PATA OPTICS
PATA OBTICS
Lonny is a friend of mine from childhood. I hadn’t spoken to him for many years. A few weeks ago he phoned me and began the conversation with a sentence we had engineered on an evening forty years before with the idea that by repeating it at a future date we would be transported back to that very evening. Besides this deliberate intention of ours the evening had nothing to recommend it over many others arguably mercifully elided. We thus fabricated a time machine. Such an average night furnished its own control as nothing else but this device could have opened the banal hours. As it happens, I had also forgotten the phrase, but with his assistance I managed to assemble more of that evening than I would have suspected could be brought to mind. Summoned were blunted needles of sea fog on my cheek-I suppose nearly sacred such verisimilitude will appear to those at death’s foyer where all becomes shadow-and a profane sludge, highly personnel, including my lost hat.
Lonny had the most intensely impersonal, bibliographic and discursive memory I have ever encountered. His could not be said to be a biography but instead a vive morte-a still life-a prosecutor’s presentation of physical evidence. Its chronology and documentation was so complete and cross referenced that any movement beyond an arbitrarily given incident became impossible. The archive was omnivorous, wolfing down the present. To be fair, wolfing down describes his avidity; his thoroughness is best compared to ants carrying off a picnic.
His rage for documentation included movies, television shows, musicals, phone numbers, and products and objects made numinous by their punctual appearance at the chosen moment. Actually, these crystallizations were the fascination. Living tissue goes rancid. The chemistry is complex as it involves the ethereal or impalpable and the terms to reference are ‘redundant’, ‘disappointment’, ‘diminished expectation’, ‘boredom’ etc. The task is to capture the esters from this decay. The raveling deathless in the breathing membranes.
But for a coincidence in pathology, it would have been impossible for us to ever become friends. The same flaccid fever smoldered in us. Starting when we were six and continuing until our early teens, we two-and only we two-played imaginary games that could last for days. Taking characters from comic books or movies we walked spellbound about his house and backyard traducing every object at hand to our purpose. Sometimes, Lonny would tape record us while in character; his dad was a furious collector of the intangible in his own right, always the first with moving picture camera, Hi Fi, color TV and tape recorder.
Lonny became more sentient or nurtured his obsessions more trenchantly than I did. My preoccupations scattered haphazard, teasing and haunting and riddling from shadow and glint, while Lonny coddled the dream state using all the technology coming available from the information age’s dream mills.
He worked as a clerk in a state government office. This job was merely an adjunct, a clam’s protruding snout, to his real life, that was conducted behind drawn curtains. Nights until the skim milk lees of dawn, he filed and played his thousands of films. He followed threads of inquiry into black market alleys and bootleggers’ labs. The internet eventually provided him an astral entrance into the thickening ether. Millions assembled avatars from their ravenous daydreams, emptying themselves into alternative lives acted at night in internet games. Lonny’s was a private endeavor and a homage untainted by megalomania.
Through decades I stayed in sporadic touch with my friend by telephone, asking him for lists of movies to see and getting updates on family and mutual friends. He always recommended obscure films, second features at matinees fifty years before, some that he had seen as a kid and had wedged themselves into his dreamscape, others that were the issue of academic searches or were gleaned from whispers or loopy raves. They were low budget affairs even for the times, a bee in the bonnet of writer and director, a first and last shiver of artistic aspiration. They always failed by overreaching, by piety and didacticism, but a true daemon drove them. Though they had been forgotten and finding existing copies took archeology, somewhere while viewing they’d spook you, hairs stiffening on the nape. They were the stuff of nightmare and childhood translation.
By the time I heard from him his marriage had been dissolved for years. It faded gradually until the actual rupture never involved legal papers. His wife returned home to nurse her sister. Now retired, he had moved, animated by a glorious ambition. He was a man in his late sixties and he was late for a very important date. He had limited funds-an inheritance he split with his wife and a civil servant’s pension. The collapsing economy collaborated. Entire neighborhoods had become ghost towns. His phone call directed me to such a sere scrape in Los Angels, steps from the river and a scant three miles from civic center.
The desert was reclaiming it. Like precipitation from a broken hourglass, gritty drifts hunkered along the lee side of buildings. City services were largely suspended. You could continue here, obscure and fugitive, favored with benign neglect, shuffling and mulling in stupor. The denizens tended potted geraniums and rusty-leaved squash patches, flickers of color in the bleached stucco maze. I barely reached the address I had been given. The directions were too pointed for my mood. I had a vague preference to relinquish and just bathe in the ambient posthumous sentiment, a balm for regret and longing.
