“The world is a book and he knows how to read it,” Lucien said. “He reads the light, reads the angles, reads the faces, and combines them into sentences and paragraphs: moving images on a screen.”
“Yes,” Dicey said. “But forever. Forever.”
Why had we trusted him? Why had we submitted our entire lives to him? No answer I give will satisfy an outsider. You had to be here at the beginning—and later, when filming kept being deferred and people left to resume their lives in Los Angeles, or San Diego, in Sacramento or San Francisco or Palm Springs. Those who chose to remain behind had to draw on cisterns of faith they never suspected they possessed.
There is motion in the mind, too. Forms of motion that fascinate, that induce submission: He is the perfect artist. Of this we were certain; we were convinced. And more than that: He is pure promise. His radiant art will change the world forever. We felt this in our bones. No one can truly understand, until they have encountered true genius: the unshakable, single-minded, diamond-grade, self-assured, hyper-aware, methodical workings of a mind operating at the summit of its art, of its own species, intent on expanding the scope of the collective eye, the reach of the collective mind, the definitions of our shared reality.
He issued a summons through the usual channels: casting agencies, classifieds, the Hollywood grape vine. Those who heard it answered: the call of the masterwork. There was the audition, and then we came here, to prepare for filming to begin. We believed that at some point he would arrive, that some thing would commence. He never did. Every decision, every order, every demand was relayed through aides, intermediaries, messengers—an army of serious men and women acting as successive barriers shielding him from the world’s distractions. Any attempt to reach him led to endless referrals: assistants, department heads, senior and junior managers, within the labyrinthine structure of VMP. He is the quintessential mediated artist. Therefore the perfect one.
One could call us deluded. One could argue that we sought in him what was missing in ourselves: a form to contain and connect the scattered pieces of a life. One could suggest zealotry precedes the cause—that the cause is merely the liquid poured into the empty vase of an aimless existence, giving it purpose and function. That some are destined to lead and others to follow. That visionaries require human instruments. All of this may be partly true. But there is one indisputable fact that proves we were not misguided, not fooled, that the chamber at the center of the temple we worshipped was not empty: the screenplay.
There were three versions we know of. One existed in the past, accessible only through the minor music of remembrance. The second existed in the present: anyone could go to Mike’s house, drag the rifle crate out from under his bed, and open it. The third was nowhere. An imaginary screenplay suspended be tween the other two like a bird on a wire, singing with a voice of silence. It was what we felt during those first months here. The pieces falling into place one after another like tumblers in a lock. The pea cock spreading its tail from here to eternity.
The first version was the copy issued to each of us on arrival. One hundred and twenty-eight pages that contained by way of introduction a brief salutation from von Maar himself and illustrations credited to a Lt. William H. Emory, taken from his Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, published in 1848. The story, as best I recall, concerned two brothers, Benjamin and Billy Kearny, scions of a prominent Southern family in an alternate America where the Native American tribes were not subdued, but united against their common enemy. The film chronicles the fall of their house following a disastrous military campaign against the mountain cities of the United Indian Nations. It opens with Benjamin returning home from war. The campaign has failed catastrophically, yet the stillborn government of the handful of United States clinging desperately to the Eastern Seaboard of America frames it as a decisive victory. Billy has remained in the ancestral seat in Alabama to manage the estate. Benjamin brings back with him a wife—supposedly the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia family—who arrives separately at night in a closed carriage. She is installed in a basement vault due to a curious sensitivity to light that has afflicted her for years, as Benjamin explains. The slaves are ordered to build her a container—essentially a large wooden box. She is never formally presented to Billy, who then becomes obsessed with her.
Alabama secedes from the Federation. Under the looming threat of a final counteroffensive by the Native American forces, the brothers’ relationship unravels—along with their sanity—and they engage in a symbolic battle as carnage spreads across the state. Then adultery, which is crystal; and the lesser glass of desire. All set against the estate’s final ruin as the brief European occupation of the Americas— barely three and a half centuries old—comes to an end and the Nations resume control of the continent.
