sorry, Gösta. Can’t use you this time but maybe some other time. We’re talking about light here, not blackness. Justine on screen is particles of light. Or waves, whichever. OK, so I’ve got to get a frame with a good full-length shot of Justine, then I isolate her for transmission. How the fuck do I do that?

Went to see Chauncey Lim in D’Arblay Street. Optical novelties. All kinds of pocket-size things with lenses, keyrings that talk and buttonhole cameras. On the wall an acupuncture chart and a calendar with a photograph of a black rooster from Aunt Zophrania’s Herbals & Dreambooks Est. 1925 ‘Harlem’s Best’. The place was pretty fuggy and there was the kind of smell you might get if you opened a box of Transylvanian earth. You have to take Chauncey as you find him. I bought a fountain pen that projects a photo of Virginia
Mayo (still big in Morocco) to put him in a good mood.

‘You already have three of these,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me this time?’

I said, ‘I’m almost afraid to tell you, it’s such a crazy idea.’

He began to look interested. ‘Crazy is good,’ he said. ‘Too much not enough crazy in this world. Tell me anything, I’m very electric.’

‘You mean eclectic.’

‘That too, but I sing the body electric. I’m talking Walt Whitman here.’

‘Please don’t. Can I tell you what I want now?’

‘OK. Always you’re in a hurry, Istvan. Slow down, smell the flowers, listen to the birds.’

‘There aren’t any birds, the radiators are knocking and what I smell isn’t flowers.’

‘It’s High John the Conqueror root, I grind it up and make little incense cones out of it. This root gives power, it’s good luck, one of Aunt Zophrania’s top sellers.’

‘Right, are you going to let me tell you my problem now?’

‘Go ahead. I can see that your problem wants to become my problem.’

So I told him and he became quite excited. ‘This is top crazy,’ he said. ‘Show me the video.’

I handed him
Last Stage to El Paso
. He put it in his VCR and played it, backing it up now and then to see a scene again. ‘This is a woman I could fall in love with,’ he said.

‘First of all, she’s dead,’ I said.

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he said.

‘And I saw her first,’ I said.

‘Keep your shirt on. You want to isolate her, this is what you have to do.’ He gave me detailed instructions and I took notes.

‘Let me know what happens,’ Chauncey said as I was leaving.

‘You bet,’ I said.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘take some High John with you, you’ll want all the power you can get.’ He gave me a box of the little incense cones.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘See you.’ I hurried home and got started while everything was still fresh in my mind. With Chauncey’s instructions I converted the video to a digitised version that I could scan frame by frame. I got a JPEG of the frame I wanted, then I started up Photoshop and highlighted the background. I went to the inverse of that and got Justine with black all around her which I cut out and pasted on a blank Photoshop canvas. So far, so good.

What I had in mind was to do a small-size trial run first. In order to use a diffraction grating I devised a converter that would laserise the light from the Justine figure and aim it at the slits in the diffraction grating. The grating was something I remembered from sixth-form physics. This was a low-tech job made of cardboard and only fourteen inches high with two slits in it. I had a sheet of photographic printing paper covered with foil on a little easel about two feet away. I darkened the room, put Justine up on the screen, triggered
the laser, and uncovered the paper as the interference pattern appeared. Then I covered it again, went into the darkroom, and printed it. That gave me the particles of the interference pattern on the paper. I dissolved the paper in hydrochloric acid and then what I had on the bottom of the tray were the particles alone.

1 January 2004. Everything grinds to a halt for Christmas but I took a taxi out to Thierson & Bates Biologicals in Surrey and got some frog specimens before they closed. Chauncey Lim helped me out with the chemicals I needed and by New Year’s Eve I was ready to have a go.

