Panopticon
a novel by David Bajo
from Unbridled Books Fall 2010
Copyright © David Bajo. All rights reserved.
See David's first book The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri.
David is represented by Peter Steinberg at
The Steinberg Agency.
Media contact: Caitlin Hamilton Summie.
Events contact: Rich Rennicks.
As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three journalists are oddly given assignments to return to stories they've covered before–each one surprisingly personal. The first assignment takes reporter Aaron Klinsman and photographer Rita Valdez to an abandoned motel room near the Tijuana crossing where the mirrors are draped with towels, bits of black tape cover the doorknobs, and the perfect trace of a woman's body is imprinted on the bed sheets. From this sexually charged beginning, Klinsman, Rita, and their colleague, Oscar Medem understand that they are supposed to uncover something. They just don't know what.
Following the moonlit paths their assignments reveal through the bars, factories and complex streets of Tijuana and San Diego, the reporters become more intimately entwined. Their search traverses the north-south trolley line and the string of public parks from the border to Balboa; it ventures to the warehouses of the desert, to the La Brea Tar Pits, to the boundaries between past and present, between what we are and how we are seen, and between what we can control and what others will see.
Panopticon is a novel of dreamlike appearances and almost supernatural memories, a world of hidden watchers that evokes the dark recognition of just how little we can protect even our most private moments. It is a shadowy, erotic novel only slightly speculative that opens into the world we all now occupy.
Chapter 1 of Panopticon
Klinsman arrived at the Motel San Ysidro on time, but the parking lot was empty and there was no police tape in front of room 9. The stucco walls of the single-story building were deep yellow in sunset, the roof postcard green. The neon sign had just come on, gaining full brightness with the sound of a lit fuse. He found the door to room 9 slightly ajar. He could only tell up close. He fumbled momentarily with the latex gloves he always brought to beat assignments but never managed to wear, then eased the door open.
The room was unlit and empty, with no signs of police investigation. Klinsman called Gina, his managing editor, hoping to catch her working late. She didn't answer. He flipped the light switch but nothing happened. He noticed that the cover and bulb for the overhead fanlight had been removed. A tiny square of black electrician's tape was stuck to the knob on the fan's pull-chain. Another piece was stuck over the door's peephole–on the inside. When he swung the door fully open to let in more light, Klinsman noticed yet another square of tape stuck to the inside doorknob.
He opened the heavy curtains to let in as much light as possible, a mix of neon and dusk and streetlight, and then the mass of lights from the Tijuana hills across the riverbed. When he thought about his past. It was that color, the light coming into room 9.
Klinsman tried his managing editor again but got no answer. He held her recorded voice to his ear, turned steadily, full circle, to examine the room. The doorknobs for the bathroom and the closet had black squares on them. The mirror on the dresser was draped with a towel. He tried the bathroom light and it didn't work. In the dimness of the shallow room he could see that the bulbs had been removed from the vanity light, with that mirror, too, covered by a towel. A toothbrush had been left beside the sink. Back in the main room, on the floor beside the dresser, he found a paper shopping bag containing all the lightbulbs, arranged on the bottom, neat as eggs.
He crouched on his heels and took his first picture, capturing the lightbulbs at the bottom of the bag. The double bed was made, but the thin cover, like milk skin, was wrinkled with the pattern left by a napping body, someone primly resting, gathering strength for a night out. With one arm outstretched, Klinsman held his camera above the bed and took a picture of the imprint. It was difficult to get the camera right above the pattern because the person who had been there had rested just off center. The pattern was intricate, swirled but contained like a fingerprint.
It was a woman. He could tell from the shape of the hips. Her hands had been clasped together over her stomach because he could see where her elbows had rested, little cups in the cloth on either side of her form. The cover was that sensitive, like a kind of photo plate, he thought, some silvery glass. Her heels, too, had left matching egg cups in the cloth. Klinsman took three shots.
He saw that it was time to leave for his evening assignment. He pressed the button on his camera and rotated a careful 360 degrees to get a panorama of the room. He lingered briefly on the blouse covering the TV screen but made sure he had enough memory in his camera left for the Luchadors in case he needed pictures for reference. The Review would send a good photographer to the Luchador event. Rita, he hoped, because she could be fun at that kind of assignment, make it not seem like work.
Klinsman closed the drapes, trying to leave room 9 in perfect order, rewinding his appearance. He even back-stepped to the door, checking to see if the industrial-grade carpet captured his footprints. There, then, imagining himself as intruder, Klinsman knew he had exposed himself to something and begun something, like Pandora taking the first full inhale of what she set free, Adam taking the second bite from the apple, feeling himself naked.
The light in the room was all artificial now: the neon from the motel sign, the sodium lamps from I-5, the veil of lights from the Tijuana hills, and that single collective amber borealis of humanity that forever hung above the landscape of his life, from these borderlands to the northernmost fingers of LA. He pulled the door closed but did not engage the lock, leaving it ajar again. As he had found it. Rewound.
Coming: Fall 2010