Volume 2 focuses on the Drifter’s subsequent exploits, namely his attempt to find a foothold in the highly secretive and clannish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled over by the enigmatic and possibly immortal filmmaker Blut Branson. In this excerpt, the Drifter watches one of Blut Branson’s films from within the Temple, a theater created specifically to show Branson’s works, in the style of Bayreuth for Wagner’s operas.

By this point in the Retrospective, which has a strict no reentry policy, meaning that all films must be watched in the gathering daze of those shown before, I’m losing track of the beginnings and endings, and my critical faculties are fading. It’s starting to feel like one ultra-long film, which I suspect is the Programmer’s intention.

Now I’m watching a pastoral, old-timey version of Dodge City, a little Shtetl-like, as Dodge City’s past can sometimes seem – as if the Old Country were located not overseas but deep in the Heart of America – when a Wanderer appears in Town, stealing in under milky cloud cover just before dawn, skulking among the pastures like a warlock in a Hungarian folktale: gaunt and black-cloaked, face obscured under a wide-brimmed felt hat. The camera hangs back as he takes a few preliminary turns around the pens that hold The Dodge City Farm Animals – pigs, sheep, cows, and goats by the looks of it, though I have the impression that some animals are playing others, as is often the case in Branson films, “casting is 99% of Directing” being one of Branson’s favorite phrases, if Branson on Branson is to be believed.

After pausing in what looks like contemplation for a moment, the Wanderer leans in to whisper something in one of the animals’ ears. As soon as he’s finished, the animal – a goat, by the looks of it – yawns exaggeratedly and falls over. At this point, I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be dead or sleeping.

***

Dead, as it turns out.

Over the next few days, the film reveals the method that the Slaughterer (now that we know what he is) uses: he simply strides up to one of the farm animals on those long legs of his, whispers in its ear, and stands back to watch it gently, even peacefully, keel over dead.

“What’s he whispering?” is, of course, the none-too-subtle subtext of the film at this point – the phrase itself is whispered among the townspeople, who always populate the backgrounds of Branson’s films, played by actual Dodge City citizens, naturally, though of course they appear more squalid and haunted-eyed than most actual people around here, even those culled from the Annex.

“What’s he whispering?” Indeed. I whisper the phrase in my seat during a montage in which ten or twelve animals are killed in quick succession, though, this being a Branson film, I know better than to expect a concrete answer by film’s end, which, since the films are all shown back-to-back, isn’t a moment I have especially high hopes of even being able to identify as such.

In fast montage, the slaughterer – known now as “the Harmless Slaughterer,” a phrase whose ambiguity doesn’t quite dawn on me until I reflect on it later, once the trance of the film has at long last been broken – whispers in the ears of all the farm animals of Dodge City, causing them to keel over one by one, until the entire stock of the Town has been reduced to meat, which, according to five or six interview testimonials included in this section of the film, is the sweetest, butteriest, and most delicious meat ever tasted in these parts.

“Like goat-lobster,” says an old man in overalls with an eye-patch. “Not that I’ve tried the real thing.”

***

The only problem, of course, is that once all the animals are dead, none are left to kill. At this point, to no one’s surprise but to everyone’s disappointment, the Harmless Slaughterer departs, into the same grey cloudiness he emerged from, seemingly never to return. It reminds me of those old-fashioned stories in which a false prophet emerges from the wilderness to tell a Town the End is nigh, and thus that they should go ahead and kill all their livestock and spend all their money and commit whatever Incest they’d been holding themselves back from, and then furtively departs when it turns out the End is a bit further off than initially projected.

Dodge City reverts, out of necessity, to a vegetarian diet, at least until new breeding calves and sheep can somehow be obtained. The memory of the meat produced by the Harmless Slaughterer grows in the minds of the populace, passed down through the generations in another fast montage, “to the point where” (according to the film’s narrator) “it could only be described as Manna from Heaven, so sweet and succulent that no latter-day meat could ever do it justice.”

