Read an Excerpt
Panopticon
By David Bajo
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2010 David Bajo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60953-002-0
Chapter One
Klinsman arrived at the Motel San Ysidro on time, but the parking lot was empty and there was no police tape in front of room 9. The stucco walls of the single-story building were deep yellow in sunset, the roof postcard green. The neon sign had just come on, gaining full brightness with the sound of a lit fuse. He found the door to room 9 slightly ajar. He could only tell up close. He fumbled momentarily with the latex gloves he always brought to beat assignments but never managed to wear, then eased the door open.
The room was unlit and empty, with no signs of police investigation. Klinsman called Gina, his managing editor, hoping to catch her working late. She didn't answer. He flipped the light switch but nothing happened. He noticed that the cover and bulb for the overhead fanlight had been removed. A tiny square of black electrician's tape was stuck to the knob on the fan's pull-chain. Another piece was stuck over the door's peephole-on the inside. When he swung the door fully open to let in more light, Klinsman noticed yet another square of tape stuck to the inside doorknob.
He opened the heavy curtains to let in as much light as possible, a mix of neon and dusk and streetlight, and then the mass of lights from the Tijuana hills across the riverbed. When he thought about his past. It was that color, the light coming into room 9.
Klinsman tried his managing editor again but got no answer. He held her recorded voice to his ear, turned steadily, full circle, to examine the room. The doorknobs for the bathroom and the closet had black squares on them. The mirror on the dresser was draped with a towel. He tried the bathroom light and it didn't work. In the dimness of the shallow room he could see that the bulbs had been removed from the vanity light, with that mirror, too, covered by a towel. A toothbrush had been left beside the sink. Back in the main room, on the floor beside the dresser, he found a paper shopping bag containing all the lightbulbs, arranged on the bottom, neat as eggs.
He crouched on his heels and took his first picture, capturing the lightbulbs at the bottom of the bag. The double bed was made, but the thin cover, like milk skin, was wrinkled with the pattern left by a napping body, someone primly resting, gathering strength for a night out. With one arm outstretched, Klinsman held his camera above the bed and took a picture of the imprint. It was difficult to get the camera right above the pattern because the person who had been there had rested just off center. The pattern was intricate, swirled but contained like a fingerprint.
It was a woman. He could tell from the shape of the hips. Her hands had been clasped together over her stomach because he could see where her elbows had rested, little cups in the cloth on either side of her form. The cover was that sensitive, like a kind of photo plate, he thought, some silvery glass. Her heels, too, had left matching egg cups in the cloth. Klinsman took three shots.
He saw that it was time to leave for his evening assignment. He pressed the button on his camera and rotated a careful 360 degrees to get a panorama of the room. He lingered briefly on the blouse covering the TV screen but made sure he had enough memory in his camera left for the Luchadors in case he needed pictures for reference. The Review would send a good photographer to the Luchador event. Rita, he hoped, because she could be fun at that kind of assignment, make it not seem like work.
Klinsman closed the drapes, trying to leave room 9 in perfect order, rewinding his appearance. He even back-stepped to the door, checking to see if the industrial-grade carpet captured his footprints. There, then, imagining himself as intruder, Klinsman knew he had exposed himself to something and begun something, like Pandora taking the first full inhale of what she set free, Adam taking the second bite from the apple, feeling himself naked.
The light in the room was all artificial now: the neon from the motel sign, the sodium lamps from I-5, the veil of lights from the Tijuana hills, and that single collective amber borealis of humanity that forever hung above the landscape of his life, from these borderlands to the northernmost fingers of LA. He pulled the door closed but did not engage the lock, leaving it ajar again. As he had found it. Rewound.
Chapter Two
Café Cinema was busy. Klinsman sat at the bar, turned toward the floor so he could watch the Luchadors play the room. They wore business suits and their brightly colored head masks, just like Santo and Blue Demon in the old Mexican wrestler movies Klinsman had grown up watching on Channel 12. Klinsman liked this troupe. They were guerrilla theater, an improv combo of LA's Culture Clash, Latins Anonymous, and Chicano Secret Service, but everyone knew them as the Luchadors. Sometimes they did scheduled events like this one, sometimes they staged secret impromptu events, and sometimes they blended one into the other. He had covered them seven years ago, one of his first assignments. It seemed fitting that he should cover them here, in the final week of the
Review's existence. Not much seemed fitting to Klinsman, so this was a rare moment. He wondered if Gina had given him this story as a gift, a bookend, a rare fit.
He sipped from his bottle of Tecate and guided the turn of his bar stool, imagining himself a kind of box camera, hollow inside, the images gathered, flipped, then righted. Los Abandoned played through the ceiling speakers, singing in their English-Spanish mix about being girls in barrios. Nada mio es fake. Ven y tocame.
