25.11.03. Sorry, Gösta. Can’t use you this time but maybe some other time. We’re talking about light here, not blackness. Justine on screen is particles of light. Or waves, whichever. OK, so I’ve got to get a frame with a good full-length shot of Justine, then I isolate her for transmission. How the fuck do I do that?
Went to see Chauncey Lim in D’Arblay Street. Optical novelties. All kinds of pocket-size things with lenses, keyrings that talk and buttonhole cameras. On the wall an acupuncture chart and a calendar with a photograph of a black rooster from Aunt Zophrania’s Herbals & Dreambooks Est. 1925 ‘Harlem’s Best’. The place was pretty fuggy and there was the kind of smell you might get if you opened a box of Transylvanian earth. You have to take Chauncey as you find him. I bought a fountain pen that projects a photo of Virginia Mayo (still big in Morocco) to put him in a good mood.
‘You already have three of these,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me this time?’
I said, ‘I’m almost afraid to tell you, it’s such a crazy idea.’
He began to look interested. ‘Crazy is good,’ he said. ‘Too much not enough crazy in this world. Tell me anything, I’m very electric.’
‘You mean eclectic.’
‘That too, but I sing the body electric. I’m talking Walt Whitman here.’
‘Please don’t. Can I tell you what I want now?’
‘OK. Always you’re in a hurry, Istvan. Slow down, smell the flowers, listen to the birds.’
‘There aren’t any birds, the radiators are knocking and what I smell isn’t flowers.’
‘It’s High John the Conqueror root, I grind it up and make little incense cones out of it. This root gives power, it’s good luck, one of Aunt Zophrania’s top sellers.’
‘Right, are you going to let me tell you my problem now?’
‘Go ahead. I can see that your problem wants to become my problem.’
So I told him and he became quite excited. ‘This is top crazy,’ he said. ‘Show me the video.’
I handed him Last Stage to El Paso. He put it in his VCR and played it, backing it up now and then to see a scene again. ‘This is a woman I could fall in love with,’ he said.
‘First of all, she’s dead,’ I said.
‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he said.
‘And I saw her first,’ I said.
‘Keep your shirt on. You want to isolate her, this is what you have to do.’ He gave me detailed instructions and I took notes.
‘Let me know what happens,’ Chauncey said as I was leaving.
‘You bet,’ I said.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘take some High John with you, you’ll want all the power you can get.’ He gave me a box of the little incense cones.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘See you.’ I hurried home and got started while everything was still fresh in my mind. With Chauncey’s instructions I converted the video to a digitised version that I could scan frame by frame. I got a JPEG of the frame I wanted, then I started up Photoshop and highlighted the background. I went to the inverse of that and got Justine with black all around her which I cut out and pasted on a blank Photoshop canvas. So far, so good.
What I had in mind was to do a small-size trial run first. In order to use a diffraction grating I devised a converter that would laserise the light from the Justine figure and aim it at the slits in the diffraction grating. The grating was something I remembered from sixth-form physics. This was a low-tech job made of cardboard and only fourteen inches high with two slits in it. I had a sheet of photographic printing paper covered with foil on a little easel about two feet away. I darkened the room, put Justine up on the screen, triggered the laser, and uncovered the paper as the interference pattern appeared. Then I covered it again, went into the darkroom, and printed it. That gave me the particles of the interference pattern on the paper. I dissolved the paper in hydrochloric acid and then what I had on the bottom of the tray were the particles alone.
1 January 2004. Everything grinds to a halt for Christmas but I took a taxi out to Thierson & Bates Biologicals in Surrey and got some frog specimens before they closed. Chauncey Lim helped me out with the chemicals I needed and by New Year’s Eve I was ready to have a go.
I poured the particles into a test tube containing polypetides that I’d prepared from the frogs. I figured that my primordial soup would bind the particles in a suspension of disbelief and the frog DNA wouldn’t interfere with the identity of the particles. I lit the High John cones and when the room smelled lucky I zapped the soup with 240 volts. Smoke came out of the test tube and there was an electrical smell. Then Jesus Christ, there she was in the test tube in black-and-white, about four inches high. She looked scared, and stood there twisting slowly with her arms above her head because of the narrowness of the tube. As I looked at her from all angles I had a crazed feeling of power. Then I suddenly felt so sad that I began to cry. I was shaking, and with the test tube in my left hand I put my right hand behind me so I could lean on the table but I pricked my finger on the point of a scalpel. When I held up my hand a drop of blood fell into the test tube and all at once tiny Justine blossomed into colour. She looked at me and mouthed, ‘Oh!’ Then the colour faded and with it the whole figure, ghastly in monochrome as it shrivelled into nothing. Oh, my God, the sadness! I stood there holding the test tube and looking at the emptiness where she’d been with my head spinning round on the first day of the New Year.
3 Irving Goodman
2 January 2004. Finding and losing! I found Justine in the lonely night-time hours when I watched westerns and drank myself to sleep. Men quick to anger, loyal unto death, fast on the draw. Horses beautiful and innocent. Women to inspire a good man and madden a bad one. Mountains and plains and rivers, canyons, arroyos, gulches and draws. Mists of morning and moons over the desert. Justine flickering in my sodden half-dreams and my forlorn hopes.
Having found her, was I now to lose her to Istvan Fallok? Was this ordained, written in the Big Book of Absurdity? I had turned to Fallok to make Justine real for me and now I knew in my heart that he was out to take her from me. The way he leered when she swung into the saddle, Oh God. Has he brought her into our reality or has he gone into hers? Wherever they are, I’ll find them and take her away from him, that bastard. Him and his high-tech treachery. Don’t go with him, Justine, I saw you first.
4 Chauncey Lim
3 January 2004. Justine Trimble. There is that about her which moves me deeply and stirs profoundly the essential Chauncey, the inner Lim. Istvan Fallok, that creep. Every now and then he comes round and buys a Virginia Mayo pen and expects me to do anything he requires of me. Insufferable cheek. The white man patronising the yellow brother. Why then do I do that which he asks me to do? Do I need his goodwill? No, I piss on his goodwill.
Justine Trimble. The very thought of her makes my heart sing. Fallok is all wrong for her and I intend to make her mine. This is the first time I’ve put it into words but there it is. Where is he or where are they now? He said he would let me know what’s happening but I’ve heard nothing. Which means that something is happening. Otherwise he’d have come round to buy another pen.