This is Part 3. Back to Part 2. Start at Part 1.
The crane arm sits low, dropped to the bottom of its swing, so that the Camera is almost on the floor. The Camera himself faces a distant dusty corner of the stage. Nobody is paying attention to him. Not one person looks over at him, sees him, and feels the resulting sense of loneliness, the chill of absolute isolation that each of us must everyday shake off with our will to act. The Camera never shakes off that chill. He never acts; he has no will. He gathers dust on his skinny, canvas-clad thighs and arms, and on top of the wisps of hair on his old head. He gathers dust just like any other object. But if you look closely you’ll see his body swell periodically with his breathing, and you’ll see that he’s shivering slightly.
Myria, our precocious child star, picks over craft services. She opens two bags of candy, some Blittles and some Snapple Jacks, pours them both into her mouth, chews with her lips open and giggling at the resulting squishing sounds. She layers a bagel with chips, kiwi slices, more candy, eats it moaning aloud about how good it is, how genius her culinary creation. She hops around impishly, does some silly pliés, pirouettes. Fills a styrofoam cup with warm coffee from an urn. Glides up to a production assistant whose eyes have lain heavily on her flesh that morning, slowly pours the coffee over his belt buckle while he mouth-breathes on her. He makes a retarded grimace and says, “Aren’t you a little young to drink coffee?”
“I’m actually twenty, I just play young,” she retorts. Cackles and does a sparkling Bourrée across the set. She prances over to the corner where the camera sits. The camera crew, idling around the dolly rig and talking dirty, eye her warily, but do not cease their conversation. The man inside the metallic frame intrigues Myria, sparks an emotion she is unfamiliar with. What is it, that vague tug? He seems helpless, like an accident victim she once saw strapped to a gurney. That man had been a gaffer; a bulb had exploded, shards of glass pulverizing his corneas. They had wheeled him out, sedated, with goggle-like bandages on his face, blind. Blind like the Camera, his eyes always hidden behind flat, blank metal lids.
Myria stands right before him. This makes the 1st Assistant Cameraman very nervous, but she’s just looking and she outranks him so he keeps his mouth shut. Myria gazes at those flat metal discs, wondering about the eyes behind them. She imagines them huge, wild, unblinking, saucers of inky black surrounded by rims of white. The image frightens her, so she dwells on it, savoring it in her mind: his boring, sucking gaze, his wild face.
To assert herself against the fear, she waves her hands in front of his shutters, very close. He remains as motionless as marble. She can’t even see him breathing. Is it like he’s dead? Right now he’s dead, motionless, blind. But once they begin filming, she’s the dead one, lost in a fog of amnesia, experiencing a lost time that she’ll never remember. She may as well be blind, for all she will remember, and yet the Camera will come alive, his burning eyes unveiled, moving about and above her like a spirit, seeing even into her heart and mind. That thought frightens her even further, and a chill shivers her. She reaches out, one finger extended, to touch his temple, right where she’s spotted a vein pulsating gently, to dispel his ghastly corpselike horror.
“Hey! Hey, don’t do that! Please,” calls the 1st AD. He knows the camera must not be stimulated unwarrantedly. Plus, something about Myria’s demeanor implies a pugnaciousness verging on maliciousness.
When Myria was six or so, having told some joke to her mother and father and not having received a satisfactory response, she had become wildly insistent. They, unbending, had grown more forceful in their ignoring. Myria had raised the volume. She had fallen into a feeling of being invisible, or rather of being treated as a miniature version of a human. She would be heard! She would make herself impossible to ignore! Her parents, trying to enjoy the Feel of Marilyn Monroe having sex with John F. Kennedy, had grown alarmed. Their natural response had been stern authority, which only inflamed Myria further, until she had been screaming at them, in tears.