This is only the barest of outlines. The particulars have been obscured by what came next. The set was ready. Everyone waited. Everything stood poised for the creation of this great film. We waited for the man to arrive. There were things we did not understand, especially regarding the set itself, which was massive and contained things that were not mentioned in the screenplay, and scenery repeated many times with minor variations. Or the way communication be tween the set and VMP had been arranged. Among the three hundred and twenty-seven of us were also three employees in charge of communications. They had undergone extensive training in Morse code, wireless radio, cryptography, formal letter writing, semaphore, and the navigation of the wire labyrinths of the Southern California telephone system. They were not VMP employees. They had been hired specifically for this project, much like the rest of us. This should have rung bells, if not brought down the whole belfry. But a sense of impending great ness hung over the whole enterprise and obscured what stood plainly before us: that not a single VMP employee was stationed with us on the movie set. We had come to what we believed was the center of the empire, only to discover it was a desert outpost. The emperor was elsewhere, in some distant and unknown capital, behind an invisible great wall of his own design.
It was then that the second version of the screen play began to take shape. On the day the director was supposed to arrive, we gathered—all of us—into one great, jubilant, expectant crowd eager to welcome the artist and begin the work. I still remember the exact moment when we saw the first sign of movement: a plume of dust, a glinting speck racing across the horizon. We felt the possibilities multiply. He was coming. The moment we had been waiting for was upon us.
A white and chrome Harley-Davidson burst from the sun-planes of the desert and stopped before us. The long plume that had trailed the rider across the desert caught up with him and enveloped him and his motorcycle, reducing both to a pale outline as he waited, head bowed, for the dust to settle. When it cleared, he lowered the kickstand and dismounted. He was very tall and lean, muscular, dressed entirely in white: white denim pants, a white leather jacket over a white T-shirt, white snakeskin cowboy boots. When he removed the white helmet we saw that the face hidden behind the mirrored visor was white as well, and the eyes red. Only his hair carried color: a dirty yellow, like a beard stained by years of diligent pipe smoking. He took out a pair of aviator sunglass es and put them on. I remember thinking, there are parts of Africa where he would have been hacked to pieces, his flesh consumed or reduced to powders and tinctures.
The director of photography stepped forward and extended his hand in greeting. “Sir, it is a great honor to welcome you in—”
The albino looked at him for a moment, then turned away without taking the hand. He unstrapped one of the saddlebags, took out a manila envelope, placed it on the saddle, and refastened the straps. The DP remained there, arm extended, with a smile on his face he didn’t know what to do with. The albino picked up the envelope and turned to him. His voice was like stone, and the edges of his words cleanly hewn, with what some heard as Germanic and others as Nordic inflections.
“Mr. von Maar sends his regards. Due to unfore seen complications requiring his urgent attention in L. A., he will not be able to join you this week. He asks me to inform you that he will be here one week from today. He regrets this slight delay and wishes you all the best until then.” He handed the envelope to the DP.
“What’s this?” the DP asked.
“An update to the script. He has made some minor, last-minute changes. Also instructions on dissemination to cast and crew. He hopes these revisions will not greatly inconvenience you. Nothing in here should significantly impede the schedule.” And without another word he turned and swung his leg over the saddle, removed the sunglasses and put on the helmet. He gunned the engine and the Harley growled. Without so much as a glance or a wave, he flicked his wrist and sped away. After a while we dispersed and went back to work.
The envelope—the first of many—contained only minor dialogue revisions, and the addition of a brief scene that nevertheless required construction of a long corridor with an overhead camera track. It could easily be completed within the seven days remaining until his arrival. The changes were photocopied and the copies distributed to the whole crew. Each of us pasted the revisions into the relevant sections of our copy. It took just ten minutes to complete. Future updates would not be so simple.
