Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  “You don’t have to worry about swallowing any of the leaves and stuff,” Pat said. “It’s just herbs.” Michael made a shutter adjustment and took a shot of me putting down my teacup.

  “But most of those computers have the phone terminals now, for receiving from other units,” Michael was saying. “And they record the entries, which is another problem. But what if you put together some sort of independent equipment of your own that got you in past the defenses by imitating the authorized signal? Then you could put your program through. It’s all audio frequencies, just like long distance. So with the right whistles you can go right through. What we should do now is to get as much footage together as possible before you have to leave the country and I have to go to Chicago.”

  “Leave the country?” I said.

  “Michael got a grant to shoot the Democratic convention,” Pat said. “I’m doing car pools for it.”

  “Which gives us about a month to shoot here,” Michael said.

  “To shoot what?” I asked.

  “Yours is our main story. Your theft, or the technology of the theft, which is going to be very important soon. And I fold that in with my convention stuff after I edit—”

  “I can’t be in any movie,” I said.

  “Why not?” Pat said.

  “Because I’m hiding.”

  “Ah,” said Michael. “That’s where you need me.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because you can hide things in film that you can’t hide in stills. Film pictures don’t stay around to be investigated. Once you get in there you can disappear, right? It’s like: how often do you get to say ‘Life has been passing me by’ and make it stick? Does that make sense?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said without stopping, “try this. Nobody gets to hide anymore. Physically. I mean, if it was you they wanted they’d have you; we weren’t that sneaky about getting you up here in the first place.”

  “Was that you on the phone?” I said.

  “Only it’s not you they’re looking for. They’re looking for your signal, which at this point is in and out of circuits like nothing.” He moved his head as if watching something very fast. “Hundredth of a second, bang. And they can’t get it to stand still. It’s like a moving picture. So you’re already hidden. Now if you want to stay hidden, you have to keep putting out code. Up there.” He put his hand out, between the window and the wall, then pulled it in toward himself, so that the shadow was sharp, then blurry, then gone. “On the screen.”

  “All I did was leave my job,” I said absently.

  “Yeah, but why?” he said.

  “Because I couldn’t concentrate.” I was watching Pat. Her breasts knocked together as she spread some apple butter on a piece of bread; then they wiggled back to stillness. But forget the breasts, just look at the action itself, the decaying harmonic motion. Pick a nipple, or a pore or something, and it’s doing it, under the sheer white cloth of the blouse. This is the charm that pulls you into physics to begin with: things know what to do, all by themselves. In this case they were dividing the motion into smaller and smaller percentages of the original, so that someone can plot it and it’s perfectly regular, but that’s later, after the fact. When I was fifteen I was reading a book in which the author said that some falling object, I forget what, “described an arc.” I loved that, “described,” because the object was telling how the arc looked without saying anything. The pure action has no contents. Pat put down the knife and it started again.

  “You think you could get that money now,” Michael was saying, “or part of it?”

  “What for?” I said.

  “We’ll need some equipment,” he said, “and you’ll have to make some more of your boxes if we’re going to get the story down.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not even going to do this. I haven’t even admitted doing what you’re talking about.”

  He stood and picked up his camera. “That’s the end of a roll,” he said. “I have to go develop these. Let me make you some prints. I’ll want to get some more on your face before we go into shooting,” and then he was gone.

  * * * *

  After all this happened, I started seeing literature on the so-called phone freaks, who had figured out that long-distance telephone calls are connected by computers and that the computers are cued into action by audio frequencies. The frequencies connected the home-phone line to the long-distance lines while the call was registered for billing. So by imitating those frequencies, either through human whistling or homemade electronic boxes, the freaks were able to bypass the equipment. Consequently their calls seemed to originate not at their own telephones but in the unpopulated distance between terminals, popping up in the middle somewhere and making only the second part of the trip. Free service, and then the compounded manipulation of frequencies and equipment, stacking connections and calling all the way around the world for nothing.

  Still later, it became public knowledge that many business computers have telephone capabilities, set up so that a programmer could have access to the memory banks and processing facilities, using his authorized equipment to identify himself by producing the right frequencies. Once he heard the entry tone coming back at him, he was in, and could then introduce or withdraw material by continuing to use his equipment, which translated his instructions from programming language into frequencies, which the computer could retranslate over the phone. Soon enterprising unauthorized individuals discovered that the tones and equipment could be duplicated, and they were impersonating the password-holders, plugging information in and out to alter memories. Entire programs were being stolen. Every phone was a potential terminal for every computer, given a widespread knowledge of the technical basics.

  None of this should have been surprising. Once you get used to the idea of everything being made of frequencies, you can circumvent nearly any defense, and the kind of people who can make beeping boxes from hi-fi scraps have been used to that idea for years.