“You always make problems out of nothing,” her mother had said, rising from the couch. Myria could not see how her autonomy as a being, how her desire to be listened to at all times, could seem like nothing. Her mother picked her up, kicking and wiggling, deposited her in her room. Locked the door from the outside. Myria wailed through the door until her voice became numb. Only when she panted with exhaustion did she realize that her protests went unheard. Her adversary was gone, not waiting on the other side of the door continuing to fight through malevolent silence. She sat down heavily on the floor and heaved until she caught her breath. Her real enemy was indifference. She never forgot that.
She had then dismantled the door knob by prying at it with a series of pens and finally by hanging from it with both hands. Her parents had heard the cracking sound from the living room and had run to see Myria running naked into their bedroom, which she locked from the inside with the chain.
Myria isn’t fat, not in the least, but she looks mature. Any mature man of the early 22nd century would certainly consider her near their idea of sexual attraction. Of course, these days nobody violates the age of consent, not anymore, not worth it, sixteen is young enough, they barely know what they’re doing at that age, and so forth. Husbands brag, “I married her on her sixteenth birthday!” But they’re always looking at those perky fourteen-year-olds, and much more secretly looking at the freshest twelve and thirteen-year-olds. Therefore, naturally, young women into their thirties strive for preternatural — even prepubescent — youth. With increasing success, thanks to medical technology. Some girls even stave off their pubescence with hormones, until their rebellious bodies have been tamed, all growth made impossible. The world being as thick with human beings as it is, this act seems almost generous, righteous, rather than perverse and self-destructive.
Even as young women try to look as much like twelve-years-old as possible, so Myria meets them more than halfway. She wears the fashionable short-shorts, almost underwear, and her slender legs flash as she walks. With a command of subtle makeup and sublime style she seems every bit an available young hussy, and indeed she is one. She has notched a constellation of young boys, mostly actors but a rich-man’s-son or two as well, into her bedpost. She keeps their names written in a red notebook in a trunk under her bed. She has decided that when she turns eighteen, she will publish it as her memoir.
The balancing ballet by which the media made hash of Myria’s precocious beauty, while avoiding creepy connotations of pedophilia, would have impressed even the legal scholars of the Byzantine Empire.
This film is a remake of two of the old Harry Potter movies, the second and third ones. It combines the two, invents a bunch of new stuff, and calls itself “Harry Potter: Unicorn Hunter”. Those older movies, produced in the mid 2050’s, had been remakes of even older film versions of Harry Potter, which had been filmed in the early 21st century. Nobody reads the original books, any more than they read Beowulf or Sherlock Holmes. The script is by award-winning screenwriter John F. Kennedy #3 (John F. Kennedy #2 was a famous Gladiatorball quarterback). JFK #3 is also the brain trust behind the “Casablanca” remake, as well as “Casablanca 2” and “Casablanca 3: Indiana Jones Returns”. In this new version of Harry Potter, the titular character is portrayed by an athletic, clean-cut young actor, blonde, no glasses. He’s been to Survivalist Certified boarding schools. He speaks Latin, French and Mandarin in addition to English. He actually fences competitively. In addition, he is one of the finest cellists in the world, performing regularly with his Pop classical group “Mozarto!” For these films, the producers have asked him to dumb his performance down a bit.
The young man’s name is Freling Governor. He’s fourteen, and Myria saw his malleability from their first meeting, which was a table reading of the script of the first film in the series. They had both been ten-years-old at that time. Myria watched him come in, a bit late, after they were all sitting down; to her, he seemed like a blank cake, freshly baked, ready to be iced and decorated. She had licked her chops. He’s gormless, guileless, good-natured. When they were introduced by some producer, he started to stammer. Myria is just his type, just everyone’s type.
At that first meeting, Myria made no further moves on Freling, treating him with a chilly professionalism. Tantalized and now frustrated, he turned more and more attention toward her. When the reading was over, he found he could not stop thinking about the color of her tongue: it had been stained bright rosy red by candy. Her breath had been heavy and sweet; he imagined kissing her, passing a piece of candy back and forth between their mouths.
