Point Omega - Don Delillo [31]
He tried to consider the complexities of editing. He tried to think in terms of the conventional projection. He couldn’t recall spotting the problem when he’d last seen the movie, on TV. Maybe the error is not detectable at twenty-four frames per second. He’d read somewhere that this is the speed at which we perceive reality, at which the brain processes images. Alter the format and expose the flaws. This was a flaw that a person might tend to excuse unless he was a man of attenuated viewpoint. If that was him, then that was him.
The children lingered just inside the door, not sure whether they wanted to investigate whatever it was they’d walked into, and the woman slipped along the side wall and paused and looked at the screen and then moved to the juncture of the two walls. He watched the kids gradually withdraw their attention from the film and glance around them. Where are they, what is this? One of them looked toward the door, where the guard stood, staring into the daylong narrows of his detachment.
Arbogast is still falling down the stairs.
He thought again of a situation. The children made him think of this, a situation in which the film is shown beginning to end over twenty-four consecutive hours. Hadn’t this happened somewhere, once, different museum, different city? He considered how he might set the terms of such a showing. Select audience. No children, no casual viewers. Entry forbidden once the screening begins. What if someone wants to leave, has to leave? All right you can leave. Leave if you absolutely have to. But once out, you do not re-enter. Make it a personal test of endurance and forbearance, a kind of punishment.
But punishment for what? Punishment for watching? Punishment for standing here day after day, hour after hour, in hapless anonymity? He thought of others. That’s what others might say. But who were these others?
The woman seemed to slide along the wall invisibly, in little fixed increments. He could barely see her and was certain she could not see him. Was she with the children or not? The children were three bright objects, ages maybe eight to ten, gathering light from the screen, where lurid death was being scratched out in microseconds.
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Norman Bates as Mother, crouched at the foot of the stairs now, in a widow’s wig and floor-length dress. He gathers himself spider-like over the detective, who is supine on the hall carpet, and resumes the business of stabbing.
Anonymous, he and the museum guard. Was the guard who was here today the same guard of the previous five days? Was the guard of the previous five days the same guard all day long? They must switch guards at some point during the day but he had failed to notice or had forgotten. A man and woman entered, parents of the kids, genetic code crackling in the air. They were large people in khaki shorts, tremendously three-dimensional, with tote bags and knapsacks. He watched the film, looked at others, watched the film. Through it all, the mind working, the brain processing. He didn’t want this day to end.
Then somebody said something.
Somebody said, “What am I looking at?”
It was the woman to his left, standing closer now, and she was speaking to him. He was confused by this. The question made him stare harder at the screen. He tried to absorb what she’d said. He tried to deal with the fact that someone was standing next to him. This hadn’t happened before, not here. And he tried to adjust to the other thing that hadn’t happened, that was sort of never supposed to happen. Being spoken to. This woman standing somehow next to him was changing every rule of separation.
He looked at the screen, trying to consider what he might say. He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.
Finally he whispered, “The private detective. Man on his back.”
It was a constricted whisper and he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. But the response was nearly immediate.
“Do I want to know who’s stabbing him?”