I'm passing faces lashed with dark-red cuts, piles of designer clothes, air-conditioning ducts, beams, a playpen and then a baby that looks as if it has been dipped in blood, which slumps, mangled, on a pile of rubble. Nearby a small child lies bleeding continuously from his mouth, part of his brain hanging out the side of his head. Dead bellmen lay scattered among magazines and Louis Vuitton luggage and heads blown off bodies, even one of a chisel-faced boyfriend of a model I knew back in New York, many of them BBR (what Bruce Rhinebeck calls Burned Beyond Recognition). In a daze, wandering past me: Polly Mellon, Claudia Schiffer, Jon Bon Jovi, Mary Wells Laurence, Steven Friedman, Bob Colacello, Marisa Berenson, Boy George, Mariah Carey.
Paths are made through the concrete boulders blocking Place Vendome, and the paparazzi arrive first, followed by CNN reporters and then local television crews, and then, finally, ambulances carrying rescue teams followed by blue-black trucks carrying antiterrorist police wearing flak jackets over paratrooper jumpsuits, gripping automatic weapons, and they start wrapping victims in blankets and hundreds of pigeons lie dead, some of the injured birds haphazardly trying to fly, low to the ground above the debris, and later the feet of children in a makeshift morgue are being tagged and parents are being ushered out of that morgue howling and bodies will have to be identified by birthmarks, dental records, scars, tattoos, jewelry, and at a nearby hospital are posted the names of the dead and injured, along with their condition, and soon the rescue workers outside the Ritz are no longer in rescue mode.
23
I sit in a revival theater on Boulevard des Italiens. I collapse on a bench in the Place du Parvis. At one point during the day I'm shuffling through Pigalle. At another point I just keep crossing then recrossing the Seine. I wander through Aux Trois Quartiers on Boulevard de la Madeleine until the glimpse I catch of myself in a mirror at a Clinique counter moves me to rush back to the house in the 8th or the 16th.
Inside the house Bentley sits at a computer in the living room, wearing a Gap tank top and headphones from a Walkman. He's studying an image that keeps flashing itself at different angles across the screen. My throat is aching from all the smoke I inhaled and when I pass a mirror my reflected face is streaked with grime, hair stiff and gray with dust, my eyes yellow. I move slowly up behind Bentley without his noticing.
On the computer screen: the actor who played Sam Ho lies naked on his back in a nondescript wood-paneled bedroom, his legs lifted and spread apart by an average-looking guy, maybe my age or slightly older, also naked, and in profile he's thrusting between Sam's legs, f**king him. Bentley keeps tapping keys, scanning the image, zooming in and out. Within a matter of minutes the average-looking guy f**king Sam Ho is given a more defined musculature, larger pectorals, what's visible of his c**k shaft is thickened, the pubic hair lightened. The nondescript bedroom is transformed into the bedroom I stayed at in the house in Hampstead: chic steel beams, the Jennifer Bartlett painting hanging over the bed, the vase filled with giant white tulips, the chrome ashtrays. Sam Ho's eyes, caught red in the flash, are corrected.
I bring a hand up to my forehead, touching it. This movement causes Bentley to swivel around in his chair, removing the headphones.
"What happened to you?" he asks innocently, but he can't keep up the facade and starts grinning.
"What are you doing?" I ask, numb, hollowed out.
"I'm glad you're back," Bentley says. "Bobby wants me to show you something."
"What are you doing?" I ask again.
"This is a new program," Bentley says. "Kai's Photo Soap for Windows 95. Take a peek."
Pause. "What does it... do?" I swallow.
"It helps make pictures better," Bentley says in a baby's voice.
"How... does it do that?" I ask, shivering.
The sex-scene photo is scanned again and Bentley concentrates on tapping more keys, occasionally referring to pages torn from a booklet and spread out on the table next to the computer. In five minutes my head-in profile-is grafted seamlessly onto the shoulders of the average-looking guy f**king Sam Ho. Bentley zooms out of the image, satisfied.
"A big hard disk"-Bentley glances over at me-"is mandatory. As well as a certain amount of patience."
At first I'm saying, "That's cool, that's... cool," because Bentley keeps grinning, but a hot wave of nausea rises, subsides, silencing me.
Another key is tapped. The photograph disappears. The screen stays blank. Another two keys are tapped and then a file number is tapped and then a command is tapped.
What now appears is a series of photographs that fill the screen in rapid succession.