LITMIR.BIZ

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Ras seems, genuinely unknowing.

      “Because,” I say, “you’ll lose your job. And what are you talking about anyway? When would you go, spring term? Honduras, in spring, for Christ’s sake!”

      “No,” says Ras, looking dreamily into his drink, “I’m talking about now. I’m talking about tomorrow, next week. Before my ol’ man turns up and . . . Just leaving, Ciaran. . . . you know. Everybody behind.”

      I close up on him as he’s putting on his helmet. “Groovy,” I say, him filling the frame, “you should have told me. You’re actually Peter Fonda, right?”

      7

      Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno says this:

      Picture-book without pictures.—The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images. While the assault on images irresistibly demolishes, after metaphysical Ideas, those concepts once understood as rational and genuinely attained by thought, the thinking unleashed by the Enlightenment and immunized against thinking is now becoming a second figurativeness, though without images or spontaneity. Amid the network of now wholly abstract relations of people to each other and to things, the power of abstraction is vanishing. The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quality of material processed, which has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience, ceaselessly enforces an archaic retranslation into sensuous signs. The little silhouettes of men or houses that pervade statistics like hieroglyphics may appear in each particular case accidental, mere auxiliary means. But it is not by chance they have such a resemblance to countless advertisements, newspaper stereotypes, toys. In them representation triumphs over what is represented.

      (Library Shelf: P044448. Professor’s Notes. Z. L. LaTroal. “Politics of Popular Culture” 35:077 Adv. From Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso: New York, 1994, 140)

      8

      We’re riding up into the hills with Southport beach behind us and the terraces giving way now to allotments, farm shops. What this would look like in widescreen you’d never believe, with the night so clear that, as we ride, it feels like it’s taking my skin off. Like an ice loofah scrubbing away. We’re travelling at what?, sixty miles an hour, which is not even half of what this thing can do. Ras is down low and his helmet, which he’s proud to say is an Arai Quantum E, shoots black and red. I’m pulled up behind him with my hands round his waist and my phone, which I cannot operate, tucked into my jacket. I’m trying to imagine Honduras but I can’t. Hondurans. Lluvia de Peces (Fish Rain). Cheap sandals. Shrimp sizzling right through summer. But all I can see, all that is suddenly visible to me, apart from the rush of scenery which blurs into blacks and browns unless I look upward to the sky which is lined and shot with low white cloud, is Karen.

      Voice absent: Karen. Joan of Arc: Karen. Ingrid Bergman: Karen. Karen: SupaVideo: Karen. Close up: Karen. Karen. Karen.

      I can’t believe that in just a few weeks she has completely abandoned her love of film, replacing it with some unexplained new belief in literature, when it was film, and film alone, that brought us together. She and I studying American Cinema with Professor Pullman at Roeford and Karen acting in five undergraduate productions in that term alone. And I could see from her total devotion to performing for the camera that she loved cinema as much as I did. When she topped Pullman’s class that only confirmed what I already knew. We got together properly heading to Southport on the train, for pre-registration, and I shot her in full profile across the carriage, reading (come to think of it) The Great Gatsby and she said that she loved Francis Ford Coppola’s work, and I pointed out that Coppola had directed You’re A Big Boy Now when he was just 26 years old, as part of his UCLA graduate thesis, and we talked about how a movie camera can be an eye, an insightful eye on our world, and about how much our graduate studies would equip us for this very world, which was rolling out so rapidly in front of us, even though the cost of graduate study, she pointed out, was phenomenal.

      I phone shot her there in that crowded carriage with the windows reflecting her back at me, the scenery passing blurred behind her, the passengers trying to stay in their fixed, unfocussed lives and she, who seemed to easily drift off into trying to calculate how she would survive at USP, the cost of a room in the college, the cost of meals, the cost of books, the cost, cost, cost of education, she said, that in all this tremendous turmoil me with my camera phone at least made her feel kind “special,” her eyes clouding over as she said this, Roeford now behind her, Southport rolling bright and shiny out in front, and me loving her cheesy overplaying of this, her almost cheese-shop Cameron Diaz playing of this scene as she described a job she’d lined up in Southport already, with a guy who was both a film maker and a teacher.

      Now this! Just to add insult to injury, Ras is talking about this crazy Honduran thing of his. And nobody is fully explaining to me how this could be happening, or where it fits with me or my plans or the whole gamut of relationships which my existence entails and which make up my film. I want to know how Cole feels about all of this. About what Monika thinks. What David Duchovny thinks. And Nic Cage. And John Cusack, whose range and versatility show him to have insights beyond the ordinary. How Drew Barrymore would read it, being a child of the Hollywood system who has endured both hard times and ridicule.

      The fact that Karen is still missing, has not been back to the terrace all day and, though I have called her phone who knows how many times, is still entirely uncontactable, only confirms that whatever is coming between us is growing larger by the minute. Like the black star in The Fifth Element or the rats in The Watcher or . . . maybe, I’m thinking, like the surging evil which fills, and then expands, in each and every frame of End of Days.

      Before we left Plexus Ras mentioned his favorite Honduran film-maker, Paul Amador, and I had to admit I had never heard of him. Now I feel awful. My head is aching and I think the cherry juice in the Lilli may have been off or something. I do know as follows: Buńuel lived in Mexico City in the 50s and 60s and the films from his middle period were shot there, including Los Olvidados. Likewise Eisenstein filmed Que viva Mexico! in 1931 but that is thorough trot, having no story to speak of and no great characters, and I can’t understand why anyone would go some place that was so visually claustrophobic. Meanwhile, Ras is giving the bike some.

      The corners seem to be coming up now increasingly fast, one after the other. Increasingly fast. I hang on, right hand holding left, and I feel him moving in front of me, his waist rolling up and down in the circle of my arms and his shoulders, which are broader than mine, shifting up and down into right bend then left. And I go with him. Ras’s parents live out at Stoneycroft, in a 19th century barn conversion on 3.5 acres, freestanding, own a Lexus, because they don’t believe (I’m guessing) in being ostentatious about their wealth, and spend three weeks in summer in Kos, Greece, picking oleanders and drinking ouzo. His parents are paying for his science degree and he is guaranteeing them that he’ll finish it—which strikes me as a dubious deal, given the remote subject of his degree (centipedes or centrifuges or something). But each, I say, to his own. He says that Karen is the best thing that could have happened to me and that I should go away with her for a while, shoot maybe a surf movie and get things into perspective, but I don’t see how or why. So he just doesn’t mention it any more, only mutters something about if his father turns up before he leaves for Honduras, or gets a first term grade on his MS project, then his whole life will disintegrate before him.

      Now, with the houses gathering again, we’re picking up the outer ring road. The bike’s an Aprilla, foreign, new (2-stroke, reminds me of my pop cutting our front lawn in summer, kids in the street being Jedis: I imagine my strong but graceless ol’ pa replacing the spark plugs. I see him sharpening those blades with a flat file on his bench which never is uncluttered but is always purposeful. I picture the tools he has pinned out on a white peg board which says, wordlessly, out from the shed: “Get a Life, dad!”) and Ras can ride. Suddenly now there’s a Burger King, a Happy Eater, an F&M Superstore. The road is turning into a highway and the lights have become yellow and there, finally, is the sign for the hospital.

      When we pull up into the bike bay Ras, taking off his

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