***

Indeed, this latter-day meat – once a few scraggly specimens are culled from the nearby woods and hastily domesticated by a cabal of desperate farmers – is stringy, tough, and grey. Worst of all, the blood and fear of its death throes – carried out in a cloud of meth by frantic slaughterers in the old slaughterhouse – is so apparent in every bite that few Dodge City citizens can stomach it, ravenous though they surely are.

The people get to wishing the Harmless Slaughterer would return, which, in due time (this being a film, and thus in large part a wish fulfillment machine) he does. He strides back into Town, visibly aged though clad in the same black cloak and felt hat as before, totally impervious to the wreckage left in his wake, and gets back to work.

Or he would have, if he’d deemed any of the animals worth slaughtering. But clearly he doesn’t. “Not a single viable specimen in the lot,” he says to the camera, speaking in what, if I’m not mistaken, is Branson’s voice. “Vicious, dumb, half-feral,” he says, more to himself than to the camera now, staring at the muddy ground he’s standing on.

Thus it comes to be that he spends his days lounging by the fountain in Sacrifice Square, whittling a stick, speaking to no one. Summoned but unable to get down to work.

No one, that is, until three teenagers – two boys and a girl, cousins perhaps – creep out to where he sits and settle in beside him. For a moment, no one speaks.

The tension in the theater is heavy.

Then one of them, the girl, clears her throat and says, “Sir, we can’t help but ask … what did you whisper to those animals all those years ago? To make them taste so good?”

The Harmless Slaughterer smiles and motions for her to draw near. Clearly, he’s not going to respond except by example.

High on the fearlessness of youth, she takes him up on his offer. Brushing her hair from her ear, she takes a deep breath and presses it up to his mouth. He licks his lips and places them against her cartilage, and then begins to transmit whatever it is.

He leans back as she falls dead with a relaxed, slightly lewd smile on her face.

Entranced, unable to stop himself, one of the boys submits to the same fate, falling on top of her.

Then – this is clearly the climax of the film – the third boy leans in to listen to the Harmless Slaughterer’s message, but, instead of keeling over, he smiles, deviously I believe, and wipes his ear with his palm, as if to cleanse it of grease or oil, and kneels on top of his dead friends or cousins.

For a moment, he prays.

Then he begins to eat of their doubtlessly sweet flesh, tearing into their necks and bellies with his teeth and fingernails while the Harmless Slaughterer watches from above, neither perturbed nor impressed. The meat looks soft and supple, like slow-cooked barbecue, and I don’t mind saying that I experience a pang of hunger, here in the theater.

When he’s eaten his fill, the boy looks at the camera, motioning it in for a close-up, and says, lips covered in blood and flesh, “And this is one of the innumerable ways in which I became Blut Branson, uniquely vested, as I am, with private knowledge of God’s Will and the inner strength to utterly disobey it.”

Then, with a wink, he leans in and whispers in the Harmless Slaughterer’s ear. The film ends with the Harmless Slaughterer falling over onto the pile of partially eaten bodies while the boy who has now revealed himself as Blut Branson steals his hat and cloak and walks into the distance, vanishing into the same gloom the Harmless Slaughterer emerged from. Like the Harmless Slaughterer, he will eventually reemerge to entrance and perhaps annihilate Dodge City all over again, in his own time and in whatever manner he sees fit.

Until then, we wait for his next film to begin.

The post A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2 Excerpt: The Harmless Slaughterer appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Volume 2 focuses on the Drifter’s subsequent exploits, namely his attempt to find a foothold in the highly secretive and clannish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled over by the enigmatic and possibly immortal filmmaker Blut Branson. At this point in the story, the narrator is sleeping in Branson Mansion, the home of the aforementioned director Blut Branson, who’s been missing for some time. The narrator—an aspiring filmmaker himself—dreams up a movie, which then, through insidious means, enters the Collective Dodge City Consciousness.

I come to, spluttering in the bathwater. I want to stay in, but I feel so woozy, and so unsure of my identity, that I can tell it’s not a good idea.

