THEY blasted down to L.A., heading back to the barn only semivisible and near as anybody could tell unobserved, Manuel and his auto alchemy team at Zero Profile Paint & Body of Santa Rosa having come up with a proprietary lacquer of a crystalline microstructure able to vary its index of refraction so that even had there been surveillance, the Trans-Am could easily, except for a few iridescent fringes, have been taken for empty roadway.
If Prairie had been expecting an old-movie private eye's office, seedy and picturesque, she wouldn't be getting it today. The Fu-mimota suite was located in a basic L.A. business/shopping complex of high-rises that stood on a piece of former movie-studio lot. Space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here — she'd watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube — but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&M's, crowds dressed to impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were made high overhead in legal offices that weren't always legal, sharing these altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun and shadow below.
Prairie still had no idea of what "karmic adjustment" was supposed to be, but for the first time it began to seem plausible to her that Takeshi, if not what he said he was, at least might be more than the nose-twister and eye-poker he appeared. The place was full of computer terminals, facsimile machines, all-band transmitter/receivers, not to mention components scattered all over, printed circuits, laser units, DIP's, disk drives, power supplies, and test equipment —
"Hi-tech Heaven," her eyes wide.
"That'd be your first mistake," DL said. "Most of it's just props to make ol' Sleazebrain here look good."
"Please," Takeshi waving a palm-sized remote control. "What can we offer you?" In rolled a little robot fridge, with two round video screens side by side, each with an image of a cartoon eye that shifted and blinked from time to time, and a smile-shaped speaker for a mouth, out of which now came a synthesized medley of refrigerator tunes, including "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "Cold, Cold Heart." Stopping in front of Prairie, humming and flexing small electric motors, it recited its contents.
"You said 'designer seltzer,' what's that?"
"Another stage in the marketing philosophy of the mid-1980s," replied the mobile cooler. "At the moment 1 have Bill Blass, Az-zedine Ala?a, Yves St. Laurent —"
"Fine!" Prairie a little high-pitched, "that'll be, uh —" and pow there was the stylish seltzer, stone-cold in its YSL-logo container in the essentially Reagan-era fashion colors of gold and silver. One of the video eyes winked at her, and from the mouth emerged a shiny pink tongue of some soft, wobbling plastic. "Anything else?" the creature inquired in the kind of voice Prairie had come to mistrust even before she could talk.
"Thanks, Raoul," DL said, "we'll let you know."
The video eyes closed, and Raoul glided back to its recharge station, playing "I'll See You Again" and "Drink, Drink, Drink."
"Time machine's in the shop," Takeshi brightly, "otherwise we'd all — go for a spin!"
"Just had to R-and-R another tachyon chamber," DL amplified, "exactly a tenth of a second after the warranty ran out, the 'sucker blew, why they call it a 'time' machine, I guess?"
But Prairie had been sitting glazy at one of the screens, stroking some keys. "If I wanted to know where she was, say right this second —"
DL shook her head. "I really don't get this. The woman —"
"DL-san —" Takeshi had his eyebrows up.
"Go ahead," the girl getting to her feet. "She ran out on me. Probably to be with Brock Vond, is the way it looks. I'm the last person she wants to see. I leave anything out?"
"Plenty. Like all your friends in 'em Cobra gunships, who seem at the moment to be part of the package, you get her, you get them too?"
"In fact —" Takeshi pretending to run over to the window and anxiously check the sky, "why are we — even hanging around with this kid? She's dangerous!"
DL reached and looped a length of hair back behind Prairie's ear. "Until you get to see her . . . would you settle for watchin' her? It's the best I can do."
"You know I have to settle for what I can get," the girl whispered, keeping her eyes down because she knew DL was on to her and if their eyes met she'd just blow it.
