Panopticon
Panopticon
David Bajo
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by David Bajo
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bajo, David.
Panopticon / David Bajo.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-002-0
I. Title.
PS3602.A578P36 2010
813’.6—dc22
2010023985
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY SH · CV
What we obscure becomes us.
•MIL MÀSCARAS
Panopticon
1.
Klinsman arrived at the Motel San Ysidro on time, but the parking lot was empty and there was no police tape in front of room 9. The stucco walls of the single-story building were deep yellow in sunset, the roof postcard green. The neon sign had just come on, gaining full brightness with the sound of a lit fuse. He found the door to room 9 slightly ajar. He could only tell up close. He fumbled momentarily with the latex gloves he always brought to beat assignments but never managed to wear, then eased the door open.
The room was unlit and empty, with no signs of police investigation. Klinsman called Gina, his managing editor, hoping to catch her working late. She didn’t answer. He flipped the light switch but nothing happened. He noticed that the cover and bulb for the overhead fanlight had been removed. A tiny square of black electrician’s tape was stuck to the knob on the fan’s pull-chain. Another piece was stuck over the door’s peephole—on the inside. When he swung the door fully open to let in more light, Klinsman noticed yet another square of tape stuck to the inside doorknob.
He opened the heavy curtains to let in as much light as possible, a mix of neon and dusk and streetlight, and then the mass of lights from the Tijuana hills across the riverbed. When he thought about his past. It was that color, the light coming into room 9.
Klinsman tried his managing editor again but got no answer. He held her recorded voice to his ear, turned steadily, full circle, to examine the room. The doorknobs for the bathroom and the closet had black squares on them. The mirror on the dresser was draped with a towel. He tried the bathroom light and it didn’t work. In the dimness of the shallow room he could see that the bulbs had been removed from the vanity light, with that mirror, too, covered by a towel. A toothbrush had been left beside the sink. Back in the main room, on the floor beside the dresser, he found a paper shopping bag containing all the lightbulbs, arranged on the bottom, neat as eggs.
He crouched on his heels and took his first picture, capturing the lightbulbs at the bottom of the bag. The double bed was made, but the thin cover, like milk skin, was wrinkled with the pattern left by a napping body, someone primly resting, gathering strength for a night out. With one arm outstretched, Klinsman held his camera above the bed and took a picture of the imprint. It was difficult to get the camera right above the pattern because the person who had been there had rested just off center. The pattern was intricate, swirled but contained like a fingerprint.
It was a woman. He could tell from the shape of the hips. Her hands had been clasped together over her stomach because he could see where her elbows had rested, little cups in the cloth on either side of her form. The cover was that sensitive, like a kind of photo plate, he thought, some silvery glass. Her heels, too, had left matching egg cups in the cloth. Klinsman took three shots.
He saw that it was time to leave for his evening assignment. He pressed the button on his camera and rotated a careful 360 degrees to get a panorama of the room. He lingered briefly on the blouse covering the TV screen but made sure he had enough memory in his camera left for the Luchadors in case he needed pictures for reference. The Review would send a good photographer to the Luchador event. Rita, he hoped, because she could be fun at that kind of assignment, make it not seem like work.
Klinsman closed the drapes, trying to leave room 9 in perfect order, rewinding his appearance. He even back-stepped to the door, checking to see if the industrial-grade carpet captured his footprints. There, then, imagining himself as intruder, Klinsman knew he had exposed himself to something and begun something, like Pandora taking the first full inhale of what she set free, Adam taking the second bite from the apple, feeling himself naked.
The light in the room was all artificial now: the neon from the motel sign, the sodium lamps from 1-5, the veil of lights from the Tijuana hills, and that single collective amber borealis of humanity that forever hung above the landscape of his life, from these borderlands to the northernmost fingers of LA. He pulled the door closed but did not engage the lock, leaving it ajar again. As he had found it. Rewound.
2.
Café Cinema was busy. Klinsman sat at the bar, turned toward the floor so he could watch the Luchadors play the room. They wore business suits and their brightly colored head masks, just like Santo and Blue Demon in the old Mexican wrestler movies Klinsman had grown up watching on Channel 12. Klinsman liked this troupe. They were guerrilla theater, an improv combo of LA’s Culture Clash, Latins Anonymous, and Chicano Secret Service, but everyone knew them as the Luchadors. Sometimes they did scheduled events like this one, sometimes they staged secret impromptu events, and sometimes they blended one into the other. He had covered them seven years ago, one of his first assignments. It seemed fitting that he should cover them here, in the final week of the Review’s existence. Not much seemed fitting to Klinsman, so this was a rare moment. He wondered if Gina had given him this story as a gift, a bookend, a rare fit.
He sipped from his bottle of Tecate and guided the turn of his bar stool, imagining himself a kind of box camera, hollow inside, the images gathered, flipped, then righted. Los Abandoned played through the ceiling speakers, singing in their English-Spanish mix about being girls in barrios. Nada mio es fake. Veny tocame.
The club was lit more than usual so everyone could see the Luchadors mixing with the crowd in different ways, chatting, dancing, demonstrating invented holds, performing little spontaneous skits. The main screen in the back and the smaller screens over the bar were all showing Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis, sound off. It seemed as if the Luchadors, or their doubles, had leapt from the screens and come to life among the crowd. They had finished their live overdub of the movie, where they had made the immortals from Atlantis into corporate heads overseeing the maquiladores, the beautiful double agents X-25 and Juno into the two current state senators, and the zombies into consumers. From the start, as always, Santo was there to fight for the people, those who had not yet become zombies. Blue Demon, his rival at first, later joined forces with his silver-masked nemesis to wrestle X-25 and then finally the immortals. Now Santo and Blue and X-25 and Juno were loose in Café Cinema.
One of the Luchadors in a silver head mask was dancing with three women. The women were young and writhing wildly, flinging their dark hair. The Luchador was intentionally dancing stiffly, like Santo in his movies, a muscle-bound pillar of righteousness in his gray flannel suit, mask on.
X-25, in her orange pantsuit, danced vaguely