So, grudgingly, I towel off, put on a robe I find hanging behind the door, and shuffle down the hall to the Master Bedroom.

In here, I pull the robe off and flop naked and still damp onto Branson’s gigantic foam mattress. It caves in to accept me, and I’m deep in a dream almost right away.

***

In the dream, I – as Blut Branson, of course – have just finished directing my first movie.

It stars a pedophile on a regimen of highly specialized psychotropic drugs. The moral premise is that pedophiles and child molesters are radically different beasts: both have the same innate, societally abhorrent urge, but one resists it with all its might, while the other gives in, either gladly or under substantial internal duress. The first category, according to the film’s drowsy narrator, “is to be commended for its efforts to deny its basic wiring,” while the second, “is to be punished to the full extent of the Law.”

The name of the male lead is George; the female lead’s called Chloe.

George, a pedophile of the type that’s determined to deny its wiring, has been prescribed a trial dose of a psychotropic drug designed to induce temporary hallucinations in which adults appear to him as children, so that he might perform the typical sex act with a consenting adult while at the same time accessing the sense of peace and inner wholeness that only sex with a child can offer him.

The plot twist comes early: Chloe — who, until now, has been unaware of her boyfriend’s practice of selectively transforming her into a little girl — accidentally ingests one of his pills, left out on the bathroom sink, believing it to be one of the anti-depressants that she has long insisted she doesn’t take but in fact always leaves out on the bathroom sink in order to take just before sex, when she needs them most.

When she returns to the bedroom and witnesses George transforming into a little boy before her eyes, she is naturally (not being a pedophile herself) shaken up. She pulls away, desperate to find her bearings in a room that’s closing in on her, fast ceasing to feel like home.

She crawls backward as her boyfriend — fully-aroused at the sight of her as a child, still under the impression that all is proceeding as usual — pursues, knocking her into a bookcase which falls on them both, rendering them unconscious for a five-minute period of ambient screen time.

***

When their consciousnesses resume, the two of them have entered an almost sweet regression into early childhood infatuation, though fraught in this case with the memory of intercourse rather than a faint, unvoiced premonition thereof.

I can tell that not only do they look like children to each other, but, thanks to their shared perspective on the other’s regression, they now feel like children as well.

Like a co-ed sleepover gone slightly off the rails, I think.

***

The middle act finds them in a state close to bliss, living in their apartment as if it belonged to a much older cousin, someone cool and grown-up and out of Town, who would be glad to guide them into the mysteries they’re just starting to long to explore, if only he or she were present.

They raid the pantry for Frosted Flakes and Swiss Miss, acting like they’re on the world’s longest snow day and nothing’s impossible.

My dreaming attention phases in and out during this section, as I’m both watching and Directing the film at the same time now. Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, while part of me fears it never will or that it already has. I’m wondering if the pill she took will eventually wear off and she’ll be forced to watch George revert to being a man, like some terrible switch-out has occurred and she’s now in a situation she very much shouldn’t be in, while he goes on taking the pills so that she remains child-sized in his eyes, or if they’ll both grow addicted, endlessly re-upping their newfound perspective on one another, until one or both of them OD’s, if that’s possible in this case, or until their supply runs out, which surely one day it must.

Perhaps an excess of these pills will culminate only in a mutual regression to apparent infancy, each squinting in the dark to make the other out, like those fetuses in the brine tank from the Unholy Family premiere.

***

What actually happens comes from further out of left field, drawing me back out of myself for the third act: Chloe is so overcome with terror at the conflicted nature of her relationship with this man she sees as a boy that she becomes convinced he has killed her Father:

THE ONLY REASONABLE CONCLUSION SHE COULD’VE COME TO!!

Reads an unexpected title card in the center of the screen.

This Dead Father, the narrator informs us, is none other than the adult-George, the man she used to live with and now cannot find.

Falling into her psychic disturbance, the boy-George mimics her fear, behaving as though his mother, Chloe, is also gone, replaced by this girl-child he can’t help but lust after, despite the competing depth of his desire to wail in her arms.