Ditzah Pisk Feldman lived in a Spanish split-level up a pleasant cul-de-sac on the high-rent side of Ventura Boulevard, with pepper trees and jacarandas in the yard and a vintage T-Bird in the carport. She was divorced and solvent, with only about a half-hour commute to work. The girls were with their father for the summer. When DL had known her back in Berkeley, Ditzah and her sister Zipi were going around in battle fatigues with their hair in matching oversize Jewish Afros, spray-painting SMASH THE STATE on public walls and keeping plastic explosive in Tupperware containers in the icebox. "Pretending to be film editors," she told Prairie, "but we were really anarchist bombers." This evening she looked like your average suburban mom, though what did Prairie know, maybe it was another disguise. Ditzah was drinking sangria and wearing eyeglasses with fashion frames and a muumuu with parrots all over it.
It was just before prime time, with the light outdoors not quite gone, birds loud in the trees above a distant wash of freeway sound, the concrete surf. Ditzah led them across the patio to a workshop in back, with a Movieola machine and 16mm film all over the place, some on reels or cores, some in pieces lying around loose, and some in cans inside steel footlockers, which turned out to be the archives of 24fps, the old guerrilla movie outfit.
Back then they had roved the country together in a loose low-visibility convoy of older midsize sedans, pickups with and without camper shells, an Econoline van for equipment, and a dinged and chromeless but nonetheless kick-ass Sting Ray that served as a high-speed patrol unit, among all of which they kept in touch by CB radio, still then a novelty on the road. They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold? Hearing the synchronized voices repeat the same formulas, evasive, affectless, cut off from whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never get to collect on?
"Never?" asked a local TV interviewer once, somewhere back in the San Joaquin.
And here came Frenesi Gates's reverse shot. Prairie felt the two women shift in their seats. Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue unfadable. "Never," was her answer, "because too many of us are learning how to pay attention." Prairie gazed.
"Well, you sound like our own Action News Team."
"Except that we have less to protect, so we can go after different targets."
"But. . . doesn't that get dangerous?"
"Mm, in the short run," Frenesi guessed. "But to see injustices happening and ignore them, as your news team has been ignoring the repression of farm workers here in this county who've been trying to organize — that's more 'dangerous' in the long run, isn't it?" Aware at each moment of the lens gathering in her own image.
DL, on the other hand, obliged to approach life in 24fps with cold practicality, stayed as far out of camera range as she could. When she talked, it was about tactics and timetables, hardly ever politics, and then only as much as she had to. She made sure the rolling stock was always ready to roll, scouted each new location for rendezvous points and multiple ways out of town, and though preferring to plan their way around cops and cop sympathizers was not above keeping a pry bar handy beneath her driver's seat. If they did get caught it would have to be DL, as unit chief of security, who lingered behind to delay the pursuit.
"That night Sledge drove us right into the middle of a drug bust?" Ditzah cackled, "Me and Zipi smoking shit somebody marinated in DMT, couldn't keep a thought in our heads, we kept wanderin' off and you'd have to go find us —"
"Thought that was the hash in the hot fudge sundaes."
"No, that was Gallup, the hot fudge. . .."
"Um," Prairie pointing at the screen, "who're all these folks?"
It was a slow pan shot of 24fps as constituted on some long-ago date the two women were unable now to agree on. An incoherent collection of souls, to look at them, a certain number always having drifted in and out — impatient apprentices, old-movie freex, infiltrators and provocateurs of more than one political stripe. But there was a core that never changed, and it included genius film editors Ditzah and Zipi Pisk, who'd grown up in New York City and, except for geographically, never left it. California's only reality for them was to be found in the million ways it failed to be New York. "Magnin's?" Zipi would smile grimly. "OK for a shopping center, somewhere on Long Island perhaps, very nice ladies' toilet of course, but please, this is no major store." Ditzah was the food kvetch — "Try and get a Danish anywhere out here!" They found West Coast people "cold and distant" as invariably as they remembered apartment living in the Big Apple being all "warm and neighborly."
This amused the others. "Are you kiddeen?" Howie, who took care of the paperwork, would snort. "I visited my sister back there, try to even get eye contact it's yer ass, babe."