The club was lit more than usual so everyone could see the Luchadors mixing with the crowd in different ways, chatting, dancing, demonstrating invented holds, performing little spontaneous skits. The main screen in the back and the smaller screens over the bar were all showing Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis, sound off. It seemed as if the Luchadors, or their doubles, had leapt from the screens and come to life among the crowd. They had finished their live overdub of the movie, where they had made the immortals from Atlantis into corporate heads overseeing the maquiladores, the beautiful double agents X-25 and Juno into the two current state senators, and the zombies into consumers. From the start, as always, Santo was there to fight for the people, those who had not yet become zombies. Blue Demon, his rival at first, later joined forces with his silver-masked nemesis to wrestle X-25 and then finally the immortals. Now Santo and Blue and X-25 and Juno were loose in Café Cinema.
One of the Luchadors in a silver head mask was dancing with three women. The women were young and writhing wildly, flinging their dark hair. The Luchador was intentionally dancing stiffly, like Santo in his movies, a muscle-bound pillar of righteousness in his gray flannel suit, mask on.
X-25, in her orange pantsuit, danced vaguely with two young men. Her gaze was distant, her steps minimal, allowing her to scan the floor, the café, the bar. Klinsman stilled himself, waited to be swept over, maybe catch her eye. She processed him without a blip, her gaze passing just above him.
Klinsman turned back to the bar and smoothed the cool lip of his beer bottle over his eyelids. He stared down at the brass bar top and noticed a fingerprint, neat and perfect, in the center of a water ring. The fingerprint was long, including the whorls below the second joint. The imprint of the woman who had rested so primly, so intentionally on the bed in room 9 flickered inside the hollow of his camera-self along with the rest of the images he had just gathered. She swayed like thin, dark seaweed between the figures of the Luchadors, her hips nudging them, her hair curling around their necks, her spiral fists up before her breasts, dancer, boxer.
When he looked up and faced the bar mirror, he saw that one of the Luchadors had taken a seat beside him. He wore a Blue Demon mask and a dark business suit with a thin '50s tie. The tie had a silk-screened flying saucer and a ringed planet on it. The Luchador was trim, not like the burly Blue Demon from Channel 12, and the elegant bones of his face were outlined on his silk mask. His lips were full, pushed into lushness by the blue mask.
"You're Del Zamora," said Klinsman.
The Luchador stared back with no reply.
"I didn't know you were with these guys again." Klinsman tilted his beer but did not sip. "I saw you with them a long time ago. Here. You've done well since then. I saw you onstage at the Globe. And in Searchers 2.0."
The Luchador nodded toward Klinsman's Tecate. "How much you pay for that?"
Klinsman eyed the bottle as though assessing its full value.
"Four fifty. Plus tip."
"Remember when you could get it in Baja for fifty cents?" asked Del. In the oblong opening of his mask his lips looked as soft and thick as sea anemones, supple and articulate with the tide.
"In Tecate," replied Klinsman, "during feria they'd pour it in the streets. When I was a kid I loved the smell so much. The town reeked of it, hops baking on the sidewalks."
"It looked green in the sunlight," said Del, squeezing a tiny smile.
Klinsman cocked his head, stroked his jaw. "But you're not from there. Or here. You're not even a real Mexican. You're mostly Apache or something. From New Mexico. Way back in Repo Man was when they turned you into a Chicano."
"I'm not Zamora."
"You are," said Klinsman. "I have no doubt. The mask only convinces me more. Highlights your features. Your voice."
"I'm Blue Demon," he said, lips moist with the truth.
Chapter Three
Someone wants to take our picture," said Blue Demon, nodding toward the space behind Klinsman.
Klinsman turned on his bar stool, Blue leaned in, and Margarita Valdez snapped the photograph. With a sideways bend in her wrist, she waved Klinsman out of the frame and then took a careful portrait of Blue Demon.
"Take off your mask," she said, lifting her chin.
"Then you won't know who I am," replied Blue.
"Besides," said Klinsman, "the rules are clear. You'd have to wrestle him. Pin him and then unveil him. Dig your fingers under his jaw."
"It's never been done," said Blue. "Not even Santo has beaten me that badly."
Rita looked at Klinsman instead, her black camera, with its fluted portrait lens, held aside but at the ready. She gazed oddly at him, lingering and with a hidden smile, as though catching him cheating, approving of it. She looked pretty whenever she did that, curvy, barely gathered. Her mouth formed a perfect ellipse, divided equally, full, a kind of emerging red. Her eyebrows were almost straight, never arcing, but lithe like something searching upward, or ready to search upward, above smooth and sleepy lids. A look of disdain appeared always atrigger in her eyes and mouth. Her black hair was gathered in a desperate failing ponytail, for her work, and this exposed her face to her subjects, its olive shape and color behind the free and springy strands.
