The atrocity exhibition (14 page)

‘Homage to Abraham Zapruder.’
Each night, as Travers moved through the deserted auditorium, the films of simulated atrocities played above the rows of empty seats, images of napalm victims, crashing cars and motorcade attacks. Travers followed Vaughan from one projection theatre to the next, taking his seat a few rows behind him. When a party in evening dress came in Travers followed him on to the library floor. As Vaughan leafed through the magazines he listened to the flow of small talk, the suave ironies of Koester and his women. Koester had a face like a fake newsreel.

Go, No-Go Detector
. These deaths preoccupied Travers.
Malcolm X:
the death of terminal fibrillation, as elegant as the trembling of hands in tabes dorsalis;
Jayne Mansfield:
the death of the erotic junction, the polite section of the lower mammary curvature by the glass guillotine of the windshield assembly;
Marilyn Monroe:
the death of her moist loins; the falling temperature of her rectum embodied in the white rectilinear walls of the twentieth-century apartment;
Jacqueline Kennedy:
the notional death, defined by the exquisite eroticism of her mouth and the logic of her leg stance;
Buddy Holly:
the capped teeth of the dead pop singer, like the melancholy dolmens of the Brittany coastline, were globes of milk, condensations of his sleeping mind.

The Sex Deaths of Karen Novotny
. The projection theatre was silent as the last film began. Travers recognized the figures on the screen - Dr Nathan, Catherine Austin, himself. In sequence the rushes of the sex deaths of Karen Novotny passed before them. Travers stared at the young woman’s face, excited by these images of her postures and musculature and the fantasies of violence he had seen in the imaginary newsreels.

The Dream Scenario
. As Travers walked through the pines towards his car he recognized Karen Novotny sitting behind the wheel, fur collar buttoned round her chin. The white strap of her binocular case lay above the dashboard. The fresh scent of the pine needles irrigated his veins. He opened the door and took his seat in the passenger compartment. ‘Where have you been?’ Travers studied her body, the junction of her broad thighs with the vinyl seat cover, her nervous fingers moving across the chromium instrument heads.

Conceptual Games
. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’

Biomorphic Horror
. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’

Sink Speeds
. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.’

Imaginary Diseases
. By contrast, for Catherine Austin these activities were evidence of an ever widening despair, a deliberate summoning of the random and grotesque. After their meeting at the exhibition Travers grasped her arm so tightly that his fingers bruised a nerve. To calm him, she read through the catalogue introduction: ‘Bernouli’s
Encyclopedia of Imaginary Diseases
was compiled during his period as a
privat-dozent
in Frankfurt. Beginning with the imaginary diseases of the larynx, he proceeded to a number of fictional malfunctions of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Within a few years, as he added the cerebro-spinal system to his encyclopedia, a substantial invented pathology had been catalogued. Bernouli’s monographs on imaginary defects of speech are a classic of their period, equalled only by his series of imaginary diseases of the bladder and anus. His greatest work without doubt is his exhaustive “imaginary diseases of the genitalia” - his concept of the imaginary venereal disease represents a tour de force of extraordinary persuasion. A curious aspect of Bernouli’s work, and one that must not be overlooked, is the way in which the most bizarre of his imaginary diseases, those which stand at the summit of his art and imagination, in fact closely approximate to conditions of natural pathology
 
. . . ’

Marriage of Freud and Euclid
. These embraces of Travers’s were gestures of displaced affections, a deformed marriage of Freud and Euclid. Catherine Austin sat on the edge of the bed, waiting as his hands moved across her left armpit, exploring the parameters of a speculative geometry. In a film magazine on the floor were a series of photographs of a young woman’s death postures, stills from Koester’s unsavoury documentary. These peculiar geometric elements contained within them the possibilities of an ugly violence. Why had Travers invited her to this apartment above the zoo? The traces of a young woman’s body clung to its furniture - the scent on the bedspread, the crushed contraceptive wallet in the desk drawer, the intimate algebra of pillow arrangements. He worked away endlessly on his obscene photographs: left breasts, the grimaces of filling station personnel, wound areas, catalogues of Japanese erotic films: ‘targeting areas’, as he described them. He seemed to turn everything into its inherent pornographic possibilities. She grimaced as he grasped her left nipple between thumb and forefinger; an obscene manual hold, part of a new grammar of callousness and aggression. Koester’s eyes had moved across her body in the same transits when she blundered into the film crew outside the multi-storey car park. Vaughan had stood on the parapet beside the crashed car, staring down at her with cold and stylized rapacity.