"We are not the ones who have to encapsulate ourselves inside our cars all the time," Zipi would point out, "are we? no, and our dogs and cats never have to get sent to shrinks, and we certainly do not come up out of the water, fuck somebody right there on the beach then go jogging away without even leaving their phone number," which had in fact happened to her during the girls' first or introductory weekend on the West Coast, the event, despite its air of the supernatural, having left both sisters with a certain attitude toward the surfing community, of which, because of his xanthocroid looks, they had singled out Howie as typical.
To watch them at work was to enjoy unthinking exhibitions of grace. Zipi edited with her nails and Scotch tape, Ditzah favored teeth and paper clips, and when it got to the Movieola stage, rarely was either sister more than a frame off. They liked to chain-smoke while they worked and to have two or three television sets, tuned to different channels, going at the same time, plus rock and roll, the more acid-oriented the better, on the radio, thus cutting and splicing in an environment you could call rhythmic. When Mirage, the unit astrologer, found out they were both Geminis, she started feeding them daily aspects. They learned to get up at strange hours, and when the Moon was void of course, not to work at all.
Frenesi and the Pisks had taken over what was left of the Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective, based in Berkeley, a doomed attempt to live out the metaphor of movie camera as weapon. The Kollective's assets included camera bodies, lenses, lights and light stands, Movieola, hydraulic camera mount, fridgeful of ECO, and, at first anyway, a rump of the Kollective's more stubborn personnel, who had put some of the language of their old manifesto into 24fps's new one — "A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgment. We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!" — which for many was going too far, including Mirage, on her feet to insist that pigs are really groovy, in fact far groovier than any humans their name ever gets applied to.
"Say 'roaches,' " suggested Sledge Poteet.
"Roaches are cool," protested Howie, who happened to have a joint in his mouth. Krishna, the sound person, put in with a stipulation that all life, even that of roaches, is holy. "Wait a minute," cried one of the original Death-to-the-Piggers, "that kind of talk invalidates our whole conceptual base, this is about shooting folks here, is it not?"
"Oh yeah? what's your sign, man?" Howie wanted to know.
"Virgo."
"It figures."
"Signism!" Mirage screamed. "Howie, that's worse than racism!"
"Worse than sexism," added the Pisks in unison.
"Ladies, ladies," boomed Sledge, gesturing with his 'fro pick, while Howie, eyes ablush, held out a smoldering joint of gold Colombian as a token of peace.
"Be groovy, everybody," advised Frenesi, who wasn't exactly chairing the get-together, only struggling as usual to keep outside the bickering. This outfit was nobody's anarchist fantasy. When DL came aboard, she and Sledge, with whom she shared a fondness for enlightenment through asskicking, immediately became the realist wing of 24fps, counterposed to the often dangerously absent dreamers Mirage and Howie. Frenesi and the Pisks soldiered on in the center, and the task of trying to keep everybody "happy" fell to Krishna. Frenesi would come back with half a dozen rolls of dysrhythmic young Californian women dancing at a rally, Zipi and Ditzah would fly into a rage at the impossibility of getting any of these hippie chicks to do anything on the beat ("It's tzuris I don't need!" "Tzimmes also!"), and it was always Krishna who found the right music, expertly manipulated the tape speed, and seemed to know what the Pisks wanted before they did, quickly getting a reputation in the unit for broad ESP skills. When backs were left uncovered and chores undone, when words got too ambiguous, it was Krishna who led everybody to the bathroom and served as counselor for as long as it took. Without her, Ditzah thought, no telling how much sooner it would all have come apart, exchanging with DL now a look that Prairie didn't miss.
Night and movies whirred on, reel after reel went turning, carrying Prairie back to and through an America of the olden days she'd mostly never seen, except in fast clips on the Tube meant to suggest the era, or distantly implied in reruns like "Bewitched" or "The Brady Bunch." Here were the usual miniskirts, wire-rim glasses, and love beads, plus hippie boys waving their dicks, somebody's dog on LSD, rock and roll bands doing take after take, some of which was pretty awful. Strikers battled strikebreakers and police by a fence at the edge of a pure green feathery field of artichokes while storm clouds moved in and out of the frame.