I’ll be honest, reader: I already grow tired of relating this episode of Myria’s seduction. Suffice to say that young Freling is currently feeling well-pleased by what he considers a conquest with the most beautiful woman in the world, Myria Dawn Ashton. For her part, Myria places a video of their brief encounter into her library of “sex tapes” that she plans to release to the world someday. She has not released one yet, but plans to first use them as black mail. The boy who dares her to post their video, she’ll marry.
I’ll continue to be honest. Myria is a little whore. I say that as a man with a good deal of experience with — and genuine affection for — whores. Let me tell you, as a connoisseur, Myria was doing it for all the wrong reasons. Not just that she is twelve, but why she is doing it at twelve. Her clientele remain satisfied only because of their utter lack of experience, the total novelty of being with a girl. They, the johns, are thirteen and fourteen-year-old boys in the film industry. She barely discriminates by rank. Once she debauches them, she puts them into a bind; uses their own parents’ protectiveness against them, threatening to reveal everything. Somehow, none of the young men has realized that exposing the affair would affect her career as well as his. For them boys, it was all about their mothers. Myria doesn’t have that concern, she is sanguine in that department; her mother verified the idea by suggesting it first.
Myria is not sanguine about people liking her. She absolutely just needs more people to like her, like, right now. Not the boys she’s fucked, they’re disposable. She counts people by the millions. She dreams of transcending her status as a child star in a successful series of kids’ films. She actually thinks this way. When Myria meets other twelve-year-olds, they seem retarded to her. Little kids, seven and younger, are of course retarded but in a different way. They’re so much smaller. Myria hates kids. Nevertheless, she’ll pass as one to get entre into any department’s encampment, and with male crew she doesn’t hesitate to add a kiss of forbidden sexuality, just an inappropriate wiggle or a smile, so anything she’s curious about she can learn about. I see her with the makeup artist, or a grip, or a special-effects supervisor, peeling back the skin of cinema’s illusion. Each one, she wraps in polite, intense interest in their job. The professionals find it flattering, and those who don’t — a certain cinematographer in particular, and most sound guys for some reason — she just avoids. Everyone likes a twelve-year-old girl, because everyone wants to have the body and personality of a twelve-year-old. The global ideal for personhood was basically a twelve-year-old Chinese girl.
I regret being so vulgar in describing Myria. She deserves a bit of discretion as much as anybody. No need to make it all seem so dreary and chess-like. There’s plenty of improvisation to her game.
Myria is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable sexual desire. She is the little pair of thighs and the tight abs that supposedly mean nothing to anyone. Millions of grown men find her athletically attractive. She is the stated ideal of youth and beauty — yet she is technically off-limits. Her full awareness of this status makes her super-powerful. She is the crux of our culture’s notion of desire and power. A twelve-year-old. All our pretensions of control dissolve into dissipation.
The Camera, on the other hand, is Frankenstein’s monster. He has holes all over his body. When they put him to bed they have to plug him up with disinfectant-smeared plastic plugs, all his holes filled for the night. When he’s working, he occupies his chair like a spider-web occupies the bottom of a discarded can. He has become a man physically incapable of expression emotions, though feelings are his stock in trade.
The Camera never moves, never speaks. He has never been seen to do so much as scratch himself. He is bodily cared for by an individual known as The Dresser. The name is a reference to an old, old movie; film people love references. The Dresser, a tall, stocky man with a bald pate and the manner of a butler, hovers over the person of the Camera like a mother hawk. He dresses and undresses him, bathes him. He electro-stimulates the Camera’s muscles to keep them from atrophying completely. Right now, he’s off set somewhere, ironing pajamas or whatever he does.
After one more shot with Myria, and another two with her and her co-star, Myria’s done for the day. The 2nd AD calls her wrap. Myria curtsies to some desultory and partly sarcastic applause from the crew. She drops back into the shadows, but doesn’t leave the set. Everyone moves on to the last two shots. They’re simple and they go quickly.