The memory of their parents lingers in the apartment, growing so oppressive it forces them out into the hallway.

***

Now the climactic journey begins: they fall to roaming the massive apartment complex, charging from room to room, knocking on doors, squeaking in baby voices at the neighbors, begging to be taken in or given a clue as to the nature of their orphanhood:

ALONE AND UNLOVED!!

Reads another title card.

By this point, they’re convinced that they’re brother and sister, on the trail of a supreme mystery.

It’s a tribute to my generosity of spirit, as a Director, that I never have them turn hostile and assign blame to one another. They remain united in their search, convinced that a tragedy has befallen them both in equal measure, scouring the building from top to bottom, then spilling out into Dodge City, off the screen, which remains blank, since the dream has ended.

***

As I sleep, I hear them knock on my door, as I knew I eventually would. It’s either them, I think, or else it’s Blut and his Southeast Asian mistress.

Either way, I resign myself to my fate and open the door, saying, “Come in, come in. Why don’t you sit down for a while?”

They do, still naked on towels on the footstool I’ve set out for them, looking exhausted and shaken up. I let them sit like this for a long time, the TV silent between us, as I put the kettle on to boil, though I have no teabags or instant coffee to offer.

I wait for the boiler to click before venturing to ask what I’ve wanted to ask since they arrived, which is, “Got any more of those pills?”

I’m afraid they’re about to say, “What pills?” but instead they nod and each hands me one, from separate vials, like they’d each had their own prescription all along.

“Are you our Father?” they ask, and I realize, with the pill on my tongue, that their doses are wearing off. Soon I’ll see them as children but they’ll see me and each other as the adults that none of us wants to be.

“Not for long,” I answer, getting up and taking a new pill from each of their vials, putting one on each of their tongues like a communion wafer and taking the kettle off the boiler, pouring three mugs of hot water for us to wash them down with.

The post A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2 Excerpt: Regression Pills appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: What writers or stories have influenced you and your fiction writing? 

Nicholas Rombes: Growing up I loved Ray Bradbury and have a wonderful memory of the first time I found his shelf at our local bookstore. This would have been in the mid-‘70s and the covers of the paperbacks meant so much, too. The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, The October Country. There was one short story in particular, “The Veldt,” which I think I read in The Illustrated Man, that held—and holds—such sway over my imagination. In college there were several books that shook me to the core, especially McTeague, by Frank Norris. The novel is so realistic and brutal that it feels almost supernatural, as if to suggest that if you look close enough at our own world without blinking it will reveal itself in all its alien qualities. There are monsters among us. You don’t need to off this planet to find aliens. They are us. The other book was Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, which just beautifully takes you into another person’s life and world and I think was the first time I felt how the power of words could make you cross out of your own life bounded by your own experiences and enter imaginatively into the world of another person whose life is so much different from yours.

Other books that shaped my writing—especially the Laing novel—include Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart, Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants, Brian Evenson’s Last Days, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman, and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. And there are three books of poetry that just gutted me and cleared space to move forward: Dana Levin’s In the Surgical Theatre, Olena Kalytiak Davis’s And Her Soul Out of Nothing, and most recently Cynthia Cruz’s In the Glimmering Room.

WFR: How would you define or describe your personal aesthetic as a writer, in your own words?

NR: I write what I would love to read. I’m very fortunate that I have the time to write, and I don’t take that gift—time—lightly. When it’s all clicking and coming together on the page there is nothing like it. It’s an adventure to fall into the narrative world as you are creating it and it’s in those moments that the typing can’t come fast enough to contain that feeling of falling. I revise a lot at the line level, beginning each day looking back over the previous day’s pages and circling back to words or passages that sound off. That’s especially important for a novel like Laing, which was written over the period of 20+ years. Just trying to keep, as a writer, in the moment of the book itself requires entering into the writing process each day so you don’t loose the atmosphere of the book.

WFR: How did the The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing come about? When did you write it? Where did you get the idea for it?