Troopers evicted the members of a commune in Texas, beating the boys with slapjacks, grabbing handcuffed girls by the pussy, smacking little kids around, and killing the stock, all of which Prairie, breathing deliberately, made herself watch. Suns came up over farm fields and bright-shirted pickers with the still outlines of buses and portable toilets on trailers in the distance, shone pitilessly down on mass incinerations of American-grown pot, the flames weak orange distortions of the daylight, and set over college and high school campuses turned into military motor pools, throwing oily shadows. There was little mercy in these images, except by accident — backlit sweat on a Guardsman's arm as he swung a rifle toward a demonstrator, a close-up of a farm employer's face that said everything its subject was trying not to, those occasional meadows and sunsets — not enough to help anybody escape seeing and hearing what, the film implied, they must.
At some point Prairie understood that the person behind the camera most of the time really was her mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she could absorb, conditionally become, Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there, load the roll, get the shot. Prairie floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead but in a special way, a minimum-security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by projector and screen, were possible. As if somehow, next reel or the one after, the girl would find a way, some way, to speak to her. . . .
And suddenly both women were going "Oh, fuck!" together and laughing, though not at anything funny. It was inside a courthouse lobby someplace and some little guy with a jocklike walk, wearing a suit, was crossing left to right. Ditzah rewound the film. "Guess who, Prairie."
"Brock Vond? Can you put it on pause, freeze it?"
"Sorry. We did transfer it all to videotape, and there are duplicates around, but the idea was to disperse the archives so they'd be safer, and I got stuck with all the film. Here, here's the little shaygetz again." Brock had convened his roving grand jury up in Oregon to look into subversion on the campus of a small community college, and 24fps had gone there to film the proceedings, or as much as they could find with Brock always changing venues and times on them at the last minute. They chased him from the courthouse, through the rain, to a motel, then to the fairground exhibition hall, the college and high school auditoriums, the drive-in-movie lot, finally back to the courthouse again, where Frenesi, by then not expecting him, just trying to shoot some old WPA murals about Justice and Progress if she could figure a way to compensate for the colors, which had darkened with the years since the New Deal, in the middle of a slow pan around the rotunda, happened to pick up in her viewfinder this compact figure in a beige double-knit, striding toward the staircase. Another camera eye on the same crew might've dismissed him as one more pompous little functionary. Zooming in a little on his face, she began to track him. She didn't know who he was. Or maybe she did.
She had used her faithful 16mm Canon Scoopic, bought new at Brooks Camera in downtown San Francisco, a gift from Sasha, with one built-in zoom lens, a control button in the end of the handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, and inscribed in the viewfinder a TV-screen shape so you could frame a shot for the evening news, though this one of Brock ended up on a bedsheet . tacked to the wall of a motel room, lightproof drapes pulled against the subtropical glare, with most of the 24fps membership jammed in together to watch the Oregon rushes.
"So that's the Prosecutor, hmm?" Zipi Pisk sounding a little dreamy.
"That was the Prosecutor," Krishna pointed out serenely.
"Yeah you got some real pretty takes of this creep," DL semi-teased her friend. "What's goin' on?"
Brock was more photogenic than cute, with his buffed high forehead, modish octagonal eyeglass frames, Bobby Kennedy haircut, softly outdoor skin. He hadn't seen much of Frenesi's face with the Scoopic in front of it, but couldn't have missed her legs, long, bare, sleekly muscled, pale in the rainlight, in the courthouse echoes. And he could feel how she focused in on him, him alone — the lines of force. The roll ended, she withdrew her thumb, uncovered her face. "Ya got me," said Brock Vond, bringing out a Boyish Grin he'd been told was effective though not devastating. "Maybe I'll get a shot of you someday."
"Nothing the FBI won't already have ... go check it out."
"Oh, all they care about is identifying faces. I'd want something a little more," trying not to stare too hard at those noteworthy legs, "entertaining, guess you'd say."
