The atrocity exhibition (9 page)

The Transition Area
. As Trabert prepared for his departure, the elements of apocalyptic landscapes waited on the horizons of his mind, helicopters burning among broken gantries. With deliberate caution, he waited in the empty apartment near the airport overpass, disengaging himself from the images of his wife, Catherine Austin and the patients at the Institute. Wearing his old flying jacket, he listened to the unending commentaries from Cape Kennedy - already he realized that the transmissions were coming from sources other than the television and radio stations. The deaths of the three astronauts in the Apollo capsule were a failure of the code that contained the operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Many factors confirmed this faulty union of time and space - the dislocated perspectives of the apartment, his isolation from his own and his wife’s body (he moved restlessly from one room to the next, as if unable to contain the volumes of his limbs and thorax), the serial deaths of Ralph Nader on the advertisement billboards that lined the airport approaches. Later, when he saw the young man in the laminated suit watching him from the abandoned amusement park, Trabert knew that the time had come for his rescue attempt: the resurrection of the dead spacemen.

Algebra of the Sky
. At dawn Trabert found himself driving along an entry highway into the deserted city: terrain of shacks and filling stations, overhead wires like some forgotten algebra of the sky. When the helicopters appeared he left the car and set off on foot. Sirens wailing, white-doored squad cars screamed past him, neuronic icons on the spinal highway. Fifty yards ahead, the young man in the astronaut’s suit plodded along the asphalt verge. Pursued by helicopters and strange police, they took refuge in an empty stadium. Sitting in the deserted stand, Trabert watched the young man pace at random around the pitch, replicating some meaningless labyrinth as if trying to focus his own identity. Outside Kline walked in the sculpture garden of the air terminal. His aloof, cerebral face warned Trabert that his rendezvous with Coma and Xero would soon take place.

A Watching Trinity
. Personae of the unconscious: Xero: Run hot with a million programmes, this terrifying figure seemed to Trabert like a vast neural switchboard. During their time together, as he sat in the rear seat of the white Pontiac, he was never to see Xero’s face, but fragments of his amplified voice reverberated among the deserted stands of the stadium, echoing through the departure bays of the air terminal.

Coma: This beautiful but mute young woman, madonna of the time-ways, surveyed Trabert with maternal eyes.

Kline: ‘Why must we await, and fear, a disaster in space in order to understand our own time? - Matta.’

The Karen Novotny Experience
. As she powdered herself after her bath, Karen Novotny watched Trabert kneeling on the floor of the lounge, surrounded by the litter of photographs like an eccentric Zen cameraman. Since their meeting at the emergency conference on Space Medicine he had done nothing but shuffle the photographs of wrecked capsules and automobiles, searching for one face among the mutilated victims. Almost without thinking she had picked him up in the basement cinema after the secret Apollo film, attracted by his exhausted eyes and the torn flying jacket with its Vietnam flashes. Was he a doctor, or a patient? Neither category seemed valid, nor for that matter mutually exclusive. Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetize all his dreams and obsessions.

Pentax Zoom
. In these equations, the gestures and postures of the young woman, Trabert explored the faulty dimensions of the space capsule, the lost geometry and volumetric time of the dead astronauts.

(1) Lateral section through the left axillary fossa of Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique: the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.

(2) A series of paintings of imaginary sexual organs. As he walked around the exhibition, conscious of Karen’s hand gripping his wrist, Trabert searched for some valid point of junction. These obscene images, the headless creatures of nightmare, grimaced at him like the exposed corpses in the Apollo capsule, the victims of a thousand auto-crashes.

(3) ‘The Stolen Mirror’ (Max Ernst). In the eroded causeways and porous rock towers of this spinal landscape Trabert saw the blistered epithelium of the astronauts, the time-invaded skin of Karen Novotny.

A Cosmogonic Venus
. Dr Nathan followed the young man in the laminated suit across the forecourt of the deserted air terminal. The metalled light shivered across the white steps like the defective image in a huge kinetic artifact. Unhurried, Dr Nathan stopped by the sculpture fountain to light a cigarette. He had been following the young man all morning, intrigued by the dialogue of motion and perspective played out in complete silence against the background of the air terminal. The young man looked back at Dr Nathan, as if waiting for him. A half-formed smile crossed his bruised mouth, revealing the scars of an automobile accident barely hidden by the pale beard. Dr Nathan gazed round at the forecourt. Someone had drained the ornamental pool. Like an immense uterus, its neck pointing towards the departure bays, it lay drying in the sunlight. The young man climbed the rim and walked down the sloping bowl to the centre. Dr Nathan laughed briefly into his gold-tipped cigarette. ‘What a woman!’ Perhaps Trabert would become her lover, tend her as she gave birth to the sky?

The Abandoned Motorcade
. Walking through the deserted streets with Kline and Coma, Trabert found the motorcade abandoned in the sunlight. They moved along the rows of smashed cars, seating themselves at random beside the mannequins. Images of the Zapruder film hung on the fractured windshields, fusing with his dreams of Oswald and Nader. Somewhere the moving figure of a young man formed a plane of intersection. Later, by the drained swimming pool, he played with the life-sized plaster replicas of his wife and Karen Novotny. All week, to please Coma, he had studied the Zapruder frames, imitating the hairstyle of the President’s widow. As the helicopter flew overhead its down-draught whirled at the matted wigs, driving into a cloud the photographs of Marina Oswald, Madame Chiang and Mrs Kennedy which Trabert had laid out like a hand of patience on the floor of the pool.