  But when you gain entry to one place, you leave another. Given that you know what you’re doing for what it is, you finally find, without time to gear up, that now you are the signal, with no weight, no shape, an instantaneous lifespan, and almost infinite speed! Studying the equipment for a long time makes the difference. The basic working part, the place where you spend most of your time on the inside, is a minuscule chip covered with enough tiny hardware for one operation or storage. You can always tell when you’re in a memory, because the turns and straightaways are special. That’s the wonderful thing about working with computers: that you can distinguish a memory from anything else.

  Not that it’s all smooth sailing out there in the nexus. There are these terrible searing flashes that you recognize as floods of electric impulses going through at the same time as you. But in time you learn to recognize other things as well, and when you look from overhead at a lighted city or a network of rivers, or through a microscope at the compounding connections of nerves forming up into a brain, you make memory’s jaunty salute, snapping two fingers from your forehead at the first chill.

  At any rate, what scared me then was that Michael should have figured out my operation in the summer of 1968, when I was the first, when there had been no publicity of any dimension. Other systems designers eventually unwound what I’d done, as I knew they would, but Michael was a layman who could think ahead, something I didn’t need because I’d barely started formulating the practice of this aberrant wave of science and already someone was ready to apply and appropriate that practice on behalf of social theory. Einstein’s dilemma, Nobel’s, spending years of their lives trying to isolate stable solutions to contain their guilt, generating shock waves of embarrassing gestures, making things worse. I went into the living room and turned on the radio. In the summer of 1968, if you turned on the radio and waited, you would hear either news about political rioting of some kind or a song by Jimmy Webb. You almost couldn’t listen for any leng
th of time without hearing one or the other. In this case it was “Paper Cup,” the follow-up to “Up, Up, and Away” by the Fifth Dimension.

  Jimmy was hot and was using it on me. That whole week, living in that house in Sacramento, I knew every move he was making without being told because it was coming to me on the air. Jimmy alone, late at night, surrounded by soft light from the pool lamps as he tortures chords from the electric organ in the downstairs living room of the twenty-two-room house no more than five miles away from where my wife and children are sleeping. The drill team captain and the college classmate enter through opposite doors, peppy ghosts moving in mirror synch and talking with one voice, begging Jimmy to give it up and come upstairs. He closes his eyes. Later he gives them thirty-five minutes each. But right now he’s writing. He hits a key, cocks an ear, and hums, stretching the pigskin along his thigh with a fast stab at a pedal. Jimmy has told a newsmagazine that he’s worried about staying fresh, about not getting into a bag. Keeping those reporters away from the house is the best insurance, but he doesn’t know that yet. It’s wonderful to have incredible facility. He still does. He just checked. But now the pressure is on: nobody wants Jimmy to write an unsuccessful song. There are friends and colleagues everywhere now, and for their sake he has to sand his fingers before sitting down to play. But what’s most remarkable is that one problem I have, living there in Sacramento that first week, is this intense lethargy, a much more serious problem than the intermittency of concentration I get in LA, and I begin to feel that Jimmy has gotten desperate and unscrupulous and is tapping me.

  Remember that we live in a world arrayed by frequencies and that when we move, we are introducing more vibrations to a surrounding that already resonates. Everything conveyed within the body is by rates of vibration, and if someone who appreciates all this encodes a specific series of signals into a camouflage of music—well, now you have your first link. As long as those songs were on the radio, in the air, I was wide open, whether I listened or not. And when I did listen, the overload of directed energy was tangible.

  People seem to think that a computer is a uniquely sterile and impervious domain, no noise in the programs, no dust, no static. What they forget is that every system has deposits forming at points of heat and motion. Similarly, there are those in every field who want to be experts, who will take the risk of touching the essential material, getting light or sound or some other vibration on their hands. Jimmy was aiming those songs at me, keying them to my entry frequencies, so that he could tap information—comparing notes, in effect, since we were really in the same field. Jimmy was a good working model of an expert because he understood what he was doing. The expert is one type of secret agent, a special case. Like the others, he goes where nobody knows him and where he remembers nothing, and he takes another name, or another form, even if it means becoming a physical outlaw, a refugee from the guidelines of matter and energy—whatever’s necessary to eject himself to the place where he can get at the stuff. The findings are in on this one, fellas. Le deluge, c’est moi. And while the other agents have to take their capsules rather than tell you anything, we are meant to talk your ear off until we get back to where we started.

  * * * *

  Standing there in that living room full of morning light as the song ended on the radio, I shuddered. I was thinking ahead. There’s one frequency, and I’ve known this for as long as I can remember, this one frequency by which the cells of the body and the objects in the line of vision are held together. And that’s the one you never hear because you’re in it, you know that line of reasoning? And I became frightened, standing in that living room seven years ago, by the inexplicable certainty that there exists equipment for turning that frequency off, and that the equipment works.

  * * * *

  I was sitting on the cot, eating the second maple bar, when Michael brought the prints up. Being unmounted left them open to stiff buckles and ripples across the surface of the paper. None of the images took all of its sheet. They sat at odd angles, their edges passing into watery white borders with only intermediary blurs. He was doing something wrong in the baths. You could see it best in those blank margins, where the set of the emulsion on the paper was most clearly visible, the chemicals’ arrested sliding leaving rings like trapped cells. The sheets felt gummy.