"Little . .. courtroom drama, maybe."
"There you go. Make you a star. We'd all have a real good time."
"Sounds like one more of those bullshit State degradation rituals, thanks anyway but I'll pass."
"Oh — you'd have no choice. You'd have to come." He was smiling.
She moved her pretty jaw a little forward. "I wouldn't come."
"Then a man in a uniform, with a big pistol, would have to make you come."
Frenesi should have just zinged him one — something — left the area and stayed out of the way for a while. That would have been correct procedure. She was wondering instead why she'd worn this little miniskirt today when it would have made more sense to wear pants.
Her silence in the dimmed motel room had deepened like a blush. "It's only a movie," she finally said. "Think the light's OK?"
" 'Sucker ain't worth no Zippo flame on a cloudy night," in the opinion of Sledge Poteet. Everybody in z4fps had their own ideas about light, and about all they shared was the obsession. Meetings convened to take care of business would turn into arguments about light that happened so often they came to seem the essence of 24fps. Against Howie's advocacy of available light because it was cheaper, Frenesi wanted actively to commit energy by pouring in as much light as they could liberate from the local power company. In the equipment van, among quartz lamps and PAR bulbs, color-temperature meters, blue filters, cable of different gauges, lamp stands, and ladders, were also grid-access devices, designed and taught her by Hub Gates, customized as occasion demanded by his daughter, "the young gaffer," as he liked to call her, intended for draining off whenever possible the lifeblood of the fascist monster, Central Power itself, merciless as a tornado or a bomb yet somehow, as she had begun to discover in dreams of that period, personally aware, possessing life and will. Often, through some dense lightning-shot stirring of night on night, she would be just about to see Its face when her waking mind would kick in and send her spreading awake into what should have been the world newly formatted, even innocent, but from which, as it proved, the creature had not after all been banished, only become, for a while, less visible.
"You don't think they know when we go in on those meters and tie points and shit? Someday they'll be waitin' for us," predicted Sledge.
"Part of this business, Sledge," from DL.
"Uh-huh, but I'm the one gets y'all's ass out of town when it happens." The other big ongoing debate around here was over the claims of film against those of "real life." Would it be necessary someday for one of them to die for a piece of film? One that might never even get used? How about crippled or hurt? What was the risk level supposed to be? DL would smile off at some angle, as if embarrassed.
"Film equals sacrifice," declared Ditzah Pisk.
"You don't die for no motherfuckin' shadows," Sledge replied.
"Long as we have the light," Frenesi sounding so sure, "long as we're runnin' that juice in, we're OK."
"Oh yeah? they just pull the plug on your ass."
"Shoot yer lights out, man," Howie giggled.
Frenesi shrugged. "That much less to carry." Nonchalant talk, considering the dangers they'd already been in and out of, more than most movie people saw in a whole career. Was she really that superstitious or whatever it was — naive? — to think, this far into the life she thought she'd chosen, of any protection for herself — did she really believe that as long as she had it inside her Tubeshaped frame, soaking up liberated halogen rays, nothing out there could harm her?
The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara's phrase "Wherever death may surprise us." It didn't have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would — it might only take one cop, one redneck, one stupid mistake, everybody on the crew could dig it, though in the usual way it was too hard for most of them to believe in, even when they began to learn with their bodies the language of batons, high-pressure hoses, and CZ gas, and as the unit medical locker gradually amassed a painkiller collection that was the envy of bikers and record producers up and down the Coast. They were still young, exempt, and for DL, in charge of security, sometimes infuriatingly careless. Just as she was allowing herself to think they might be showing a learning curve on the subject, along came the events at College of the Surf down in Trasero County, and there they found themselves all the way up Shit's Creek, with all lines of withdrawal from the campus denied them. By the time of the last offer by bullhorn of safe passage, every road, watercourse, storm drain, and bike path was interdicted. All phones were cut off, and the news media, compliant as always, at a harmless, unbridgeable distance. On that last night, 24fps had exclusive coverage of the story, if anybody survived to bring it out.