I supposed it a defrocked store-front church because spray painted in Spanish was a name I translated as “holy fountain of light”. But, the lettering was desultory and done without conviction and may have been graffiti. Maybe, if I were to wander through this quarter, I would find these illuminations on razed gas stations and dumpsters marking the pilgrimage of a poetic vandal or an evangelical madman lifting Jerusalem from the dust.
A hidden key allowed me entrance. It was a cavernous space, an industrial grade construction of concrete floors and cinder block walls. Skylights leaked piss-colored sunlight through tarry plaque. It had the acrid poignancy of a city dump, a dump’s becalming and its Sargasso vortex. He had found his spot. In this complete emptiness defended by bunker stone against attrition by even the paler emptiness without, his project might succeed. He would build a time machine and its subtle product would reveal itself perfect and untarnished. As he worked, it would materialize its own means within the sidereal ether.
He would hodge-podge. His direct antecedents were movie adaptations of H.G. Wells’ novels. Machines and technology ideated by literary woolgathering and then facilitated by machines that incarnated metaphysical animus, light and sound. His was not the physique or character to rout awe with a saber; let surrogates shoulder fear and trembling and push the capstan raises the perishing soul. Lighter and less fraught burden was his aim. The sweeter surrender, even detour or dodge that might be chosen, the frolic of gossamers but tentatively alit, these the graces, these theater and art, the ibex but askance resolved thus as unicorn is caparisoned.
. The transformation would be by captivation, as it always had been. His engine would splice time to timelessness; its models were those that had held him rapt before, the vacuum tube television, the movie projector and the Broadway musical. The tubes: a congress of archangels with hearts of light harvesting ghosts for the Orpheum. The projector: a maze whose riddle and passage is answered when the film passes through and worlds of light open. And musicals that gently repost the soul’s too glad solemnity when evaporating into music.
I followed the course he had set for me, threading my way through the lab. He had brought in long tables and set them in rows. One was occupied by scrolls. It took me a while to recognize the scrolls that came from player pianos. They were labeled by the song they would have played braided through the machine. Some were from calliopes and one was the tune that used to pied piper from an ice cream truck. Using a scroll labeled “Meet me in St. Louie, Louie”, he had slapped together a wee planetarium whose cosmos was the stars cast on a screen by light strained though the holes where sprockets would once have churned the gears of the piano. He had photographed the result and tacked the picture on the table, and there connected up constellations with a felt pen. Regular star charts were tacked beside it, and then in a pile I found more song cosmos alternating with astronomical charts. And here a cosmos tacked beside a map of Australia and another of the abyssal topology of the Atlantic Ocean. This Pantheon and manangerie titled “As Time Goes By” I finally figured out was drawn from the black areas between the points of light.
With sudden vertigo, I saw this bleak quadrant of the city from high above. Rows of transistors, and my friend in this grinding wringer seeking a drop of nectar, a childhood cell brimming with honey. What from choiring orchard burst the vivid boy from ashes.
He had purchased a light table. Film strips were laid across it. How does the story emerge from these still lives, how can it adhere? These strips are solely dedicated to a close up; a sequence when everything was expressed in what cell by cell would have been a dizzyingly minute change. Here are magnifying glasses to fragment the vanishing particle even farther. Here he teetered between all and nothing, so fine he thinned the veiling membrane, until only a wet tear might plumb it: This ambition to retrieve the original particle, the first stitch which he could employ to reweave a lifetime to include realized dream and literature, this ambition that dangled him in silence.
He is hovering over the tiny cell. Magnification gives it depth for his descent, for his delving, and he floats in rapt concentration, a state wondrously dry and anticipatory, charged with a divine erotic voyeurism, becoming that risky adoration found in lovers where detail tells too much and extinction and eternity balance on a pin. I see the moment; it’s mapped by a child’s microscope with 100X, 200X, and 300X magnifications. It is the moment when he entered an individual cell, a close up of Ingrid Bergman in “Gas Light”, a scene when she is first in love and her face glows. Here so immersed that the image has disappeared, he stares into naked light.
I walked towards a back door, another heavy iron fire door. I clapped as I walked. Bravo, I called. Bravo. He had come to the heart of matter, nothing more than time that felt and so invested the universe. And her face, a sonata, tree, and gazelle, reciprocations, where light was illuminated to itself before perishing.
. The thorn that snags the rose.
I opened the door and stepped into the garden.
.
