His wife was weeping openly now. “You know what they recommended, Elwood? You know what they want us to do?”
“We can’t just… put him away,” Doughty said. “He’s our son.” He paused, took a breath, looked about him. Smooth lawns, sunlight, trees. The world. The future. A bird flickered past him.
“Let’s think about this,” he said. “Let’s think this through. Just how monstrous is he, exactly?”
∇
Flash Frame
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The sound is yellow.
∇
It was when you could still make a living freelancing in Mexico City. Nowadays, it’s wire-services and regurgitated shit, but in 1982 rags still needed original content. I did a couple of funky articles, the latest about the cheapest whore in the city for Enigma!, a mixed-bag of crime stories, tits and freakish news items. It paid well and on time.
I also did articles for an arts and culture magazine which, I was hoping, would turn into a permanent position. But when it came time to gather rent money, Enigma! was first on my mind.
The trouble was that there was a new assistant editor at Enigma! and he didn’t like the old crop of stringers. To get past him, I had to pitch harder. I needed better stories. Stories he couldn’t refuse.
The crime stuff was a bust, nothing good recently, so I moved onto sex and decided to swing by El Tabu, a porno cinema housed in a great, Art Decco building. It’s gone now, bulldozed to make way for condos.
Back then, it still stood, both ruined and glorious. The great days of porno of the ’70s had come and gone, and videocassettes were invading the market. El Tabu stood defiant, yet crumbling. Inside you could find rats as big as rabbits, statues holding torchlights in their hands and a Venus in the lobby. Elegant, ancient and large. Some people came to sleep during a double feature and used the washrooms to take a bath. Others came for the shows. Some were peddling. I’m not going to explain what they were peddling; you figure it out.
It was a good place to listen to chatter. A stringer needs that chatter. One afternoon, I gathered my notebook and my tape recorder, paid for a ticket and went looking for Sebastian, the projectionist, who had a knack for gossiping and profiting from it.
Sebastian hadn’t heard any interesting things—there was some vague stuff about a whole squadron of Russian prostitutes in a high-rise apartment building near downtown and university students selling themselves for sex, but I’d heard it before. Then Sebastian got a funny look on his face and asked me for a cigarette. This meant he was zeroing on the good stuff.
“I don’t think I should tell you, but there’s a religious group coming in every Thursday,” he said, as he took a puff. “Order of something. Have you heard of Enrique Zozoya?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s the one that’s renting the place. For the group.”
“A porno theatre doesn’t seem like the nicest place for a congregation.”
“I think it’s some sort of sex cult. I can’t tell because I don’t look. They bring their own projectionist and I have to wait in the lobby,” Sebastian explained.
“So how do you know it’s a sex cult and they’re not worshipping Jesus?”
“I can’t watch, but I can very well hear some stuff. It doesn’t sound like Jesus.”
∇
There was no Wikipedia. You couldn’t Google a name. What you could do, was go through archives and dig out microfiches. Fortunately, Enrique Zozoya wasn’t that hard to find. An ex-hippie activist in the ’60s, he had turned New Age guru in the early ’70s, doing horoscopes. He’d peaked mid-decade, selling natal charts to a few celebrities, then sinking into anonymity. There was nothing about him in the past few years, but he’d obviously found a new source of employment in this religious order.
Armed with the background I had clubbed together, I ventured to El Tabu the following Thursday with my worn bag pack containing my notebook, my tape recorder and my cigarettes. The tape recorder was a bit banged up and sometimes it wouldn’t play right, or it would switch on record for no reason, but I didn’t have money to get a new one. The cigarettes, on the other hand, could be counted upon on any occasion.
Sebastian didn’t look too happy to see me, but I mentioned some money and he softened. He agreed to sneak me into the theatre before the show started, onto the second balcony where I would not be spotted. The place was huge and the crowd that gathered every Thursday was small. They wouldn’t notice me.
Sitting behind a red velvet curtain, eating pistachios, I waited for the show to start. At around eight o’clock about fifty people walked in. I peeked from behind my hiding place and recognized Enrique Zozoya as he moved to the front of the theatre. He was dressed in a bright yellow outfit. He said a few words which I couldn’t make out and then he sat down.
That was that. The projection started.
It was a faux-Roman movie. Rome as seen by some Hollywood producer. It could have been filmed in 1954 and directed by DeMille. Except DeMille wouldn’t have featured bare tits. Lots of women, half-dressed, in what was some sort of throne room. In the background I noticed several men and women, less comely and muscled. Slightly unsettling in their looks. There was something twisted and perverted about them. But the camera focused on the people in the foreground, the young and beautiful women giggling and feeding grapes to a guy. There were men, chests-bared, leaning against a column. The tableaux was completed by an actor who was playing an emperor and his companion, a dark-haired beauty.
It lasted about ten minutes. Just before the lights when on, I caught sight of a flash frame. A single, brief image of a woman in a yellow dress.
That was it. Enrique Zozoya stood to speak to the audience. I didn’t hear what he was saying—I was sitting too far back—but it wasn’t anything of consequence because just a short while later everyone was out the door.
I left feeling dejected. There was nothing to write about. Ten minutes of some porno, probably imported from Italy. And even that it had been disappointing. You could hardly see much of anything in that scene they’d chosen; bare breasts, yes, but nothing more.
What a waste.
∇
I returned the following Thursday because I kept thinking there had to be something more. Maybe the previous show had been a bust, but this one might be better.
Sebastian let me in after I shared my cigarettes and I sat down in the balcony. People arrived, took their seats, Enrique Zozoya in his yellow outfit said a few words and the projection began. It was the same deal, only this time the group was larger. Maybe a hundred people.
I was disappointed to see the film was the one we had watched last time. Not the same section, but it was obviously the same movie. This time, the sequence took place in a Roman circus where aristocrats had gathered to watch a chariot race. There was more nudity and the erotic content had been amped a bit, with a stony-looking emperor sitting with two naked girls in his lap—one of them the dark-haired woman from the previous sequence—fondling their breasts. Unfortunately, he seemed more interested in the race than the women.
The music was loud and of poor quality. There was no dialogue. There hadn’t been any dialogue in the previous scene either, which struck me as a bit odd, since you’d expect a few jokes or poor attempts at breathless sexiness at this point.
The emperor mouthed a few words and I realized the audio track must have been removed. The music playing was probably layered onto the film to replace the original soundtrack and had nothing to do with the film. Someone had taken the added effort of inserting moans and sighs into the audio track, but the dialogue track had been clearly lost. Not that it would be much of a loss for this type of flick.