The house lights come up with a buzzing hum inside the hangar-like sound stage, bright stadium lights mounted on the dim, faraway ceiling. Most of the crew is gone within a minute, filing out through the human-size door next to the six-story rolling door. They emerge into the sweltering Mumbai night, break up into groups to drink in the bars and restaurants nearby, before heading to their homes. The camera crew relax for a minute, while out of their sight Myria toes around, throwing sidelong looks at the Camera.
A dark, compact person shimmies down from the support column of the stage rigging, drops lightly to the floor, startling the camera crew. He has dark brown skin and wears a tight charcoal suit; he begins to speak to the crew. They all give him their total attention. Myria moves closer to the Camera, lolls before him, her mouth open, her head falling to the side, like someone dozing before a fire. Then she claps her mouth shut, grins. With a comical little half-step to start her off, she runs, hops on the camera’s lap. The rig bounces wildly but she’s got part of the Camera’s harness in each fist. She leans in, kisses the Camera on the lips, bonking her cheek and temple against his matte-box/visor.
A flinch pulses through the Camera’s whole body. She pulls her mouth away and his lips sag open unsymmetrically, revealing yellow, peg-like teeth. She suppresses a giggle. Her hands grope through the forest of connections on his head, and she finally finds what she wants. She pulls something. With a metallic scrape, the Camera’s lens-cap shutters flip open.
In all her nightmares and imaginings, Myria had always seen the Camera’s eyes as staring, dead. Instead, they quiver with intention. They swivel, tremble, scanning her, the crewmen approaching behind her, the set. They never stop moving, the light blue irises adjusting continually, seeming to float under a film of water. The eyes’ scanning trembling becomes finer as the Camera zeroes in on Myria’s face. She gasps, pulls away. Then, angry shouting, big hands pulling her from the rig, lifting her away, depositing her on the concrete floor. As soon as her feet touch ground, she’s gone.
***
Dziga Vertov saw something in Benazir that no one else could see. Or at least, they only saw it in his photographs of her. It was’t just her, either. Some called him the Starmaker. “He creates drama where none exists,” touted one pudgy scribbler in Salon magazine.
His photographed hobos became heroes, posterboys for the reform of social services. Businessmen became Beelzebubs, suddenly catching the interest of prosecutory and regulatory agencies. Housewives became whores and used that to whatever advantage they could – household name first, fragrance and clothing line to follow. Whores became fireflies, chanteuses, sex-goddesses. But SHE, she became IT. Everyone wanted her to wear their clothes and their makeup. They wanted her naked, dead, sexy, smart, spiritual, vapid, deep, thirsty, frightened, relieved, perfect. She represented an age. Benazir, the gangly girl from the India subcontinent, became the most lusted-after supermodel of her time.
Her look became the look. As the 2060’s dawned, suddenly the buzz word in fashion was “provincial authenticity”. Irony had never been less in vogue. Suddenly everything had to be genuine.
She never let anyone else but Dziga photograph her. Somehow – they whispered about witchcraft – she even avoided the paparazzi. Oh, the occasional snap made its way online, but no one ever took notice. The tabloids seemed to pass over her. Through eyes and lenses other than Dziga’s, she was simply…ordinary.
Benazir wore success easily, as if born to it. The sudden social obligations, the welter of people who wanted in on the magic. The fans, the lustful men, the money men, the artists, the producers, those who wanted to use her, collaborate with her, invest in her, schmooze, win her confidence, or just gain social status by knowing her. Krevich and his staff managed it all, of course, but so did she, taking an active role in her own management with a natural ease and a golden tongue.
Krevich forgot how much he needed Dziga exactly once. Perhaps he underestimated Dziga’s importance to the chemical reaction that made Benazir a star. He arrived back one Monday morning from a weekend party in Norway where he had “really bonded” with a celebrity photographer who ran a glossy nude photography website. The man wanted to do a spread with Benazir. Krevich summoned her to an official conference room, poured her some gin.