The following week we gathered again at the appointed time and place, certain the director would turn up. Once more, we heard the Harley racing on the dirt road. The scene had the feel of a recurring dream. The same gestures were repeated with slight variation. The albino dismounted. He handed the dumbfounded DP another envelope. This one a bit thicker. Another announcement about another vague setback. Another promise that in a week’s time the director would finally come. Until then, the second batch of updates to the screenplay would keep us busy. This time the revisions were a bit more extensive. New scenes had been added, a new location introduced, and some earlier sequences had been reordered and reworked. It would be tight, but we believed that if we hurried we would be ready for him the following week. We set to work.
And so it went. The updates arrived weekly, with the same courier. More revisions, new instructions. Whole sections had to be inserted in-between, and he provided photographs that we had to photocopy and paste into designated places. Each time, the instructions claimed this was the final version. By the end of the first year, we knew this wasn’t true, but belief or disbelief had ceased to matter. What mattered was the screenplay’s evolution—or perhaps, I should say, its explosion.
After the first year, the updates became bi-weekly. Later still, monthly. Five years after our arrival, with twenty people left on set, the courier stopped coming. The updates, irregular now, were spaced out, and arrived in envelopes taped to the floor of the supply truck. In the past eight years there have been only two. The first was five hundred pages long. It arrived with a box containing two hundred and sixty-three photographs—most depicting empty walls in the streets of Los Angeles. It also included a seventy-eight-page document titled “Sample Story board,” consisting of watercolor shapes arranged in the comic-book sequence of a storyboard. A brief note explained that the images were intended for “reference purposes” only: illustrations of how the shapes and volumes in each scene would intrude upon and juxtapose one another. The second update, which arrived six years ago, was one hundred and fifty pages long, all text, no paragraph breaks. It ended like this: “In order to make his picture, a filmmaker dips his brush in light and shadow, where corruption reigns. The medium is tainted by design, the form is perverted. Unless a different path is chosen, corruption enters his work and begins to undo it. I have found a new path. I have chosen purity. I have succeeded in creating a work of pure beauty. Yes. And the hand doesn’t hold blood to improve on it.”
As a result, the film is no longer one film. I don’t mean merely that its projected duration would exceed even that of the most hardened cinephile’s endurance (we calculated it at approximately seventy-five hours). More than that: it is the structure of the movie itself. Little by little he inserted forks in the narrative, fault lines and cracks so fine and purposeful that we could not detect them until, many updates later, they blossomed into diverging versions of the story. Entire movies nested inside the arc of the original. Wrong turns. Dead ends. The screenplay now functions as a system of corridors multiplying in the mind. It lies in that rifle crate underneath Mike’s bed, chained to the floor and secured with six thick padlocks. I no longer have the keys. This version, too, is inaccessible. Mike wore the keys on a cord around his neck. At any time I could have knocked on his door and demanded to see it. This was part of the agreement. Mike guarded it because his faith never wavered. Anyone, at any reasonable hour, could knock on his door and request access. Mike would come to the door and nod, lead the way through the mansion and into the library, which he had converted into living quarters. I would help him drag the heavy thing out from beneath his cot. Then he would sit on a chair, elbows on knees, and watch me—his face intent, set to an inscrutable expression: part delight, part hatred, part desire. Inside were: thirty-five spiral-bound letter-size volumes comprising the master printout with every revision integrated; hundreds upon hundreds of numbered photographs; twenty-three small boxes, each containing a carved wooden figurine of a species of bird; sheaves of graphs and schematics; an antique vase wrapped in a soft cloth.
This is the version we possess—fragmented, exploded, the blueprint of many films at once—complete with notes and appendices detailing, among other things: the maximum operating altitude of the Gymnogyps californianus; film-canister scatter print; passenger pigeon migration routes; Darger spheres; the mating-call frequencies of warblers; fallout distribution graphs by fission yield; the nesting capabilities of the common sparrow; instructions for building a nuclear shelter for a family of four. And so on.
Some of us believed this was the masterpiece. Others believed it was merely the handmaiden to it. Now I am certain that each of us harbored, in secret, another unuttered thought: that the screenplay under Mike’s bed was not a weaving but an unraveling. Because the third version of the script does not exist. It is nowhere, it is imaginary, it stands in the maelstrom of updates and revisions between the other two. It is the perfect version—where genius confirmed itself and met its high potential. When the work seemed to assemble itself in a majority against the artist’s own will, falling into place one sequence after another.
