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What You See in the Dark, Manuel Muñoz Algonquin Books, March 29, 2011 There’s the story you think you know, and there’s the one I need to tell you. What we do know is this. The police had officially labeled it a homicide. Yellow tape marked the crime scene in pictures that found their way online in real time. The body of the Writer was found in a heap of blood near his desk at 8:32 A.M. Neighbors had grown suspicious upon seeing the Writer’s dog wandering the condominium hallways. The front door to the unit was ajar. The neighbor walked in and soon found the Writer on the office floor in a pool of blood just to the foot of the iMac that was still beaming brightly as if nothing at all had changed, as if it would soon be receiving input, an edit, an email, a URL typed in a browser. But things had most certainly changed. The blood streamed down, second by second, the tub being rinsed clean. It spiraled into the drain, disappearing. We also know this. The Writer had been alive at midnight CST because it was then that he phoned friend Mark Graham in Los Angeles. Graham gave police a detailed report of the ensuring conversation, explaining that nothing seemed out of the ordinary. During the call, Graham told the Writer that he had just gotten back from the gym where he had spotted the Actress who won an academy award for Best Actress for playing a serial killer. The Writer-turned-starfucker seemed very excited by this news. The phone conversation ended when the Writer told Graham that he had started an essay on the Manuel Muñoz novel, What You See in the Dark, and that he wanted to write a bit more on it before calling it a night. The text of the unfinished essay is provided here, having also made it online seemingly before the body bag had even been zipped shut. * * * And then her own eyes, in a close, tight focus and a slow, painful pullback, trying not to blink. But it had been worth it, her face frozen in the stupor of cruel death, the close-up of her eye. A spiral, a circling. The slow dance in the tub repeating. Such brutality meant erasure, a cold, unblinking eye, a woman lying in a pool of her blood, which was draining away, vanishing. The bathroom in near silence, save the flow of the water, as the camera glided over to a newspaper concealing the stolen money. I have seen Psycho many times. Absolutely love it. But to pinpoint a before and after film that changed things for me, I have to give that honor to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It obviously came after Psycho and certainly owes much to Hitchcock, but I just so happened to see the Hooper film first. It remains my ground zero, my measuring stick. My love of horror movies traces back to the the grainy faux documentary-like film that still manages to scare the shit out of me no matter how many times I revisit it. It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie. And yet, it’s not. It’s just so much more than that. After all this time, this is the moment you hold and remember, down to the sweaty, nervous palm of your boyfriend: the quiet in the dark of the theater, the story coming. Before and after. No matter how much you wish it were not so, things invariably change. Life is full of turning points from which you can never go back. A first kiss, losing your virginity, the death of a loved one. There are those moments too that are far less obvious, invisible now in the strained recollection of twilight years, but they too exist as intersections where things took a turn, for better or for worse. She tried to think back to the day when everything—everything, everything—had gone wrong, to the day that had led to this moment, but she couldn’t see it. She looked as hard as she could into the dark but she couldn’t see it. You remember what it was like so long ago going to a movie theater. Back when there was no place you would rather be, back when it was pure magic. When you saw Jaws, Star Wars, Kramer vs. Kramer, Urban Cowboy, Rocky, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 9 to 5, The Shining. The films stand tall forever if for no other reason than the experience of sitting in the dark theater as you held your breath in that great anticipation, looking up at the bigger than life stars with their stories that made you dream that your life was destined to be something grand as well, something so much more epic than a suburban small town story could ever tell. Your life was optioned up before you on the big screen. A curtain rose, your eyes opened wide, and the rest of your life was about to begin. And now, it seems like more of a hassle than anything else. The downtown theaters charge an arm and a leg for parking alone. Your parents or big brother didn’t have to pay to park in a theater lot. The cost of tickets are outrageous as well and there are even surcharges for things like those ghastly 3-D glasses that offer up the added “pleasure” of a watching a headache-inducing blurred screen. You roll your eyes as you read that The Great Gatsby is being remade in 3-fucking-D. Are they kidding you with this shit? And the theaters themselves although you love the stadium-style seating just don't seem as big as they used to with all the chatter and distractions that surround you. You complain that Hollywood’s bottom line has diluted the quality of the stories as well. Formulaic blockbusters—sequels and prequels, trilogies and longer series than that—hog the majority of the bigger screens while bumping the indies out into the puny-boxed wings. You long for the days when the lights would dim and your heart would race, back when there were not five TV commercials to endure before the trailers even began. Darkness used to be the delicious moment of not knowing what would come next. You don’t see things like that anymore. The magic has all but disappeared for you now. Sad as it is, you’d rather not mess with the hassle and expense of going to a theater and instead, you just stream a film from Netflix or iTunes. And it is sad. Convenient but sad. A part of your rich history is dying or dead. You envision the theaters closing down entirely, empty buildings that will stand temporarily as haunted reminders of times gone by like the empty movie house in The Last Picture Show, home to ghosts and silence. Note to self: write about how Muñoz nails small town life, where rumor and innuendo create a reality of their own, where details have a way creating themselves, filling in the gaps of what would otherwise be impossible to ever know. * * * Certainly more than once, you will go on to explain the story of finding the dead Writer, and each time, a new detail will surface, sometimes from vague recollection, but more often than not, from conjecture or simply because it will make the story that much more vivid. And so it will become that the butcher knife that was never found shall come to be as real as the blood, as real as the axe, as real as your own breath when you saw the killer walking out the front door. |
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