When Klinsman and Rita turned in unison to address Blue Demon, they found him gone. Klinsman scanned the floor.
"There he is," said Rita.
He followed her gaze upward to the screen over the bar. Back in the Atlantis movie, Blue Demon stood with a woman at a cocktail party, planning something over martinis, same suit, same flying-saucer tie. Klinsman and Rita gazed at the screen together, necks bent like friends watching after-school TV. They got into the scene together, feeling their jobs slipping away behind them, their jobs ending after seven years. Seven days left. What were Blue and his striking accomplice planning?
"Why do the women take off their masks?" Rita asked as she and Klinsman watched together, drank their beers. "Why doesn't she wear her mask with her business suit? Like him? Why only the men?"
"Because the men are beastly under those masks."
"That guy we just talked to wasn't beastly. He was pretty. You could tell."
"He was Del Zamora," Klinsman told her. "I'm sure he was."
"Why are the men beastly?"
"Because they're actually wrestlers. Not actors. Which also explains keeping the masks on."
"They look like barrels wearing suits, with arms and legs."
"The women don't," said Klinsman as they continued to watch. The scene hadn't moved. Blue Demon and the woman were still chatting, their martinis unsipped. This was typical of these movies, the way they droned domestically between sudden outbursts of wrestling. "The women all are beautiful. So they take off their masks."
"They all look like Edwige Fenech. Mexican Edwige Fenechs. That actress in your Uncle Mir's giallo collection. How does she get her hair that high? How does she get her chiches that high? They're like rocket ships."
Rita scooped up her breasts and looked down at herself. Her camera clunked to her side, slung over her lens pouch. Her shirt was caught up in the straps of the pouch and camera, exposing the slope and curl of her waist above her jeans. Klinsman felt a sway inside him, seaweed bending.
"Can you come to San Ysidro with me?" he asked her. "After you're finished here? I know it's late. But I think it's important. It might be a story. Of some kind. I need pictures. Good pictures. I need you to see."
"Sure," she said, beginning to compose that look for him. "I'm finished here. Where we going?"
"San Ysidro Motel. Room 9."
Her eyebrows leaned upward, her lips did something, fought gently against something, approved.
Chapter Four
Outside, the downtown air smelled of the bay, a barnacled hull. Rita and Klinsman shouldered their way through the 5th Avenue crowd to catch the southbound trolley. She got slightly ahead of him, always the photographer, always in front. She wore black boots, heeled to give her some height and vantage. Otherwise all her subjects would look nose-up and arrogant, she claimed. The black boots and jeans made her look
cholo. "Chola," she would always say, correcting him. Then she would push her hip toward him, lifting, twisting a little, pinch a little flesh. "La la Cholitas. Never quite down enough for the clothes we wear."
She looked back to him as they neared the trolley. "We can take my car."
"You've been drinking."
"Only beer. And whatever was in those little green glasses the wrestlers were serving."
"I hate cars," he said.
"I hate the trolley this time of night. The mozos and sailors look at me like I'm a dancer going to the Bambi Club or something, with these cameras as props for some freak show. Not hot enough to work without props. You know?"
"I'll carry your gear."
"That will look much better."
They rode the trolley south to San Ysidro, Rita getting the window seat. She gazed at the blackness of the Pacific beyond the stretch of beachfront lights. She leaned her head to the glass and he watched the reflection of her face, her eyebrows slanted, melancholic, her rounded lips still as a single piano note. Sometimes she could catch sight of the waves, white and featherlike across the black shore. He wondered where she was, where she was going. He was surprised to hear his name.
"Aaron," she said, still gazing through the window. "You didn't call those people up north. You didn't do anything. Again. You didn't do anything. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to travel Mexico. Then Prague with my uncle. See what I find. Write something."
"We're too old for those kinds of answers. We're already too old for what we do now."
"Having second thoughts?" he asked.
"Only for you. I like my plan. I leave for Manzanillo next week. Day after we finish here."
Klinsman was surprised, a wave suddenly lifting higher as it neared, doubling itself. "You've moved it up."
"Yeah." She rolled her forehead against the glass, closed her eyes. "I keep moving it up."
"You should've told me."
"I just did tell you. You're the first one I've told. Chingodero. Chingadero taking me to some motel on the border."
After the Palm City stop, the tracks bowed away from the sea and the trolley filled up more with Mexicans getting back across after very long work days. Most of them looked too tired to stare at anything, certainly not anything as complex as Rita, with her hair gaining more and more freedom from its ponytail, her brow mourning, her lips holding stoic and full.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Panopticon by David Bajo Copyright © 2010 by David Bajo. Excerpted by permission.
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