Operating Formulae
. Gesturing Catherine Austin into the chair beside his desk, Dr Nathan studied the elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in the copies of
Vogue
and
Paris-Match
. In sequence they advertised: (1) The left orbit and zygomatic arch of Marina Oswald. (2) The angle between two walls. (3) A ‘neural interval’ - a balcony unit on the twenty-seventh floor of the Hilton Hotel, London. (4) A pause in an unreported conversation outside an exhibition of photographs of automobile accidents. (5) The time, 11:47 a.m., June 23rd, 1975. (6) A gesture - a supine forearm extended across a candlewick bedspread. (7) A moment of recognition - a young woman’s buccal pout and dilated eyes.

‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’
Ignoring Catherine Austin, Dr Nathan walked over to the photographs of the isolation volunteers on the enamel wall beside the window. The question revealed either astonishing ignorance or a complicity in that conspiracy of the unconscious he had only now begun to unravel. He turned to face the young woman, irritated as always by her strong, quizzical gaze, an overlay of her own potent sexuality. ‘
You
, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse.’ He rapped the magazines with his gold cigarette case. ‘These images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage through consciousness.’

‘Planes Intersect.’
Dr Nathan pointed to the photograph of a young man with a pale beard, the cast in his left eye displacing one side of his face. ‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits closer scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’

The Soft Quasars.

Pre-uterine Claims - Kline.

‘Young virgin auto-sodomized by her own chastity’
 
-Coma.

Time-zones: Ralph Nader, Claude Eatherly, Abraham Zapruder.

The Departure Platform
. Closer to this presiding trinity, Trabert waited among the departure bays in the deserted terminal. From the observation deck above the drained sculpture fountain, Coma watched him with her rune-filled eyes. Her broad cheekbones, reminiscent now of the President’s widow, seemed to contain an immense glacial silence. On the roof terrace, Kline walked among the mannequins. The plaster models of Marina Oswald, Ralph Nader and the young man in the laminated suit stood by the railing. Xero, meanwhile, moved with galvanic energy across the runways, assembling an immense motorcade of wrecked cars. Behind the advance car, the Presidential limousine waited in the sunlight. The silence before a million auto deaths hung in the morning air.

A Mere Modulus
. As Margaret Trabert hesitated among the passengers in the crowded departure building, Dr Nathan stepped behind her. His small face was dwarfed by the vast mural of a satellite capsule still drying on the wall above the escalators, the artist’s trestles like a huge gantry that would carry the entire building into orbit. ‘Mrs Trabert - don’t you understand? This young woman with him is a mere modulus. His real target is yourself.’ Irritated as always by Nathan, she brushed past the police detective who tried to block her way and ran into the forecourt. Among the thousands of cars in the parking lot she could see the white Pontiac. All week the young woman in the white car had been following her husband like some animal in rut.

The Target Vehicle
. Dr Nathan pointed through the windshield with his cigarette. Two hundred yards ahead Margaret Trabert’s car had turned out of a motel driveway. It set off along the deserted street, a white integer beneath the unravelling ciphers of the overhead wires. ‘This motorcade,’ Dr Nathan explained, ‘we may interpret as a huge environmental tableau, a mobile psycho-drama which recapitulates the Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza and the experimental car crashes examined so obsessively by Nader. In some way, presumably by a cathartic collision, Trabert will try to reintegrate space and so liberate the three men in the capsule. For him they still wait there on their contour couches.’ As Catherine Austin touched his elbow he realized that he had lost sight of the white car.

The Command Module
. Watched by Kline and Coma, Trabert moved behind the steering wheel of the open limousine. Behind the empty jump seats the plastic mannequins of the President and his wife sat in the rear of the car. As the motorcade moved off, Trabert peered through the frosted windshield. An immense target disc had been painted at the conjunction of the runways. From the departure area a white car turned on to the next runway and accelerated on a collision course towards the motorcade.

Zapruder Frame 235
. Trabert waited until the audience had left the basement cinema. Holding in his hand the commercial replica of agent Greer’s driving licence he had bought in the arcade near the overpass, he walked towards the young man sitting in the back row. Already his identity had begun to fade, the choreography of his hands tracing a last cipher across the blunted air.

Epiphany of these Deaths
. The bodies of his wife and Karen Novotny lay on the floor of the empty swimming pool. In the carport Coma and Kline had taken their seats in the white Pontiac. Trabert watched them prepare to leave. At the last moment Coma seemed to hesitate, her broad mouth showing the scars on her lower lip. When they had gone, the helicopters rose from their waiting grounds along the highway. Trabert looked up as the sky was filled with these insane machines. Yet in the contours of his wife’s thighs, in the dune-filled eyes of Karen Novotny, he saw the assuaged time of the astronauts, the serene face of the President’s widow.

The Serial Angels
. Undisturbed now, the vaporizing figures of the dead astronauts diffused across the launching grounds, recreated in the leg stances of a hundred starlets, in a thousand bent auto fenders, in the million instalment deaths of the serial magazines.

The Impact Zone.

Little information has been released about the psychological effects of space travel, both on the astronauts and the public at large. Over the years NASA spokesmen have even denied that the astronauts dream at all during their space flights. But it is clear from the subsequently troubled careers of many of the astronauts (Armstrong, probably the only man for whom the 20th century will be remembered 50,000 years from now, refuses to discuss the moon-landing) that they suffered severe psychological damage. What did they dream about, how were their imaginations affected, their emotions and need for privacy, their perception of time and death? The Space Age lasted barely fifteen years, from Gagarin’s first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown live on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public’s loss of interest - the brute-force ballistic technology is basically 19th century, as people realize, while advanced late-20th-century technologies are invisible and electronic-computers, microwave data links, faxes and VDUs are the stuff of which our dreams are made. Perhaps space travel is forever doomed because it inevitably recapitulates primitive stages in the growth of our nervous systems, before the development of our sense of balance and upright posture - a forced return to infantile dependency. Only intelligent machines may one day grasp the joys of space travel, seeing the motion sculpture of the space flights as immense geometric symphonies.