NR: The Laing novel is something I began in the early ‘90s, at Penn State. I had gotten into a knife fight and stupidly treated my own wounds rather than going to the hospital. It was a month of transformation and on the other side of that I began to write what would become Laing. The section “The Story of A. (Laing’s Digression” dates from that time. The idea came from wondering what it would be like if some of the directors I admired had made films from outside the genres they typically worked in. What if, for instance, David Lynch directed a war film set in the 1940s? That was the initial idea. I also was interested in the idea of misremembering and how we seem to be losing the ability to do that in the digital age with all its archives. For most of my life the films I saw as a child and young man weren’t easily available for repeat viewing and in my memory they became different—sometimes just slightly different—from what they were. I probably saw the original 1968 Planet of the Apes when I was eight or nine, sometime around 1973 or ’74. It would have been on WTOL-TV in Toledo, which ran a program in the afternoons called “The Big Show” that featured movies (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Hombre, etc.) edited for television. I didn’t see it again until recently—clips are available, like everything, just a click away online—and of course it was much different than what I had remembered. I preferred the way I remembered that film as opposed to the way it really was, and I was interested in exploring this gap in the book.

WFR: I noticed that most of your previous work is nonfiction. When and why did you decide to transition to fiction instead? 

NR: I’ve written fiction that I’ve never sent out for a long time, and published some poetry and short stories off and on, but the transition to fiction began in earnest with the Laing novel and, later, with A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (Bloomsbury, 2009), a non-fiction book that nevertheless has an alter ego author—Ephraim P. Noble—who rails against punk and writers “like me” and who took on a life of his own. I found his voice liberating, and that’s when I began serious revisions on Laing, which had expanded to over 200,000 words before I took some major surgical tools to it and winnowed it down to its white hot core of around 60,000 words.

WFR: Film plays a central role in The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing so I was wondering if you could point us to some films that you’d recommend for those of us who enjoyed the book or perhaps some films that influenced your work.

NR: I love genre films because the best of them offer sheer entertainment that often disguises bigger, deeper ideas. I don’t mean self-consciously generic films like Interstellar, but smaller ones like John Carpenter’s They Live, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, or Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. Through the ready-made scaffolding of genre (science fiction, horror, the road movie) films like find a way to use that scaffolding to explore provocative ideas. And there is nothing better than getting lost in a film from a country that you’ve never visited or know little about. For me, four films by the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa—Cure (1997), Charisma (1999), Pulse (2001), and Doppelganger (2003)—embody the uncanny like no other films I can think of. The familiar made unfamiliar. And the taken-for-granted customs and tics and rituals of Japanese society add another level of unfamiliarity that’s disorienting the best sort of way. I return to these Kurosawa films again and again because I feel like I’m missing something in the smallest of things, the gestures between characters, the setting of a table for dinner, small talk on a roof overlooking a city. All these small moments are both routine and utterly alien.

WFR: Pulse (aka Kairo) is one of my favorite movies but I haven’t seen Kurosawa’s other films.

NR: Cure is definitely the one to see. The other two–Doppelganger and Charisma–are both excellent but the mood is not as singular as in the other two.

WFR: I know your interest in films has influenced your fiction but what about your interest in punk rock, Nirvana, the Ramones, and music in general? Any albums you’d recommend?

NR: Writing about punk was a remarkable experience as I came to appreciate the material conditions of music as I hadn’t before. Craig Leon, who produced the Ramones’s first album, talked about the technical side of trying to capture the energy and feeling of the band’s live performances without having the album “sound” live. The mic placement, track order, sound image—all these considerations and more created the sparky feeling of a live performance while still retaining the big studio sound. Details like that somehow make the music richer without demystifying it. The DIY spirit of punk has been such an inspiration for thousands of people, including me, for whom writing a novel is very much a DIY enterprise. There is something very open and democratic about the punk ethos and learning about it in detail for the 33 1/3 Ramones and Cultural Dictionary of Punk books was an inspiration.

