He stood outside the barracks. A clear day. Occasional small whirlwinds in the area. Memory. A playback. He watched a raven soar toward the mountains, wind-assisted, rising at first gradually, a continuous and familiar fact, and then in spasmodic surges, peculiar stages of rapid ascent, wholly without effort and seemingly beyond the limits of what is possible in the physical world-imperceptible transitions that left the watcher trying to account for missing segments of space or time.
Large soaring birds were the only things here that lived without reference to a sense of distance. Or so he imagined, Selvy did. He'd once exchanged stares, at fifteen feet, with a red-tailed hawk that had lighted on a tree stump at the edge of a deserted ranch, perhaps twenty miles from this spot, during exercises with live ammunition. That was how he'd come to believe in the transcendent beauty of predators.
That day was like this one. A morning of startling brightness. Clarity without distracting glare. The sky was saturated with light. Everything was color.
He was twenty yards from the barracks when he realized two cats were at his feet. He stopped and turned. Three more cats moved this way. He knew what it meant. Still more cats came out from under the barracks. They followed him, moving around his feet, mewing. Cats approached from another direction now, the windmill. An image unwinding. After ten paces he crouched down and they were all over and around him, scratching, crying out, at least fifteen cats and kittens, allowing themselves to be petted and rubbed, or just stretching in the sun, purring, or sniffing at his clothes, all of them looking healthy and well fed.
Levi Blackwater was here.
At the Mines, back then, he'd been an unwelcome presence in most gatherings of men. An ordinary boy from Ohio, named out of Genesis, he'd served as technical adviser to ARVN forces in the relatively early days of U.S. involvement. Out on a reconnaissance patrol, he'd been captured by the Vietcong, and tortured, and had come to love his captors. Eight months inside a prison building in a VC base camp in a mangrove thicket. Fish heads and rice. They strung him up by the feet. They held his head under water. They cut off two of his fingers.
The more they tortured him, the more he loved them. They were helping him. He considered it help.
At the Mines he cooked and worked in the laundry and did odd jobs. The men knew his history and stayed away from him. Selvy was an exception. He went to Levi for lessons in meditation.
Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.
She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.
Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. People came up against themselves in the end. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.
Lightborne wouldn't agree. Lightborrie wanted a marketable product, she was sure. He wasn't in it for the existential lift.
Odell turned on a lamp and approached the screen in order to make sure it would be parallel to the strip of film itself when it moved through the projector gate. While he was doing this, Moll glanced over at Lightborne.
"What was it doing when you arrived?" he said. "Was that rain or sleet? I need new boots. I'd like to find something with some lining this year. This is a bad year, they're saying, looking long range."
He'd been making the same nervous small talk ever since Moll walked in. Twice now Odell had turned on the light to make a last-minute adjustment somewhere. Both times Lightborne had immediately started talking. In the dark he was silent. He chewed his knuckles in the dark.
Once more Odell turned off the lamp. Moll began to feel that special kind of anticipation she'd enjoyed since childhood-a life in the movies. It was an expectation of pleasure like no other. Simple mysteries are the deepest. What did it mean, this wholly secure escape, this credence in her heart? And how was it possible that4 bad, awful, god-awful movies never seemed to betray the elation and trust she felt in the seconds before the screen went bright? The anticipation was apart from what followed. It was permanently renewable, a sense of freedom from all the duties and conditions of the nonmovie world.
She felt it even here, sitting in a hard straight chair in a shabby gallery before a small screen. She felt it despite her knowledge of the various dealings, procedures and techniques that surrounded the acquisition of the film.
A two-dimensional city would materialize out of the darkness, afloat in various kinds of time, all different from the system in which real events occur. Yet we understand it so readily and well. They connect to us, all the city's spatial and temporal codes, as though from a place we knew before.
"I had the phone turned off," Lightborne said. "A temporary measure. To mute out the sound of certain voices."
He started to say something else but his voice drifted off and the only sound that remained was the running noise of motion picture film winding through the transport mechanism of the black projector.
_A bare room/black and white_.
_Plaster is cracked in places. On other parts of the wall it is missing completely. The lights in the room flicker_.
_Three children appear. A girl, perhaps eleven, carries a chair. Two younger children, a boy and a very small girl, drag in a second chair between them_.
_The children set the chairs on the floor and walk out of camera range_.
_There is a disturbance. The picture jumps as though the camera has been farred by some brief violent action_.
_A blank interval_.
_Again the room. The camera setup is the same_.
_A fourth child appears, a girl. She walks across the room and climbs onto one of the chairs, sitting primly, trying to suppress a bashful smile_.
_The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs. A woman appears, very drawn, moving toward the seated child. The lights flicker. Another girl appears; she notices the camera and walks quickly out of range_.
_The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs_.
_The camera is immobile. It does not select. People pass in and out of its viewing field_.
_The woman sits next to the small girl, absently stroking the child's hand. The woman is blond and attractive, clearly not well. She appears weak. It is even possible to say she is emotionally distressed. The oldest girl stands next to her, speaking. The woman slowly nods_.
_The boy carries in another chair. Three more adults appear, a man and two women. They stand about awkwardly, the man trying to work out a seating arrangement. The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs_.
_The once bare room is crowded with chairs and people_.
_The lights flicker overhead_.
"What do you think?" Lightborne said.
"I don't know what to think."
"You know who it could be? Magda Goebbels."
"The first woman?" Moll said.
"Those could be her children. I'm saying 'could be.' I'm trying to supply identities. Make a little sense out of this."
"Do you think it's the bunker?"
"It could be the doctor's former room. Hitler's quack doctor was allowed to leave. Goebbels took over his room."
"The three others," Moll said.
"I don't know. They could be secretaries, the women. The man, almost anything. A chauffeur, a stenographer, a valet, a bodyguard."
"Magda Goebbebs, you think."
"I'm saying 'could be.' This isn't what I expected. I wasn't looking for this at all."
Nothing much had happened thus far but Moll found something compelling about the footage she was watching. It wasn't like a feature film or documentary; it wasn't like TV newsfilm. It was primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic, not without an element of mystery.
Faces and clothing were immediately recognizable as belonging to another era. This effect was heightened by the quality of the film itself, shot with natural lighting. Bleached grays and occasional blurring. Lack of a sound track. Light leaks in the camera, causing flashes across the screen. The footage suggested warier times-dark eyes and fussy mouths, heavy suits, dresses in overlapping fabric, an abruptness and formality of movement.