By means of thirty-six electrodes and who knows what computerised mumbo-jumbo, Orff had his head zapped by Fallok and had a number of encounters with the head of Orpheus. Eventually he found his way into cereal boxes, the backs of, and eked out a living in that medium while developing a character called Nnvsnu the Tsrungh which he copyrighted as a computer game that made him almost wealthy.
Orff was white-haired and rosy-faced, and he was what you might call a successful failure. He had failed as a novelist and he had failed to regain his lost love, Luise von Himmelbett, (see his novel, The Medusa Frequency) but he could smile (ruefully) and say that really he had no complaints. ‘Life is a one-way trip,’ he said to me. ‘If someone nice sits next to you for a while, that’s as much as you have a right to expect.’ It was at a publisher’s party that he told me this, the occasion being the launch of Geoffrey Thrust’s novel, Love’s Labia, at the Horse Hospital behind Russell Square tube station. Neither of us knew Thrust but we were on the Palinurus mailing list.
‘Do you think Istvan Fallok could do anything with a visual problem?’ I said. Having drunk more red wine than I should have I outlined my situation at length.
‘Fallok can do all kinds of things,’ said Orff. ‘Try him and see. The worst that can happen is that it will cost you your sanity and maybe your life but you’ll probably be sorry if you don’t ring him up.’
Who could say no to a proposition like that? Orff gave me Fallok’s number and I rang him up. When I met him I was impressed by his appearance. How a man could look so worn-out without being dead was a real head-shaker. I’m told that his hair used to be red but it was white now. His face hung loosely from his watery blue eyes but he looked sharp in an almost extinct way and this was the man to whom I confided my cask strength whisky and my hopes.
13 December 2003. I tried to be patient. I fully appreciated that I’d asked Fallok to do something that, as far as I knew, had never been done and very likely couldn’t be done. When I was a child we had a large mirror that took up most of the width of the rear wall in the front room. It had no frame and was fastened flush against the wall. It showed what was in front of it but I used to put my face against the very edge and try to see around it to what it wasn’t showing. I never could but I knew that the mirror wasn’t giving me the whole picture. I’m still trying to see around the edge. That’s where Justine was and I believed that Istvan Fallok could get me there.
I waited a week, then a month. I watched my copy of Last Stage to El Paso again and again, straining my eyes in an effort to pull her out of the screen and out of death into my world.
My eyesight was failing. Age-related macular degeneration was the diagnosis. The macula is that part of the eye which gives detail and depth perception. I frequently mistook flat surfaces for raised ones and shadows for substance. I always drank most of a bottle of red wine at dinner and that didn’t help. In the evening it was difficult for me to read with my reading glasses and images on the TV screen lost sharpness. In a surprising number of films there’s a bit where someone holds up a letter and I couldn’t read it unless I got up very close. If it was a video I could pause the tape but if it wasn’t I often missed crucial information. Sometimes people killed themselves or someone else after reading a letter.
I was having difficulty with colour too; the scene before my eyes sometimes seemed pale. It wasn’t cataracts — I’d already had implants for those. Dr Luzhin is my eye doctor. He looks like Lenin and strokes his goatee a lot. When I asked him about the colour problem he put drops in my eyes, sent me back to the waiting room for fifteen minutes, then led me to the apparatus where you put your chin on the chin rest, shone lights of various colours into one eye and the other, and stroked his goatee. ‘What?’ I said.
‘There’s no change in your eyes since six months ago,’ he said. ‘This business with loss of colour, there is no defence against it. What you see is what the brain tells you you’re seeing. If the brain decides that the colour is going out of the world you’re going to see everything paler than before.’
‘Is there anything I can do about it?’
‘Get yourself a girlfriend.’
I waited and waited for word from Istvan but there was no news day after day. Then I began to see Justine Trimble where she wasn’t. If I looked out of the corner of my eye I saw her in the street, in the Underground and on buses in black-and-white. She always looked back at me as if she wanted to say something. When I looked straight ahead she wasn’t there.
2 Istvan Fallok
24 November 2003. ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly …’ Right? General disbelief. But the Wright brothers suspended their disbelief. They believed that man could fly and the rest of it followed from that. Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible. Yes. I keep telling myself that. I’m Istvan Fallok and I believe that I’m going to reconstitute Justine Trimble from the magnetised particles of a videotape. I believe it because when I saw her on that video it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Wham, I was in love. Irving Goodman’s an OK guy and he’s in love with Justine too but if I can make this happen she’s going to be mine, not his.
Right, let’s get practical. Google tells me that videotape is composed primarily of three components: magnetic (metal oxide) particles, a polyurethane-based binder, and a polyester base material. Particles yes. Particles and waves. Diffraction gratings. Particles in suspension. Particles in a suspension of disbelief. Waves of aggravation and frustration. Light comes through the grating as waves or particles. Interference patterns. Light. Justine on the video is made of light.
Wait a minute. Let’s think this thing through. Do I want to bring Justine to me or do I want to go to her? Not dead Justine but the waves and/or particles of her on the video? So if I go there, what then? Will I be the sixty-five-year-old me or will I be young like Justine? And western? With a pistol and a horse?
There was a name in my mind: Gösta Kraken. I had a copy of his book, Perception Perceived. I went to my shelves, stuck out my arm, and it leapt into my hand. So I knew it wanted to help. I’d flagged the page where he talks about being:
Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.
Thank you, Gösta. So it’s light and motion, blackness and stillness. Waves or particles? Waves and particles? Still, I’m thinking of it from her end. What about my getting to where she is? No good. Even if I could work out the translation of me into magnetised particles all I’d have is me stuck in Last Stage to El Paso. Endlessly. No, I’ve got to bring her to me. First I’ll have to scan the stillnesses and calibrate an electronic suspension of the black. Film runs at twenty-four frames per second; video at twenty-five and the black … Hang on, do I want the black? No, I don’t. Let’s back up and start again.