There are maybe thirty, forty people in this room. Nick’s there, sitting at the top of the stepladder blowing bubbles from this kiddie bubble kit he’s got — but Heidi doesn’t want to rush up to him as though she needed him as some kind of entrance ticket; besides which, he’s not exactly in her good books right now having sort of fucked her around re the whole street-door/telephone-cabin thing. Besides which, Roger’s kind of cute and to-be-stuck-with for a while. He seems to know all the band people: as he leads her over towards a projector that’s sitting on a table in front of the podium pointing at the sheet (and is the bloodstain menstrual, Heidi wonders, or has this Jean-Luc been deflowering teeny-bopper Czech girls? Which one is he, anyway?), two of them come up to him. They swig from his beer, start talking technical stuff about plugs and voltage or whatever — for which Roger even seems to have the vocab, which makes Heidi wonder if his parents are Czech or something, although she doesn’t verbalize this query. He introduces her to a Jiří and a Kuba, who both smile and say hello. Then Jiří goes and plugs the projector lead into some massively overloaded socket and Roger delves beneath the table, pulls out a stack of circular tins, opens these up and unwinds the first few feet of the film inside each, holding the strip up towards the light so he can see what’s on it.
“Can I help?” she asks him.
“Do you know how to feed film through a projector?”
“Well … sure,” she says, figuring she’ll work it out.
“Stick this one in, then,” he tells her, handing her a tin. “I’ll just go take a leak.”
And he’s off. So: there are two things which kind of turn, and one of these already has the plastic spider on it, which must be for gathering the film as it comes out — so probably the reel should go on this front one. But then all this shit in-between is a real fucker because there’s any number of ways it could go round all these little rubber fingers. Why did she pretend in the first place? Is Roger not going to want to know her if he finds out she can’t load a projector? She bends down to pretend to look more closely at the turning thing, to make anyone looking at her think she’s thinking “Is it an x-type turning thing, the type that feeds from underneath, or a y-type turning thing, that feeds from above?” The stoners are still wailing in the antechamber:
Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee, it’s good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I’m back in the USSR …
Heidi’s sure by now that everyone is looking at her thinking She can’t thread a spooclass="underline" she must be just an English teacher! A bubble breaks across her face, as though Nick were pissing on her from on high: she’s gone so red that to be anally exact about it the bubble doesn’t actually break across her face, i.e. strike her skin and break as a result: it pops a couple of millimetres from it, from the heat she’s giving off. An object touches her chin from behind; she turns round to find a tall, spindly black man has put his arm around her shoulder. He’s dressed in a white toga, and has a pistol in his hand, and he says to her:
“My dear, I think you’re doing it all wrong.”
His voice is high and theatrical, or kind of operatic even, like he was singing. And he’s got, that’s right, a fucking pistol in his hand. But he’s smiling. He’s quite old, like maybe forty plus or even fifty, and his thin face has deep creases in it as he smiles. He’s got his other arm around a beautiful blond boy whose eyes stare out serene, or dazed, or stoned.
“You like my weapon?” he says, then the creases in his face contract as his eyes narrow and his mouth pulls open. He throws back his head and whoops out a long, loud laugh. “Karel loves my weapon. He just loves my tool. My piece. Isn’t that so, Karel?”
The blond boy smiles and answers:
“Krásná, Tyrone. Big black weapon.”
The black man throws back his head and whoops again.
“Here, let me show you how you do it,” he says when he’s finished laughing. “You understand a little English?”
“Yeah. I’m from Vermont,” she says.
“No! Oh my God! Ver-mont!”
Heidi notices his eyeballs are huge and white amidst all that black skin. A vein has burst inside the right one, daubing the white with red. She asks him:
“You too?”
“My dearest, dearest friend is from Vermont. Veronica. We call her Vermont Veronica. She’s got a great act back in San Francisco. A drag act, you know. If you’re ever over in San Francisco go to The Pink Pollen Box and look for Vermont Veronica. You do that. She loves to meet people from home. She’ll take you everywhere in town.”
“OK,” she tells him, smiling nervously and looking at the creases in his skin and thinking that she’s never seen a black guy of his age from this close back home: of course she’s seen them, but they were cab drivers or postmen or gas-pump attendants or just generally people whose faces you didn’t really clock — but here she is now with an elderly black queen who’s alluding to a world of drag bars and intercity hopping where you just go look people up when you land in such and such a town, and he’s assuming she’s part of that world too. Cooclass="underline" four. And then this great black pistol. Heidi tries to sound all blasé as she asks:
“Is that a real gun?”
Tyrone’s head goes back again. Another long, long whoop.
“You’re priceless, my dear,” he sings. “She’s priceless! Karel, kiss this gorgeous girl for me.”
She looks at the blond boy, who fortunately seems not to understand. Tyrone continues:
“No, I’m only joking, my dear. Karel’s mine alone. For my eyes only,” and his big white eyes roll up. Then he gives out a theatrical kind of start or gasp as he remembers why he came over to her in the first place: “The film goes on the other spool. Here, give me that.”
He’s got the whole thing loaded in about ten seconds — which is perfect timing because just then Roger comes back followed by this tall, older guy with big white teeth, sees it’s all threaded correctly and says:
“Thank you. Did you study film?”
“My dear, she is a film,” says Tyrone. “A real star. Lights! Lights!”
While Roger’s introducing the big-toothed older guy to her as Michael who’s in advertising and she’s shaking Michael’s hand, the lights go down although not out completely: there’s a free-standing lamp over in the corner which she figures is an artist’s lamp because its glow is pretty strong. An image comes up on the bedsheet: art-house-type found footage from the Fifties of this woman in her kitchen who just turns once towards the fridge and then it starts again and then again and so you’re kind of forced to think about the gesture, i.e. turning to a fridge, and see it as a symbol or whatever, which is anyway what makes it kind of art-house. As the image comes up there’s a crackle as an amplifier is switched on. The band start playing; their front, a girl, starts singing, in English but with a totally Czech accent:
Open your eyes
To my door
I wa-ant you to …
— a song that Heidi’s heard maybe a hundred times on Radio Jedná, and really likes. As the girl sings on, she realizes with a sudden rush of excitement that these people are the real band that sing this on the radio, The Martyrdom of Somebody: she’s just met two of them at a private party, with them playing to her in the atelier of a French artist in Prague — which is, just, Cooclass="underline" one zillion.