“Magruder,” my mother said, “like the sound a flat tire makes slapping the road.”
“If they don’t want you to know something, if it’s really big and ugly and makes them look bad, don’t think for a minute the thing will surface on national television. Don’t be naive,” said Mr. Levine, a neighbor who was considered an alarmist but one with interesting theories about conspiracies that he even exposed to children. As he paid you for mowing his lawn he might explain the connection between former president Johnson, an unlabeled complex of cinder-block buildings down Route 2, and a Coca-Cola commercial which co-opted sports imagery. “It’s a racket,” he would always say. There were no guns in his house, no freezer full of deer parts and bloody footprints on the concrete garage floor, and he refused to vote.
Paty de Clam. Patsy de Cline. I put the letter into a desk drawer beside the first one and reached for the telephone, then replaced the receiver without dialing. The notes didn’t threaten or harass, they only proposed schemes like those hatched by the long-dead man down the road, links between assassinations of popes and presidents, between the deaths of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Aldo Moro, as if suicide, shooting, and kidnapping were all hatched from the same committee, a cartel shrouded in secrecy that exerted power over every unconscious citizen. As I fit the film over the viewing machinery and examined each crumbling frame, I was afraid of what I might learn, but if I learned anything from my mother staring into space and my father plotting against those who believed Adam and Eve were parentless, it is that there is no safety to be found in pretending the facts aren’t staring you in the face.
Even up on the fifth floor a fly had somehow gotten into Alphabet, and I watched it collide with the strips of venetian blind. I shut the door behind me and walked down the hall, letters in hand. Felix the Cat was being restored next door. The jingle, played at the beginning and at the end of the cartoon, was repetitive on its own but run over and over as the film was spooled back and forth, the lyrics could easily become the kind of episodic torture used to drive someone mad. I knew it was the actual cartoon that was being played not something spliced together or borrowed and used as a weapon in an imaginary setting, but the knowledge didn’t keep the song from being any less penetrating. As I walked past Julius’s office I could hear him talking loudly. Antonya sat with her feet on the reception desk, writing notes in the margins of a book on martial arts. Her glasses were pushed up on her head; replacing them in order to look at me she peered through black-rimmed eyes and lenses smeared with hair gel.
“Did a man come in this morning, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, jacket, sweatshirt turned inside out?” I asked her.
“No, but I’ve only been here an hour. The temp who comes in while I’m at class might have seen someone yesterday.” I showed her the letters.
“A crackpot.” She only glanced at them, then shrugged in dismissal, but she did call the agency, got the temp’s number, called her home and left a message anyway.
“Why don’t you leave Kews a note asking him to knock next time so you can actually shake hands.”
“I don’t want to shake hands with a stalker who doesn’t want to meet me anyway. He writes about old magazines and Napoléon.”
“What if he thinks he’s Napoléon?”
“Look in the book. Did Julius have an appointment with Napoléon yesterday?”
With a twist Antonya turned the appointment ledger around so I could read it. He had meetings with a woman from the British Film Institute, a man from Kodak, a pair of researchers compiling a catalog of silent Westerns, a man who had a collection of films made on early cameras, the Mutigraph and the Mirograph, and the list went on. Jack Kews could have been any of them.
“Why don’t you go to the police?”
I shook my head. Could you spell Méliès for us? they’d ask, the note having been sent to another department in order to determine what kind of old typewriter had been used to produce it. The female officer might open her drawer for a second and I’d be able to see a glint of handcuffs, keys, unused chopsticks, Rolaids and Juicy Fruit. Perhaps Kews had a record, a police file that could be called up on a computer that would reveal a past I’d no knowledge of: tax fraud, armed robbery, credit-card and identity theft. I would lean over the screen and try to read what he’d been apprehended for: resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, loitering with intent, blocking the entrance to a church.
“Whaddaya think? They’re going to issue a restraining order for a phantom or place a guard at the door?”
For a moment she reminded me a little of Mr. Levine, the man who had watched the Watergate trial with premonition and enthusiasm, the man who saw the figure in the carpet, who thought everything was a swindle of some kind. With very little information she could construct cathedrals of imagined crimes, and yet Antonya was only humoring me.
“You got nothing better to do than worry about some couple of notes that don’t even make sense?”
My explanations, stories about surrendered sunglasses, aimless trips to shops, emptied drawers that had long been cleaned out of anything meaningful, all these statements were left half-finished, stuttering. For Antonya the way to keep ghosts at bay was to figure out how many free meals you could tolerate at Burrito Fresca, because if you could put away a certain amount of money each week, you might hope to return to the city where your family had disappeared. She calculated and didn’t reflect, taking a pragmatic approach, losing patience with my stuttering and obsession with the Dreyfus trial.
“Could he be charged with trespassing? He wasn’t even seen for certain. Any messenger could have delivered the letters.”
As far as I knew the police had never been to the offices. I imagined them arriving on the fifth floor to dust for fingerprints. They’d pick up copies of anticolorization letters stacked in the reception area, not with the intention of mailing them, but only to file away somewhere. They’d tell me that as long as my life wasn’t threatened, there was nothing they could do. It was just a prank, sweetie. I went back to work.
At six o’clock Antonya knocked on my door. The temp had called back.
“She remembered only two visitors who didn’t have appointments: a woman who inquired about renting an editing room, and a man who claimed to have rented space, but he left a few minutes later, saying he had forgotten something. He didn’t return while she was here.”
Three days later the following note arrived by mail:
Dear Frances,
I changed my mind. Meet me at La Chinita Linda’s at 7:00 this Tuesday. I have short brown hair, wear glasses, beard, and moustache. Will wear a black T-shirt and a plaid jacket.
Yours,
Jack Kews
I tacked the note to the bulletin board above my light table, my eye wandering up to it when tired of examining and preserving the fleeting images of tiny men and women. Dreyfus read a letter from his wife, Lucie, and looked as if he would disintegrate with anguish. The prison as Méliès had designed it in 1899, gray and minimal, looked very modern. The emptiness of the prison cell wasn’t the result of film-stock degeneration; the film at this point was in good shape. Lucie’s letter, a surprisingly stark white square, fluttered to the ground. I worked on this scene all afternoon until my eye began to hurt. Toward the end of the day I showed the third note to Antonya.
“He didn’t ask what you look like.”
“So he knows. It’s not like the notes are responses to an ad placed in a personals column.”
“He knows your name, too. You better watch yourself. You want me to come with you?”
“Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound offhand, but Antonya was right. What did I really know about this guy?
Jack Kews was a fin-de-siècle Terminator, programmed,