I poured the particles into a test tube containing polypetides that I’d prepared from the frogs. I figured that my primordial soup would bind the particles in a suspension of disbelief and the frog DNA wouldn’t interfere with the identity of the particles. I lit the High John cones and when the room smelled lucky I zapped the soup with 240 volts. Smoke came out of the test tube and there was an electrical smell. Then Jesus Christ, there she was in the test tube in black-and-white, about four inches high. She looked scared, and stood there twisting slowly with her arms above her head because of the narrowness of the tube. As I looked at her from all angles I had a crazed feeling of power. Then I suddenly felt so sad that I began to cry. I was shaking, and with the test tube in my left hand I put my right hand behind me so I could lean on the table but I pricked my finger on the point of a scalpel. When I held up my hand a drop of blood fell into
the test tube and all at once tiny Justine blossomed into colour. She looked at me and mouthed, ‘Oh!’ Then the colour faded and with it the whole figure, ghastly in monochrome as it shrivelled into nothing. Oh, my God, the sadness! I stood there holding the test tube and looking at the emptiness where she’d been with my head spinning round on the first day of the New Year.

2 January 2004. Finding and losing! I found Justine in the lonely night-time hours when I watched westerns and drank myself to sleep. Men quick to anger, loyal unto death, fast on the draw. Horses beautiful and innocent. Women to inspire a good man and madden a bad one. Mountains and plains and rivers, canyons, arroyos, gulches and draws. Mists of morning and moons over the desert. Justine flickering in my sodden half-dreams and my forlorn hopes.

Having found her, was I now to lose her to Istvan Fallok? Was this ordained, written in the Big Book of Absurdity? I had turned to Fallok to make Justine real for me and now I knew in my heart that he was out to take her from me. The way he leered when she swung into the saddle, Oh God. Has he brought her into our reality or has he gone into hers? Wherever they are, I’ll find them and take her away from him, that bastard. Him and his high-tech treachery. Don’t go with him, Justine, I saw you first.

3 January 2004. Justine Trimble. There is that about her which moves me deeply and stirs profoundly the essential Chauncey, the inner Lim. Istvan Fallok, that creep. Every now and then he comes round and buys a Virginia Mayo pen and expects me to do anything he requires of me. Insufferable cheek. The white man patronising the yellow brother. Why then do I do that which he asks me to do? Do I need his goodwill? No, I piss on his goodwill.

Justine Trimble. The very thought of her makes my heart sing. Fallok is all wrong for her and I intend to make her mine. This is the first time I’ve put it into words but there it is. Where is he or where are they now? He said he would let me know what’s happening but I’ve heard nothing. Which means that something
is
happening. Otherwise he’d have come round to buy another pen.

I went to Elijah’s Lucky Dragon, Rosalie Chun’s restaurant in Golders Green. Rosalie’s maiden name was Cohen but she married into North Chinese
cuisine, wears iridescent cheongsams although she’s fourteen stone, and has mingled Golders Green with North China to the point where she is now to cholesterol what Charlton Heston is to rifles. I had latkes Xingjiang with sour cream. While I was doing quality belching and drinking jasmine tea Rosalie came over to my table. ‘Hi Chaunce,’ she said. ‘How’re they hanging?’

‘Uncertainly,’ I said. ‘Yourself?’

‘A day older than yesterday but not much wiser. You look troubled.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Profoundly.’

‘Woman?’

‘Yes, but it’s probably an impossible love.’

‘The best kind,’ she said. ‘Don’t move – I’ll bring you chicken soup Lucky Dragon with industrial-strength matzoh balls. This will put roses in your cheeks and yang in your schlong, guaranteed.’

‘Matzoh balls?’ I said.

‘With Yongzheng ingredients,’ she said. ‘Very secret, don’t ask.’

I partook of the soup and I felt that my probably impossible love might be negotiable. I said to Rosalie, ‘I am now spiritually refreshed and ready for whatever comes next. Thank you.’

‘What are friends for?’ she said. ‘And remember, in the immortal words of Rabbi Whatshisname from Kotzk, “If you can’t get over it, get under it.”’

‘I’ll remember that,’ I said. What I did next was go down to Istvan Fallok’s place for a butcher’s at the mad genius. I didn’t go in but through the glass I could see
him sitting with his head in his hands. There were various contraptions on his work table but no sign of Justine Trimble. So apparently no result yet.

5 January 2004. Now what? Do I even want to think about it? The idea of it puts me off with its perversity and at the same time it turns me on. I can’t get it of my mind, how the colour went out of her and she shrivelled up and became dust. That was just a little tiny Justine. With a full-size one it’s a whole new ball game. And if I do it, where do we go from there?