Like a ghost in its house, or like you in your apartment, the lizard will soon become an eternal tenant: having partaken of the death of the leaf and therefore died before dying on the leaf—having entered, even for a second, the brown house of the leaf—the lizard will never be able to leave. Everywhere it goes, it will still be deep inside it. Indeed, even as you are thinking this—even as you drum your foot hard against the deck, to scare the lizard away—you see that it is already too late. For although the lizard does scurry across the deck in fear, its body remains exactly as brown as before, retaining the leaf’s shade: its body has left the leaf—all four feet have departed from its surface—but its mind remains behind, still enmeshed in that brown logic. Every cell of its skin still thinking leaf thoughts. You watch it dart off the deck and disappear into the shrubs beyond, where, surrounded by green grasses, its brown body will prove a liability, a provocation of conspicuity to the birds that prey in the courtyard, perhaps even to the finch that, you see now, has vanished from the banister. Yes. The lizard is still inside the leaf, and it may very well die there: while trapped beneath the finch’s talons, you imagine, while being crushed in the bird’s beak, the brown lizard will still be inside the brown leaf. Not even death is an escape, you think, rising from the table and packing your laptop back into your bag. Exiting the courtyard, you begin the long walk back to your apartment. Not even death is an outside for the dead.

White Dialogues

Listen to her, Bereyter says, as together we watch the mute woman mouthing something on the screen. On the pull-down canvas behind him, a single scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo repeats itself on a loop. Earlier this semester, the fall of what is to be my final year at the University, Bereyter accepted our cinema department’s prestigious postdoctoral fellowship, to continue his so-called groundbreaking work on white dialogues. Now, several months later, on a dismal morning in November, he is delivering a lecture on the progress of his research, addressing a scattered audience of roughly twenty people—humanities majors, graduate students, our fellow film colleagues—from a walnut lectern at the front of the darkened seminar room, down here in the basement of the historic Wolfsegg Hall. Bereyter, still in his late twenties, is a natty dresser, and for the occasion he is wearing a bone-white oxford button-down with a navy cable-knit cardigan, a prep-school ensemble that only serves to reinforce his precocity. That is the brazen boy-genius image he means to project: so young, and yet already he has (in his own terms) fashioned a brand-new technique of close reading, or else has (as my colleagues in the cinema department have put it) blown film scholarship wide open. I am sitting alone in the back row, in one of the room’s uncomfortable desk chairs, with their stiff polypropylene seats and claustrophobic tablet arms. I have laid an opened notebook and two pens on the desktop, even though note-taking will be impossible. The single light source in the room is the overhead projector, a rectangular turret mounted directly above me, where it beams its dazzling adit through the air: a passageway of light that extends between the screen and the bulb, the movie and the room. If I were sitting nearer to the screen, I think, I might be able to see better. That is no doubt why my colleagues have chosen the front row. There, Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss—arrayed like eager students at Bereyter’s feet—are free to take notes by the glow of the screen. Whereas I, shrouded in secrecy and darkness at the back of the room (three rows behind the nearest person, and hidden from Bereyter), cannot see my notebook page beneath me. Until he turns the lights back on, it will be impossible to jot down my observations, criticisms, or aporia, in preparation for the Q&A. I will have to hold them all in my head until the Q&A. That is the only reason I have come to Bereyter’s talk today: to destroy him, to disturb and destroy him, by posing unanswerable questions and merciless provocations throughout his Q&A. Earlier this morning, before he turned off the lights, I was able to copy down the few scant lecture notes that he had written on the whiteboard. The first item was a works-cited entry for Vertigo, the movie under discussion: Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, Paramount Pictures. The second was a quotation, attributed to (what I took to be) an early lip-reading manual, The Listening Eye, by Dorothy Clegg: When you are deaf, Clegg writes, Bereyter wrote (and I transcribed), you live inside a well-corked glass bottle.