Excerpt of Unruly Angels

Selected excerpts from: UNRULY ANGELS
Ronald Evans

"It's a favorite Hitchcock trick, you have seen it before, countless times," Horst said. "He sets his scene in a place that's comforting and familiar, the United Nations Plaza or Mt. Rushmore, and then he starts undermining your sense of security. In the middle of a crowd of ordinary people, a man is murdered. You don't know whom to trust."
They emerged from the theater on Eighth Street to find it had been raining. Water was dripping from the trees in Washington Square, a setting both comforting and familiar.
"Think of the power of Hitchcock's camera," Horst said. "Two hundred people are gathered in one place, people who until a few minutes before had seen the world in two hundred different ways; and for ninety minutes he persuades them–he tricks them into seeing the world through a single pair of eyes: his own."
"They all interpret it in their own ways," Tiger said.
"Yes, but the basic vision is Hitchcock's. The audience has been moved out of its own tiny world into a bigger one, or at least a different one; and that's what all novelists and painters are trying to do. Change the perspective, and who knows what may happen?"
"Where are we going now?"
"To change your perspective. Life looks different from the back of a Harley crossing the Brooklyn Bridge."

* * *

"Unreal," Tiger said. Here finally was his chance: a challenge, life in the fast lane. Rollerball. The carousel is death.
"What is real?" Horst said. They were standing in a black room with dim lighting. Tiger felt disoriented. "This is not your darkroom."
"No."
"Real is what you know, I guess."
"The articles you write," Horst said. "How do you know they are true?"
"They're news," Tiger said. "If they're objective, they have to be true. News is a kind of truth–like the pictures you take."
"But my photos aren't true," Horst said. "Come here, I'll show you something interesting." He switched on a bright light hanging low over a drafting table splayed with stacks of photos. Tiger came to look and was surprised to see they were all photos of himself that Horst had shot the last time he was here.
It was a shock, seeing himself through someone else's eyes, yet he couldn't argue with it. "They're me, but they aren't me," he said.
"Not the way you think of yourself. The way I think of you. But with all the emotion screened out."
"You're fucking with my brain. What have you done to me?"
"I manipulate these photos in the camera, or I correct my camera work in the darkroom, in the developing tank, in cropping. I don't like the darkroom, using the tank like an airbrush, fading mistakes out, erasing–the damned artiness, knowing how to fake it. I'm thinking of using a Polaroid. Instant art. Whatever comes out of the camera, that's it. That way I can focus on the image itself, drained of its sentimentality. Maybe I'll just close my eyes and shoot."
"And that way your photos will reflect the truth?"
"No, truth has nothing to do with external reality," Horst shook his head. "Like the tree falling in the deserted forest, you mentioned that once. Does it make a sound if no one is there to hear? It doesn't matter. We invent our own sounds. Objective truth doesn't exist."
"How do you know?"
"You are playing tricks with me–that's good, very good. But if truth does exist, we can't know what it is. Like in science: the results of our experiments are distorted by our observations. It's because we have expectations. We see the world through a distorting lens. We have been programmed, taught how to see what is good, what is beautiful. But my good and my beautiful will be different from yours. The world consists of millions of realities, all of them valid."
"Not equally valid."
"No, but who is to decide?" Horst stared. "Would you like to experience my reality?"
"Yes, I would."
The rain was lashing the windows. "First get out of your wet clothes," Horst said.
Were his clothes wet? He couldn't remember, but he obeyed. Even as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, Tiger could make out nothing that made sense: a nearly empty room with metal rings attached to the wall.
"The task," Horst began, "is to break through that self-created reality. If we can surprise the viewer–shock him enough with an image he's not prepared to handle–we can create a tiny rupture, a small hole, in the mental structure that screens out all new experience. And we can get, for once, for an instant, genuine emotion."
"But that's imposing your own reality on another person."
"What else is truth? Multiple images." He laughed; he was enjoying this.
"Horst, do you realize you're subverting the basis for western rational discourse that has existed since the time of Plato?"
"You can't surprise people logically. Logical argument is a question of defining your terms, a game, and the place where you end up is already determined by the place where you start out. If you've done it right–if you've followed the rules of logic–you'll get the result you wanted. No surprises. The end is contained in its beginning. It's only in poetry, in art that we get surprises."
"But if what you show me in that instant, in that rupture, is false–an image that you have manipulated. . . ?"
"First the artist must have surprised himself. In the gap that is opened by our yearning and our disappointment, the gods appear."
Horst placed his hands on Tiger's shoulders. "Have you ever trusted anyone so much you knew they would catch you?"
"Catch me where?"
"If you were falling," Horst said. No, never, not since he was five and his father decided he could teach him to swim by throwing him into the pool. Falling into blackness. Recapturing lost time: can that be a surprise or is it part of the defense wall? To capture all of life's variety, to take other men into yourself, become them; how promiscuous can you get?
Horst grabbed hold of his wrists and forced him to his knees. "You know what I want?"
"Yes."
"And that's okay with you?"
"I want what you want."
"Good. I want you to open my pants without using your hands. . . That's right. . . Now take it out. Ya. Work it over, get it nice and hard. . . You know how to do it. You can take it. . ." Everyone has his own story. Breaking through. Music is being written around me everywhere, falling on deaf ears. In this black room may be black stars.
Horst pinched Tiger's tits lightly until they grew hard, then pulled him again to his feet and brought out a chain with alligator clamps at both ends. "This will hurt."
"How can pain break down barriers?"
"This is not about pain, it's about dominance and submission, and going back to a time, earlier than you can remember, when you were taken care of. Fear helps establish the dominance, but it's less important than trust, which has to be stronger than the fear, and triumph over it. Do you trust me?"
"Yes, I trust you."
"Tell me what you want."
"I want it all, Horst."
"The pain?"
"Yes, even the pain."
"But do you need it?"
"Yes, I need it."
The pain was a distraction, and then he was pushed over onto his back, lying on a mat, his legs over Horst's shoulders. He hardly felt it when Horst slid in, though it should have hurt. Tiger floated in a diffused sea of pain that masked everything, and then it began to fade, like a drug that has lost its power. He became aware that, under the surface, had been building a pleasure that was almost like pain in its intensity, and before he realized it he had passed a threshold of pleasure so strong that, if he had known what was coming, he would have held back. He relaxed and let Horst take him wherever he wanted to go.

* * *

And then I fall back against the pillows and close my eyes. Are you ready to go flying so high you can see the whole world, horizon to horizon, and all blue (DON'T DROP ME DON'T DROP ME I CAN'T STAND IT) soaring so that it takes your breath away and you don't ever want to land again?
My vision is beginning to blur. I look down the ward but I can't tell any more which beds are occupied. Floating in a white mist, in a nimbus, light rain falling along the shore. . .
But still I have more to say to Joel: "O lente, lente currite noctis equi." Odd that I would be speaking Latin, which I hardly even know, but it's English, really, from a play by a gay Englishman. It seems like the last thing I will ever say.

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