  In the first two pictures I turned my head from the pillow toward the door, squinting. In the third one I lifted my head and brought it forward.

  I was holding them. Michael stood at my side, his hands hovering. He brought a finger down on the edge of the third print before I could flip past it.

  “You see what you’re doing here?” he said.

  “Did you want this much contrast?” I said.

  “See the way you’re bringing your head up?” He jerked his own head up fast, on the diagonal. “See how it pulls your eyes open really wide?” I looked at my eyes in the photograph: they were frightened, and trying to get me to look into them. I closed my eyes. “Okay, these next two,” Michael went on, pulling away the third print and pushing it to the back of the stack, holding the fourth one above the fifth so I could see them both at once. I opened my eyes and looked. “Dropping the head halfway and then coming up again,” he said. “See what you’re doing with your neck here? I’m going to want that.”

  “Let’s forget about the movie thing, okay?” I said. “I’m really tired.” I tried to hand the prints back to him.

  “You can keep this set,” he said. “I did two. Look, why don’t you come downstairs and we’ll screen some pictures?” He was talking to my face in the fifth print, which was at the top of the stack. The eyes were closed.

  * * * *

  Trying to assemble a consensus on Michael’s movies, I’ve relied on available literature: film journals, radical magazines, no very popular reviewers because Michael has never had that wide an audience. I would have tried to do it all myself, but my critical language is far from adequate. And even though I own prints of all the films and have seen most of them fifteen or twenty times, I find that long sections of each one refuse to come to mind in any recognizable form unless they’re on the screen in front of me. Somehow they resist not only memorization but simple recollection. At any rate:

  In the early pictures (everything before Cloud Chamber), Michael establishes his comfort with conventional rhythmic cutting and planned sequence, at least on a shot-by-shot basis. Only in a larger framework—that of plot and continuity—is the interference felt. In Governments (1966), Ellen (Cathy Lewin) tells the hitchhiker (Bobby Roy, who later turns up in Cloud Chamber as the guidance counselor) a story about her having to leave a house just as a shipment of drugs is about to arrive there. Then, during what we would take to be the next morning (the hitchhiker, who’s been sleeping on Ellen’s couch, goes out; Ellen dresses and leaves immediately afterward), the episode she’s described as a memory takes place in the present. No suggestion is made that this is a flashback or that she remembers either the incident or having talked about it. From the use of an omniscient viewpoint to trap her within the action, it’s unmistakable that the event she’s described and the one taking place are identical.

  Claire Clouzot wrote a long piece about Governments for Film Quarterly, calling Ellen a direct representative of Michael’s authority and “a fully realized person in the director’s terms because she creates her experience by anticipating it,” the first step toward creating in the films “a disruption of sequential time only insofar as a simultaneity, and thus an equality, are imparted to all memories and events.”

  But in Cloud Chamber (1967), a single action—the guidance counselor takes the list of drug-users’ names from Celia (Sue Rice, who is Tinda in Apparatus of the Carnival [1969] —is staged and filmed four different ways. Lines are exchanged and visual relationships reversed; the office space contracts and expands as Michael changes point-of-view and angle coverage from one rendition to the next. Sympathy, malevolence, detachment, and cordiality are permuted. Increasingly, everythin
g takes too much or too little time to happen, and sequence is abandoned. Philip T. Hartung, questioning this method, says the “literal accumulation of alternatives fabricates a contrived uncertainty, a forced deprivation of judgments.”

  In a series of five scenes at the end, Celia decides to leave town after the third confrontation between the students and the construction crew working in the vacant lot across the street from the school. These last scenes, taking about twenty minutes, are silent (the student ringleader, Fred Spiegel, asks Celia earlier: “How would you like it if things were quiet around here?”). In those twenty minutes, Michael drops both minute-by-minute time and continuity entirely. In the middle of a take, he lets the camera fall, with what looks like arbitrary abandon, into some object or stretch of color and lets it rest there, insistently, for too long; that is, until the viewer’s ability to watch it comfortably elapses and it has become meaningless as an image. The urgency of boredom is enforced by the knowledge that, all this time, things are happening to Celia, and we’re not seeing all of it. She’s changing her clothes, finding the bus station, being stopped by Terry’s policeman father (Mark Pauley). But our ability to follow her, the connection that lets us invade her privacy, is now faltering and discontinuous, and so we find Manny Farber writing that Michael has “pumped the movie full of manufactured space, trying to liberate the Rice character into a life that continues when the movie is over ... he wants to show us that he appreciates the transciency of his vision.” These processes are familiar devices in Adult Mail (the changing of the depositions from scene to scene) and Rotogravure, both done in 1968, but are then applied only transitionally in Scaled Down (1969) and Positron (1972).