Death Games (a) Conceptual
. Looking back at his wife’s death, Travers now reconceived it as a series of conceptual games: (1) a stage show, entitled ‘Crash’; (2) a volume curve in a new transfinite geometry; (3) an inflatable kapok sculpture two hundred yards long; (4) a slide show of rectal cancers; (5) six advertisements placed in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
; (6) a board game; (7) a child’s paper-doll books, cut-out tabs mounted around the wound areas; (8) the notional ‘pudenda’ of Ralph Nader; (9) a set of noise levels; (10) a random collection of dialogue samples, preserved on videotape, from ambulance attendants and police engineers.

Death Games (b) Vietnam
. Dr Nathan gestured at the war newsreels transmitted from the television set. Catherine Austin watched from the radiator panel, arms folded across her breasts. ‘Any great human tragedy - Vietnam, let us say - can be considered experimentally as a larger model of a mental crisis mimetized in faulty stair angles or skin junctions, breakdowns in the perception of environment and consciousness. In terms of television and the news magazines the war in Vietnam has a latent significance very different from its manifest content. Far from repelling us, it
appeals
to us by virtue of its complex of polyperverse acts. We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra - these are games that anyone can play. Their violence, and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place now, within sex as elsewhere, and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques. Where all this leads one can only speculate - why not, for example, use our own children for all kinds of obscene games? Given that we can only make contact with each other through the new alphabet of sensation and violence, the death of a child or, on a larger scale, the war in Vietnam, should be regarded as for the public good.’ Dr Nathan stopped to light a cigarette. ‘Sex, of course, remains our continuing preoccupation. As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else. What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration, without any taint of guilt, of every aspect of sexual psychopathology. Travers, for example, has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect. In many ways he is the first of the new naives, a Douanier Rousseau of the sexual perversions. However consoling, it seems likely that our familiar perversions will soon come to an end, if only because their equivalents are too readily available in strange stair angles, in the mysterious eroticism of overpasses, in distortions of gesture and posture. At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as paedophilia and sodomy will become derided clichés, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls.’

Chase Sequence
. As the helicopter roared over their heads again, Travers and Karen Novotny ran towards the shelter of the overpass. Karen stumbled over a wooden trestle, falling across the concrete. She held her bloodied left palm up to Travers, her face in a grimace of stupidity. Travers took her arm and pulled her on to the unset cement between the pillars of the overpass. The cleats of Vaughan’s tennis shoes had left a line of imprints ahead of them, tracks which they were helplessly following. Vaughan was stalking them like the nemesis of some over-lit dream, always in front of them as they tried to escape from the motorway. Travers stopped and pushed Karen to the ground. The helicopter was coming after them below the deck of the overpass, blades almost touching the pillars, like an express train through a tunnel. Through the bubble canopy he could see Koester crouched between the pilot and cameraman.

Che as Pre-Pubertal Figure.
Travers stood awkwardly in front of the student volunteers. With an effort, he began: ‘The imaginary sex-death of Che Guevara - very little is known about Guevara’s sexual behaviour. Psychotic patients, and panels of housewives and filling station personnel were asked to construct six alternate sex-deaths. Each of these takes place within some kind of perversion - for example, bondage and concentration camp fantasies, auto-deaths, the obsessive geometry of walls and ceilings. Some suggestions have been made for considering Che as a pre-pubertal figure. Patients have been asked to consider the notional “child-rape” of Che Guevara
  
. . . ’ Travers stopped, aware for the first time of the young man sitting in the back row. Soon he would have to break with Vaughan. In his dreams each night Karen Novotny would appear, showing her wounds to him.

‘What are you thinking about?’
Travers walked along the embankment of the overpass. The concrete slope ran on into the afternoon haze. Karen Novotny followed a few steps behind him, absently picking at the spurs of grass in her skirt. ‘An erotic film - of a special kind.’ Somewhere in the margins of his mind a helicopter circled, vector in a scenario of violence and desire. He counted the materials of the landscape: the curvilinear perspectives of the concrete causeways, the symmetry of car fenders, the contours of Karen’s thighs and pelvis, her uncertain smile. What new algebra would make sense of these elements? As the haze cleared he saw the profile of the multi-storey car park rising above them. A familiar figure in a shabby flying jacket watched from the roof. Travers let Karen walk past him. As she sauntered along the verge he became aware of a sudden erotic conjunction, the module formed by Vaughan, the inclined concrete decks and Karen’s body. Above all, the multi-storey car park was a model for her rape.

Treblinka
. Cement dust rose from the wheels of the approaching car. Travers held Karen’s arm. He pointed to the ramp. ‘Go up to the roof. I’ll see you there later.’ As she set off he ran into the road, signalling to the driver. Through the windshield he could see Catherine Austin’s knuckles on the steering wheel, Dr Nathan cupping his ears for the sounds of the helicopter. As Catherine Austin reversed and drove the heavy sedan down the slip road Travers walked back to the car park. After a pause he strolled towards the stairway.