WFR: What’s next for you?

NR: I’m blessed to be a professor and that keeps me plenty busy. I love teaching and the remarkable exchanges between what I know and what my students know. The classroom is not a static space but an open, dynamic one and when everything’s working just right it feels like the luckiest place on the planet to be. Non-teaching wise I’m working with the film production wing of Two Dollar Radio to bring my screenplay, The Removals, to life as a movie. There’s a wonderful set of collaborators working on it, including author Grace Krilanovich (The Orange Eats Creeps) and musician Mike Shiflet. I’m also at work on novel number two, The Insurgent, about a woman tasked with destroying an object that, let’s say, doesn’t react kindly in the face of its destruction.

The post Interview with Nicholas Rombes appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Image by mannyisdead on deviantart

The following is an excerpt from the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes. It is reprinted with the author’s permission. Be sure to check out our interview with Rombes as well. — The Editors

Laing is not so good at transitions. As soon as he finishes describing Destroyer he starts in on another film, Black Star. At the time I chalked this up to his age, but even then I knew there was something else at work, and that Laing’s rough transitions between films—his inability or unwillingness to provide connective tissue—was really the equivalent of the rough jump cuts in the films he loved, the films he loved so much he had to destroy, and that my own desire to fill the void of her loss (a void that had nonetheless given my life its shape) was the very reason I had come out here to find Laing as if somehow he could replace the blank and final fact of her death with something else, some mystery, the mystery that her life was or would have been had she lived. The earth is stuffed with the dead. This I understand. In a perverse way, I suppose, I had refused to be sentimental about the death of my daughter. I had been deep into Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette during that time, and there was a line that was so powerful that for many years it extinguished all other belief: “A new creed became mine—a belief in happiness.” Lucy Snowe writes this as she is falling in love with someone she knows she cannot love and I can say this now, after exiting the dangerous orbit of Laing: I had not loved my daughter fully in order to protect myself from what I feared most: her loss.

“Black Star,” Laing says, “was simply too close to the truth. It had to be destroyed. The film was shot and is set in the ‘80s but it used 16 mm Eastman Kodak stock from the ‘40s. While the magenta and yellow dyes that form the image fade in other stocks, the Kodak stock from that era is persistent, so the film has a weird vibrancy to it, so strong and intentional, if that’s the right word, that it’s almost like it’s the film that’s watching you, rather than the other way around. ” There’s a sadness or a false sadness as he says this, a lilt in his voice, and while at the time it seemed to be rehearsed I’ve come now to believe that describing the movies to me involved a genuine loss on Laing’s part. I’d go so far as to say that it was a slow method of suicide.

The knife-shaped sliver of sunlight coming through Laing’s motel room window is there on the floor moving and slowly elongating (though he and I can’t see this happening) like a weapon made from light. I remembered something that had happened after I first arrived in Wisconsin at my own hotel not far from here a week prior to meeting Laing. I had gone to a small tavern across the black river. The waitress—thinking back on it now—resembled an older version of the waitress Laing described from the Destroyer film, wearing the yellow server’s outfit and looking so ravaged and thin as if in her mind there was a continuously running blast furnace. Of course it wasn’t the actual waitress from the film because I hadn’t seen Destroyer, and yet because I hadn’t seen it I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her, as if somehow she, or the phantom possibility of her, had leaked into my life just prior to Laing’s recollection of a movie that featured her as a bit character. No matter, there I found myself at the tavern where a version of the Destroyer waitress brought me my drinks in a ritual that was absurdly formal, as if I couldn’t fetch them from the bar myself, or as if I needed a new white napkin with each glass of beer and in fact it was this last detail—about the napkins—that led to our brief and cryptic conversation, one that I won’t repeat here except to say that it touched on the local children who had disappeared and who had been the subject of the news reports and flyers stapled to telephone poles and even one small billboard along the road that pictured a heavily pixillated face of a young girl with the words FIND ME next to her face. She said that she understood like only a mother can (but what about a father? I wondered) the void of losing a child like that and the terror of not being able to shut off the part of your brain that speculates on the details and that my journey to and from Laing’s motel was much more complicated and treacherous than it appeared.