“Nude but classy,” he said.
“Of course,” Benazir smirked.
“The people in Norway, Benazir, you would love them. How they drink. How they fuck.”
Benazir watched Krevich from smiling, half-lidded eyes. “Oh? Who did you fuck?” This photographer?”
“No, no. Not yet anyway.”
“Benazir, let him photograph you. He said he’d give you total control. If you don’t like them, they go nowhere.”
“And I have to get naked?”
“You’re naked half the time anyway, Benni.”
She sighed, gulped her drink.
“That’s different. Naked in Norway, brrr…. I’m from the subcontinent, Krevvy.”
“Don’t call me Krevvy. He wants to take you to cote d’azur. Tropical sands. Tropical women.”
“Cote d’azure is mediterranean, not tropical.”
Krevich stared at her, dumbfounded.
“And I’m not tropical either. Exotic, yes. Tropical, no.” She finished her drink and rapped the glass down like a gavel. “What is Dziga’s role in this.”
Krevich sat down and seemed to gather himself for a moment, covering by taking out a fresh pack of cigarettes, tamping it, opening it, fumbling turning around a lucky cigarette, removing one, carefully tamping it too, and finally searching his pockets for a lighter.
“Damn it, gave my lighter away again.”
Benazir was there with a match before he could get up. As he sucked the fire into his smoke she said, “What about Dziga?”
Krevich took a long inhale, and held his head back to blow it out. “He’s offering good money. I think it will be good for your image, actually. Add a little bit of ‘bad girl’, you know European sophistication and all that. And you already do nude work in many of those perfume ads, it’s just not marketed as –”
Benazir squatted in front of Krevich in his chair, and put her hands on his thighs. She spoke very softly. “Sweetie, I’m not worried about my image. I’m asking about Dziga. I have never shot without him. He’s…important.”
“Dziga is a great artist with the camera. It was hidden in him all this time that I was fucking him, thinking he was an idiot.” Krevich smiled. He clapped his big hands over Benazir’s on his thighs, leaned down so that his face was close to hers. “I don’t give a fuck about art. We’re in advertising. Fuck that, we’ve transcended advertising — you’re a brand. With or without Dziga.”
Benazir slid back, dropping her butt to the floor and sitting cross-legged.
“Aw.”
“I’ll talk to him.” Krevich stood up, brushed some ash off of his pants. “Don’t worry about it. Just stay beautiful.” He rested his hand on her head for a moment.
Benazir reached up for his arm with both hands, placed the edge of his hand into her mouth, and bit into him.
Krevich’s panicky yelp sounded just like dog getting wounded. He yanked away from her, shaking his hand. “What the fuck, bitch?” He looked at his hand: no blood, but a red arc of teeth right across the meat of his palm. “Fuck. Fuck this. What the fuck.” He shook his hand again, then grabbed it tightly with the other hand and bent over it, his teeth clenched, his eyes squeezed shut, and endured the apex of his agony before he finally began breathing again, gasping and choking.
Benazir saw a new emotion creep over Krevich’s anger, a mixture of greed and fear. He was like the monkey with its fist in the jar of rice. He could not let go of the rice to pull his hand out of the jar.
He sat down heavily on the chair, looking at Benazir from under a heavy brow. “Why? The fuck.”
Benazir held her feet and rolled back on her haunches, playfully like a small child. “You should call the cops. Look what I did to you.”
“The fuck. The fuck. The cops? No cops.”
Benazir giggled. “Here, let me see it.” She scooted closer to him. He drew back in fear, but she cooed and petted him and gently pulled out the hand she had bit, and held it between her cool hands. She kneaded it softly, and said, “there, there, it’s not so bad. I didn’t bit you hard. It just scared you. Look, the mark is already faded from red to white.”
