The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Read Free Page A

us…’
    “‘. . . came in and that he took that money…’
    “‘. . . said she’s being watched all the time …’
    “‘He’d destroy us if he could.’
    “The level of disengagement from the audience is palpable. This isn’t a movie that wants to be loved. The waitress is radiation-sickness thin in her cornstalk yellow outfit. She clears the table. With her skeletal hand she casually drops what appears to be a folded note in the lap of the biker with tattooed hands. He slips it into the pocket of his denim shirt without looking atit. The woman biker notices this. Her black hair is in what we used to call Indian braids. She murmurs something that’s not audible to us. Whatever she says infuriates the tattooed man. He slaps the table hard with his palm and leans forward as if challenging her. The skinny waitress in yellow looks agitated and says something to all of them, and for a few moments the sound cuts out in a way that suggests conspiracy, like the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes, a gap that Alexander Haig actually said was caused by a sinister force . But then the man with the red bandana says something to calm him down (‘let it go, for now, man…’) and puts his hand on the other biker’s shoulder in a way that can only be described as tender.
    “Finally a character we hadn’t noticed before, sitting alone at a table at the far right edge of the screen, gets up to pay. He has a terrible limp and is slope-shouldered. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat that somehow seems out of place. The tattooed man notices and tips his head to the others. Without speaking they leave their table, casually, and follow the limper out to the parking lot that’s so dusty and loose it feels like some of it has blown up onto the theater screen itself. The camera holds on the empty booth as if there’s still someone there who we can’t see and then something hits the window, hits it hard. It’s a large bird. The sound it makes when it hits the glass is the sound of death. The film cuts to a shot originating from across the road. The restaurant is framed in the middle of the screen like a lonely outpost. The wind has picked up and dust and tumbleweeds scatter in that delicate, gravity-defying way of theirs across the screen in the direction of time. The man in the cowboy hat limps up to a dusty yellow Datsun. There might be something finger-written in the dust that cakes the side of the car, but it’s hard to tell. The man wearing the black cowboy hat gets in the filthy Datsun and tries to start it but like so many bad cars from that era it just won’t turn over. He curses frantically and, with both hands grasping the steering wheel shakes his body back and forth likehe’s having a seizure or is trying to tear off the steering wheel. He finally gets it going and takes off in the direction of the blowing sand. The three motorcyclists talk excitedly and point in different directions. The woman tries and fails to light a cigarette in the wind. She finally throws the lighter to the ground. The tattooed man leans down to pick it up. The note falls out of his shirt pocket. It’s carried away by the wind. Then they get on their bikes and head out in the same direction as the Datsun.”
    Laing pauses for a second, as if he’s holding the entire movie in his head and the image is projected onto the side of an enormous soap bubble there in the motel room with us that might burst and disappear forever at any moment. I suddenly have no desire to be in the room with him. I’m overcome with the feeling (a feeling that made only a little sense then and only a little sense more now) that we are standing on the sea floor, and that the blue velvet chair, the bed, the table, were all sunken objects, somehow preserved by the icy water that Laing and I, as if by magic, could breathe under. And if Laing hadn’t started up again about Destroyer I may very well have walked out.
    “The next scene looks radically changed