“Black Star begins with a color-saturated Polaroid that fills the screen,” Laing says at last, and with a sort of stupid authority that I would come to understand as a form of concealment. “It’s Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most coherent film, as if he had decided to make a movie whose style went against his every instinct as a director, or as if he had split into two men, one who directed the incoherent elephants-battling-elephants sequence in Tusk (1980) and another who directed Black Star which, despite its madness, is grounded in reality. Which is to say that it’s absurd, but absurd in a way that’s familiar. The Polaroid is of someone crouched next to what appears to be an archeological dig, pointing into a shallow pit and smiling, as if he had just unearthed an artifact. He looks to be of college age, or maybe a little older. He’s in a desert, and the light is yellow. His dark hair is windblown. The Polaroid is accompanied by this voice over: ‘Diego was into the distribution of goods, and the acquisition of labor. In this way he acquired slaves, used them to produce distributable goods, and acquired more slaves.’

It’s voiced by a woman—Diego’s girlfriend or wife?—who has a slight southern accent. You picture her telling this story sitting on the back stoop of some remote cabin, smoking a cigarette, as an owl watches her from the woods. The way she says slaves, it sounds like slayves, the ay coming from the very back of her throat. Then the screen goes black for a few seconds before the Polaroid appears again, this time blown up so that what Diego’s pointing toward is at the center of the screen. What he’s pointing at doesn’t matter though because it’s his finger that draws our attention, bent at a weird angle, an impossible and painful angle, as if broken. And tattooed on the back of his hand is what appears to be a small black star.

“At least that’s how I remember it,” Laing says, as if there’s anyone to question how he remembered it, or as if to distract me from the sliver of sun shaped as a knife which has now taken on an orange hue, a persistent orangeness that suggests a secret passageway beneath the motel to a furnace so enormous that it could only be understood in terms of Miltonic Hell. “I saw the film only once, on late-night cable, in a distant country where I didn’t speak the language. I had been sent by the university in Pennsylvania to Warsaw, of all places, to learn about the latest methods in humidity stabilization as it applied to microfiche and other silver-gelatin and vesicular film-based storage devices. This was in the spring of 1987, or the fall of 1988. It was the first English I had heard in days, and so I watched it straight through. The story was convoluted and hard to follow but just when it verged on the ridiculous some small dark moment kept the film frightening enough to keep watching.

“It turns out that the kid in the Polaroid—Diego—has been sent to Mexico to live with an aunt after his parents were killed in an auto accident. The aunt, who attempts to seduce him, is a former model who goes around her apartment in a pink silk robe and with rollers in her hair and a cigarette whose ashes she taps into the clay flower pots scattered around the apartment. Diego runs away, working various jobs at the tourist hotels up and down the coast of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, and where he eventually befriends a rich, childless couple from Germany whom he manages to con, after an elaborate weeks-long performance that begins innocently enough but that ends with an act of violence that leaves stains on the walls that, in another setting and another context, could be viewed as abstract art. The movie suggests that Diego discovers that the couple are Nazis, not neo-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers or far-right extremists but actual Nazis, which is impossible because it’s the mid-1980s, and yet when Diego discovers their Nazi uniforms in the hotel room closet on a rack hidden behind the main closet rack it’s clear the uniforms aren’t antique or vintage but new, new but worn, so it’s not like they’re collectors. They actually wear these things. And this shot—as Diego parts with both hands the first set of hanging clothes to reveal, behind them in the closet, the Nazi uniforms with their bright red armbands and the black swastikas (which seem to be in motion, as if marching through history)—this shot, especially, looks as if it was filmed not just on film stock from the 1940s, but in the 1940s. Just how he escapes their hotel room with over one-hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly clear but I do remember that in the next scene he’s in disguise, or else time is supposed to have passed and he’s grown older. He’s gone deeper south yet into the remote mountains north of Tarija, Bolivia.

