I went to the address I had been given, establishing a locus of observation among the branches of an oak tree in a park across the street from it. The house was small, the lot cut into the side of a hill. I watched people come and go, and compared each face to the picture I held in my hand. None of them were the subject. In the late afternoon I was discovered by a park employee, whom at first I ignored but who subsequently prodded me with a stick until I was forced to climb down. Shortly thereafter, he forced me to leave the park.
In the three days that followed, I did my best to keep the house under observation, despite the continued harcelations of the park employee. I was tempted to kill him for the sake of the observation, and surely would have, had I not felt that his death was as likely to complicate my ability to use the park for observation as it was to facilitate it. I developed an elaborate series of maneuvers to avoid the fellow, quickly mastering the possible variants of his rounds and learning to anticipate his movements. He saw me at a distance once or twice, but by the time he came nearer, I had vanished.
Despite these setbacks, my observation was rigorous. I could state with certainty that the man in the photograph did not enter the house, nor did he leave it.
Perhaps, I thought, I have a bad likeness. But even considering the photograph a bad likeness, I still could not imagine that it represented anyone I had seen enter the house.
Or perhaps, I thought, I had been given this assignment as a punishment.
On the fourth day, not knowing what else to do, I approached the house and rapped on the door. A young woman — early twenties, baby slung on one hip, no resemblance to the man in the photograph — opened the door. I showed her the photograph, claiming I had found it fluttering on her front lawn. Had she or someone in her household dropped it? Did she recognize it? No, she said, it wasn’t hers. Did she recognize the man in the picture? Perhaps it was a neighbor of hers? I would, I claimed, gladly return the photograph to the rightful owner if only …
She looked long and hard. No, she said, she was sorry, but she did not recognize the man.
I attempted to make contact with my supervisor by returning to the movie theater. I arrived early in the morning and waited outside until it opened. I went to the row where we had conversed before, and installed myself. There I remained until the theater closed, my sole encounter being not with my supervisor but with an elderly and uncircumcised man — the accuracy of this latter adjective made manifest to me through the fact that the fellow felt compelled to display for me his foreskin. I had neither encouraged nor discouraged him, simply remained staring straight ahead at the flickering images on the screen, waiting for my supervisor to arrive.
I had, in my first meeting with my supervisor, paid no attention to the film. Indeed, all my energy had been focused on gathering the particulars of the job itself. Thus, I had no way of knowing if that particular film and the film I was now regarding on this, my second visit, were in fact the same. I can speak only to the particulars of the film I saw on this second visit and hope they cast some light on the film of the first visit. Or, rather, what I mean to say is that what I say about the film might have some significance to my understanding the purposes of the administration or it might not, might reveal only something about myself and my subsequent actions. And perhaps not even that.
I was surprised to discover that I could make no sense of what I was seeing on the screen. There was occasionally an image that might have been a face, but it was so sunk within a general morass of light and sound that I could never fully apprehend it. There was a flux of what might have been bodies, but so abstracted as to have been equally likely scratches in an overexposed film stock. The images, if images they were, first entranced and then slowly unsettled me. At the moment when my distress had reached its height, the film flickered out and the houselights rose. The old man who had been beside me was gone; he had been kind enough to leave behind no sign of his presence. The few theatergoers — all men, curiously enough — filed out, save for me. A clubfooted employee armed with dustpan and broom swept the aisles and gathered garbage and then disappeared. A few minutes later the lights dimmed, a few dim men filed in, and the film began again.
Or perhaps I should say, merely, a film began. I was unable to tell if I was watching the same film or a different one. I experienced the same deep play of color and light that at once threatened to dissolve into abstraction and cohere into discrete images without ever quite doing either one. But there was no particular moment I recognized. I had the odd sensation of both seeing something for the first time and seeing it again. This exhilarated me and then unsettled me. I watched the remaining showings without ever quite being at ease.
Imagine me, then, seated, awaiting my superior, until the final showing of the evening came to an end and I was forced to leave the theater. I returned to the theater every day for a week, becoming more and more engrossed in the film or films, still unable to make sense of them. I kept to the same seat. My contact never appeared, though the uncircumcised man or someone not unlike him made several repeated forays down my aisle. On the eighth day, I found myself confronted not by the sort of film I had grown accustomed to but by a blaring and heaving image of a nude or nearly nude woman. Startled, I left.
I searched my mind: was there something I was forgetting, some method of contacting my superior that I had neglected? No, I thought, there was not.
What followed was a slow and lost movement through the city as I considered what, if anything, I should do. I kept my eyes open for the man in the photograph, to no avail. I shuffled in and out of movie theaters throughout the city without finding anyone who resembled my superior. Having no subject whose movements I might record, I began to record my own movements, slowly developing my own notational code, a code, I will acknowledge, derived from that of my previous supervisor.
I slept in the streets, plastered in newspapers. I became tattered, ungainly. I was awash, adrift, unadministrated.
How long this period lasted, it is difficult to say. Perhaps several months, perhaps more than a year. There are whole months of which I have only the vaguest memories. Even in my notebooks, pages in which each of a day’s movements is carefully notated are followed by bursts of blank pages. I remember the act of notating certain days in the notebook but no longer recall the movements themselves: even as I was writing them, it was as if I were recording not my own movements but the movements of someone else.
In a moment of lucidity, it came to me that it might be possible to regain contact with the administration through my previous administrator. I boarded the first bus. After a journey involving little or no sleep and the changing of buses on four or five separate occasions, I found myself back in the city in which I had fulfilled my first assignment. After a brief sleep within a green metal dumpster behind the bus station, I set off. I pursued a trajectory straight through the city along the main street until the surroundings began to strike me as familiar, at which point I began to wriggle my way about on side streets. By such means I stumbled onto a park not unlike the park in which my first subject of observation had shot himself. I discovered a house seemingly identical to the house he had occupied. I made my way through the park and down a side street, turned right, turned right once more, but at what should have been the designated corner I found no car.
I sat on the curb and considered. Was it or was it not the designated corner? The name of the street was familiar, but for what reason it was impossible to say: perhaps it was merely a street I had often passed, or it bore the name of another street in another city. My notebooks, carefully coded, were of no help on this score — the relevant pages had all been long ago torn out and pinioned to windshields. What remained of my notebooks concerned only my abortive second assignment (also in a house near a park, but in a different city) and my period of self-observation. Is this or is this not the place? I wrote, and then held the pen poised above the paper to see what words might come next.