Pause.
“La Société de la Preservation du Cinema. That’s who’s got the contract.”
Pause.
“Yes, I’m pronouncing it correctly.”
Pause.
“I know. I know I can’t pay you with celluloid.”
Pause.
“Look, Ratner, you can’t impound my equipment. I’ll never be able to pay you if I can’t work.”
Pause.
“Well, suit yourself.”
Pause.
“You have a point, but if I don’t pay my electric bills and the power is turned off I can’t work either. My company vanishes into paperwork. I declare personal bankruptcy, and you get zilch.”
Pause.
“I know someone else will pay three times what I’m paying in rent, but if Alphabet goes Chapter 11 you better collect top dollar from whoever moves into this dump next. We’re the last in the industry, Ratner. For your information what I do is a dying art.”
Pause.
Julius looked up, saw us listening, put his hand over the receiver, “He just told me to take my extinct horseshoes to Williamsburg — not the Brooklyn one, but the one he heard is in Virginia.”
“You’re no Trump, Ratner, you’re a small-time dinosaur yourself.”
Pause.
“Listen, Frances, prepare yourself,” Antonya whispered. “He’s already spent that contract money he’s talking about. Don’t count on being paid anytime soon. I do the books, so I know. There isn’t any Société paying for this job. It must be some other outfit.”
“Frances, how much longer on the Méliès job?” Julius called out to me, hand over the receiver once again.
I held up seven fingers although I really wasn’t sure how much longer it would take. Julius frowned and kicked the door shut.
The sound of breaking glass interrupted my concentration on a scene from French Cops Learning English. Thinking the noise came from a nearby sound track I tried to ignore it. In the Méliès film four French policemen were learning bilingual puns. The teacher wrote on the blackboard What a fair fish! One of the police responded by writing Va ta faire fiche as if that were the French translation. Then she wrote Very well, thank you. He replied by writing Manivelle Saint Cloud, holding a chalkboard up for the audience to see. The end of the film was chaotic. Four English girls, clearly actors in drag, invaded the classroom and sat on the policemen’s laps, danced with them, and then the whole scene degenerated into wild cartwheels and gymnastics. The sound of things being thrown around persisted.
I looked out my door toward the reception area. The door to Julius’s office was open, and a man I’d never seen before was screaming at him. The room was in disarray. Tables overturned, papers scattered. One of Antonya’s martial arts books had been thrown down the hall and lay a few feet away from me. She was out of the office, perhaps at lunch or doing errands, the whole place seemed deserted, as if the man knew when Julius would be alone or nearly alone. The telephone lay on the floor, disconnected. It would not have been possible to plug it back in and call the police without drawing the intruder’s attention. The only way out of Alphabet was past him, so I was trapped. The man was small and well built, bug eyed. I could make out a pierced eyebrow and elaborate multicolored tattoos of intertwined snakes and ferrets crawling up his forearms. He was scary in the way a rodent is scary: it could run up your pant legs, your dress, it could gnaw into you, you wouldn’t be able to stop it, so you inch your way down the wall, trying very hard not to provoke the creature or man, whoever he was. Then I noticed that he had a knife in his hand, which somehow seemed more dangerous than a gun, which would at least have made some noise. I reached for the Mr. Coffee, not knowing whether I could hit him over the head with it, but then he turned, took it from my hand, and smashed it against the wall, holding a large, curved shard up against my only functioning eye.
“You have three days left. That’s it,” the man said to Julius. Then he left without saying a word to me.
I reached for the phone, but Julius caught my hand.
“Don’t call the police.” He picked his glasses up off the floor with dignity as if the intruder had been nothing more than a phantom, a film projection, something that never happened and should be easily forgotten.
“You’re okay.” This was not a question. “We can get on with our work here and not mention our visitor to anyone.” Julius shut the door to his office, and I wouldn’t see him again for a few days.
I was shaking too badly to return to work that required a steady hand, and so I sat at Antonya’s desk for a few minutes. My impulse was to start cleaning up, but this was a crime scene, and it needed to remain untouched, even if the police were not to be called. When Antonya returned she called the building’s janitor. Asking no questions about the cause of the mess he proceeded to clean up as if minor indoor tornadoes happened every day. As I watched them from my doorway I considered how it might be a good idea to start looking for another job.
Everything in Dreyfus’s world was fixed, stable, he was set on a particular course until his own personal letter bomb was found in the trash, conclusions were drawn and never entirely withdrawn in some quarters. But the accusations leveled at him weren’t completely the result of confusion over handwriting. The army targeted him because they believed he belonged to a rootless tribe and that nomadic nature, according to his accusers, was inherited, not learned. His allegiance to the army must therefore be unreliable. Of course he was the spy. Who else?
It was only a matter of time before apartment walls, furniture, books of family records and photographs all went up in flames. In the scheme of things Field Marshall Pétain and Pierre Laval were only a few decades away, so his stolid, solid life was doomed anyway. It’s easy, looking back, to speed up time so it all passes in a blink. Méliès was busy constructing what it meant to see, record, to bear witness, but he too was threatened by erasure by that same blinking mechanism that reduces years of quotidian misery to the half life of a twinkle.
Stuck in traffic, I daydream. I could be anywhere, bouncing from city to city, my path traced by an animated dot on a turning globe. Driving down Sunset Boulevard, boulevard du Montparnasse, or the Cross Island Parkway approaching the Throgs Neck Bridge, I’m traveling in an unassigned city, a city that becomes a character with arms, legs, hands, and feet of clay. This borough is the head, the people on this block will spill out and clog an artery, this corner was torn up and never rebuilt: the city, an amputee, erases itself. From a distance, it’s a candy city, apartment towers look as if made of waffles with Life Savers water tanks perched on rooftops. I drive closer to them and the metaphor of sweets falls on its face. Barrackslike buildings near a train depot have been gutted, fire escapes and catwalks dangle from crumbling walls; ailanthus, sumac, orange hawkweed, and yarrow grow out of the wrecked foundations. An area of warehouses is transformed into expensive apartments: the city rewrites itself.
The radio is on, tuned to a talk station. General Schwarzkopf, the host says, and a caller picks up the topic, responding with the general’s nickname, Stormin’ Norman, he agrees, the Bear, but his voice has nothing to do with the view from my car window and I listen indifferently. Image, meaning, plastic: I look at my work as three choices, three pools to dive into, and usually I pick the third. Assessment and repair of the material is my job, but meaning often throws me for a loop. For the Dreyfus job, repairing 780 feet of incendiary film (thirteen minutes, the longest of the lot), I have found out one or two things