“Years pass in the movie. Maybe a decade. We’re in the 1990s now because Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box,’ probably unlicensed, plays on the soundtrack. The transitions don’t seem linear. It’s as if the movie was edited by people who have a mixed-up or perverse sense of time. Next thing you know, Diego is the owner of three indigenous Bolivians—two men and a woman—who look like their costumes (such as they are) were designed by someone with a poor memory of those anthropological photos of tribesmen and women from 1970s issues of National Geographic. We assume Diego has purchased them with the money filched from the Nazi couple. The movie uses English subtitles when the slaves talk in what sounds like a made-up, mixed-together language of Spanish, Quechua, and Tacana, but the subtitles are riddled with spelling errors, and Diego’s name is spelled at least three different ways. There is a quickly edited, heavy-handed sequence (really the only Jodorowsky-like part of the entire film) that I think is supposed to depict the slaves’ increasing love and devotion to Diego, although maybe it’s intended as a metaphor for hegemony itself: how the oppressed often internalize the very values of the oppressors thus becoming compliant in their own disastrous fates. In one shot, a naked slave smashes his iron ankle chains with a stolen hammer and instead of fleeing or using the hammer on the unarmed Diego, he drops it and embraces Diego with tears in his eyes. ‘My master, mi padre,’ he says, sobbing.

“One morning, Diego—who has grown a full beard and looks like you’d imagine a character might in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel—wakes up to find a letter pinned to his nightshirt. The letter—shown in close-up and read in voice-over by the same woman’s voice that first introduced us to the Polaroid of Diego—is, in effect, a ransom note for a kidnapped German priest who had been in Bolivia to establish an orphanage. Diego has no idea who delivered the letter and, worse yet, has never heard of the priest. He goes outside and there’s a terrible screech in the forest trees and Diego watches as an enormous bird attacks what appears to be a brown sloth which, after a struggle, tumbles crashing through the branches to the forest floor. Diego understands, we are made to see in a close-up of his troubled, sweaty face, that to use his slaves to rescue a priest would be the sort of culminating paradox that his life had tilted toward and the particulars of such a rescue-action would make his mark on history. The next morning, swatting away the flies, he inspects the base of the tree and finds the sloth’s body, already shredded and mostly devoured.

“’Kill them all, including the priest.’ That was the deal, as Diego understood it, ‘them all’ referring to the nameless others who had also been kidnapped so as to disguise the fact that the priest was the real target. And how to recognize the priest? The slaves would recognize him, the slaves in the aluminum canoe pulling across the river in strokes. The priest scarred by acne and humbled by one leg shorter than the other, from childhood polio, his pretext for a life defined by self-pity.

The movie switches back to the present and goes quiet as Diego and his three slaves navigate the wide, glassy, green river deeper into the hot jungle. The strong current pulling time itself downward into the river-bottom muck. The peeling bark on the shore. The fungal, persistent stench of decaying jungle. A grouping of sloths in a tree, a congress of fur and shiny brown marble eyes. The film turning into a nightmare, a real out-and-out nightmare. This is all shot from the point of view of the boat, and we see as the metal and twig cabin on the river bank comes into view where the priest and the others are held. There’s a smash cut and suddenly the assault on the cabin is underway. Images on the screen burst forth like explosions. The camera is in on the action, its movement as violent as what’s happening on the screen. The cabin, of course, is not well-guarded, as the whole point of the plan was for the kidnappers to allow the priest and the other hostages to be murdered during the so-called rescue.”

Laing stops here. He stands up from the table, untucks his shirt, and takes a small red object that had been attached with white adhesive or hospital tape somewhere on his lower back. It’s about five inches long and is shaped like a cone, narrowing to a sharp point at one end. He sets it on the table. This doesn’t come across as a threatening gesture, as you might expect, but rather a protective one. I’m somehow grateful and relieved to see the object there before us.

Of course, I would deeply regret not leaving—not escaping—at that moment, when I was still capable of taking such action.

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