I am quite certain—and I was not alone—that this third, perfect version existed at some point. That we had it, read it, studied it, practiced the lines, tested new filters on the cameras, built new sets. And did not know that what we held in our hands was the work we sought after and believed in and existed in a state of utter anticipation for its unveiling. We saw it forming, week after week. The story filled out like a wife counting down her nine months, and with each addition it grew more beautiful. What began as a familiar narrative of American ruin—the pastoral staging of a nation’s death wish—became the high-water mark of the nation’s death. Instead of the usual fauns and the usual nymphs—dressed as Southern gentlemen and ladies drifting through glittering balls and dances, beneath radiant chandeliers, along the corridors of mansions wreathed in a glory and power that never was, of a long-held American fantasy unrequited, like love—the story became a gem cut with many facets holding no light of its own but turned to the exact angle required to catch the inner radiance of its maker; no longer merely a film, but life rendered immortal on a screen, stripped of its third dimension yet granted the many dimensions that inhabit the mind of each moving shape as it strives to conceal its thousand in sides. True life ordered and organized in categories: the supreme vision of a singular, single-minded artist. We knew this version had existed at some point. For a week, maybe two. Long enough, had we known. But we were busy waiting for the next revision, the next crested summit. It remains there still: an arrested figure in the middle of a long dance whose steps have been forgotten. Like the instant when day folds into night, it was apparent only afterward. The moment itself can never be grasped as it occurs. Like trying to catch the exact midpoint of a whispering hourglass as it empties. Because even a genius may not know where to stop. So he continues.
How does one contain the merciless march of storytelling? One does not. After that, everything was corruption, false turn after false turn. The screen play lost its forward thrust, its lucidity. Like water that had been stirred: mud rose and wouldn’t settle. Slippage. The wife split into daughter, sister, wife, mistress; slave, and slave mistress, one and many; one brother became a son, the other his father; the horizon was a circle, its two halves mirroring one another; the mansion between them veered toward infinity; the corridors darkened and the vases sank in the alcoves’ gloom; now black candles burned with black flames in obsidian holders; a bird of fire crossed the sky above with flaming wings that spanned the horizon; the moon turned into a midnight sun; slaves with torn backs danced with their masters in ruined ballrooms choked with filth; then patricide, which is crystal; and murder’s simple glass; a great hand; the mansion fractured into many shacks and lean-tos; a gong; a bell swinging, slowing at the end of its arc, then crashing back through the echoes of its own peals; a cowbell struck with a ball-peen hammer; a little boat; the sunrise; a lake; a line of trees on the opposite shore dividing the sky: the thing itself and its reflection on the water; cotton fields buried beneath crawling drifts of locusts; a bird that was many birds; a condor trapped in taxidermy above the mantle; the sabers, the medals, the portraits; the generals and the colonels; the central staircase of the great house; and outside, at high noon on the hottest day of the year, instead of viola and lute, the myriad and mechanical song of the cicadas rising up toward the sun’s tiered galleries. Because how to contain it? It is impossible.
I know now that even this third version—the un seen and perfect one, undone by multiplications, constructions, and mirror games that obscured and dimmed the true life—even that, perhaps especially that, was already a diminishment, the final concession of defeat. Because it was unattainable. Because it never truly existed. Because we came to think of it as something imaginary. What’s worse still is that no one admitted it. The defeat was private, hidden, tinged with guilt. And I am certain—though I cannot prove it—that everyone here felt it.
The Sixth Desert is available now from Eris Press. You can order a copy here.
Panagiotis Kehagias is a writer, editor, and translator based in Athens, Greece. His first book, the short story collection Final Warning (Antipodes, 2016), was shortlisted for five major literary awards in Greece. His translations include: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Light in August, Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Greg Jackson’s Prodigals, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Jesus’ Son, and Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings and The Netanyahus.