Krevich’s body slackened, his face shed its tension. He looked at Benazir’s face.
“Are you in love with Dziga?” he asked.
“I don’t know what that means. I’ve already loved everybody in the universe, where do you go from there? Dziga and I have a purpose together.”
“What’s that?”
“Funny you should ask, I’m not sure I know yet.”
“You are a ridiculous girl. The most ridiculous I have ever met,” Krevich said. Benazir laughed, a chesty, honest laugh that made her feel weak. Krevich smiled. “You really are. How could anyone take you seriously?” He rubbed his hand. It just itched a little. The bite mark was nearly gone.
“I don’t know,” she said through tears of laugher. “I don’t know.” She helped herself to some more gin. “We can do the shoot. With Mr. Norway. Get the contract, I probably want to make some changes.”
Mr. Norway ended up paying for not only a trip to and accommodations in cote d’azure for two days, but a greatly increased fee for Benazir, part of which was wired to Los Angeles and handed to Dziga as cash. The three of them went out to an awkward dinner where Krevich made a speech about their “amazing little brand” and how it was ready to grow and called Dziga the creative force behind it and toasted him. Then they took Dziga back to the big bed in the apartment on the sixteenth floor and tag teamed him until he squirmed away from them exhausted and spent and ticklish. Benazir stayed, and the three of them spent the night together. Dziga’s face beamed peace and happiness and his heart exploded layers of gold light.
Dziga walked all the way around downtown, from the historic core over to Cesar Chavez and then up into Chinatown, down Figueroa, back east on 6th and through the heart of skid row, six dozen times during the week-and-a-half while Benni and Krevich were gone. The hobos knew him when he passed, and nudged each other and whispered about him. In between walks he took to a cocoon made of blankets. He didn’t shoot any photographs at all.
He met them at the airport on their return, proudly showing them to where he had parked the car himself. In the car, all buckled in, Dziga blurted out, “We should all three spend the night together again. Tonight.” He squinted a smile and wiggled the steering wheel.
Benazir reach up from the back seat and put her hand on Dziga’s shoulder. “Of course, sweetie. May I stay the night, Krevich?”
“Of course. But you must save some Dziga for me, I found him.”
Dziga threw his head back and laughed. He turned up some music. They glided home on freeways empty in the pre-dawn morning.
By the time they got into the apartment, conversation had become stilted and forced. Krevich fidgeted with a nail clipper. Benazir efficiently put away all of the luggage, then went into a series of yoga positions in an out of the way part of the floor. Krevich wandered out through the foyer in to the studio, smoking. Dziga watched them both.
“What’s wrong?” he finally said.
Krevich strode in and slammed the door. Benazir let out a huge breath and lay flat on her back, her hands on her face.
“Where are they?” snapped Krevich.
“I unpacked them. On your desk.” Krevich got them. He grabbed a letter opener and dramatically ripped the manilla envelope open, though it wasn’t sealed. He threw the stack of photos on the floor, splaying them out.
Dziga looked at them. A woman who looked a bit like Benazir posing nude on a beach. She had different eyes, distant and faint, and none of Benni’s insouciant mouth. She even seemed to have a different arc to her spine, more defeated, less confident. She looked bored, awkward, plain and a bit childish, like a teenager posing for her first sexy picture.
“Did they replace you with her?” He pointed to the photos.
“That IS her!” Krevich shouted. “That is her. She sabotaged it somehow.”
She screamed, a quick rising tangle of anger. But when she stood before Krevich and spoke she kept her voice carefully low and even. “I did not sabotage it. Do not say that again.”
Krevich kept silent. Benazir turned to Dziga, who was trembling. She hugged him. “I’m sorry, sweetie. It’s okay. Everything’s okay. They’re not going to use those pictures.” Krevich went into the studio and locked the inner door behind him. Dziga wondered why it would matter if they used those pictures. They didn’t even look like her.
The Human Camera - a serial novel 
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