"Trust"

Hernan Diaz wrote a neat puzzle-box of a novel.

• Benjamin’s experience as a college student was an amplified echo of his years as a schoolboy. All the same inadequacies and talents were there, but now he seemed to have acquired a cold sort of fondness for the former and a muted disdain for the latter.
• A few stagnant years went by, during which he made halfhearted attempts at starting different collections (coins, china, friends), dabbled in hypochondria, tried to develop an enthusiasm for horses, and failed to become a dandy. <> Time became a constant itch.
• He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself,
• It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details.
• But it would have displeased him even more to be thought of as an “original.” In the end, he became a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man. That his circumstances coincided with his costume did not make him feel any better.
• He brimmed with that most conventional and embarrassing of qualities—“taste.” Rask would look at him, thinking only an employee would spend the money someone else gave to him in such a fashion: looking for relief and freedom.
• she mended broken bonds and created new ones; she managed to include people in select circles while, crucially, preserving the sense that these circles were closed; she was, everyone agreed, a peerless anecdotalist and a consummate matchmaker.
• A shadow hesitated, right next to hers, on the threshold leading to a sitting room. Helen noticed that her own black shape on the floor expressed the same vacillation—the regret of having been seen, the lack of courage to leave, the unwillingness to come forth. The faceless silhouettes seemed to look at each other, as if wishing they could resolve the situation between themselves, without having to trouble their owners. Helen was not surprised when Benjamin Rask emerged from the sitting room.
• Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind.
• She knew that Mrs. Brevoort’s newly acquired eccentricities, her heightened frivolity, her calculated impertinence, and her gratuitously flamboyant behavior were not simply manifestations of unbridled joy but acts of a festive sort of aggression directed straight at Helen both as a dare and as a lesson—“This is the life you should be living.” The most eloquent declarations in her mother’s unspoken monologue came in the form of bills and receipts.
• It was in this period that Helen came to understand what Benjamin had realized a long time ago—that privacy requires a public façade.


• If at work he was always self-assured and resolute, at home he became indecisive and timid. He wove intricate conjectures around her, threaded with contrived causal links that quickly expanded into vast nets of suppositions, which he would unspin and weave again in different patterns.
• It had been Rask who engineered the whole crash to begin with, people said. Slyly, he had whetted a reckless appetite for debts he knew all along could never be honored. Subtly, he had been dumping his stocks and driving the market down. Artfully, he had leaked rumors and stoked paranoia. Mercilessly, he had overthrown Wall Street and kept it under his thumb with his selling spree the day right before Black Thursday. Everything—the breaks in the market, the uncertainty, the bearishness leading to panic selling, and eventually the crash that would ruin multitudes—had been orchestrated by Rask. His was the hand behind the invisible hand.
• Where do you think Dante would have lodged the savants of Wall Street? In the fourth or the eighth circle of Hell? Greed or Fraud? In fact, this could be a stimulating topic for one of your upcoming salons. Please share your thoughts, if you ever can spare a minute. And if you can’t spare a minute, I’ll take a dime.  Yours in so many ways, Shelby Wallace
• The crash, he believed, had been a lancet applied to an abscess. A good bleeding was necessary to do away with the swelling so that the market could find its true bottom and rebuild on solid foundations. He was even quoted as having said that because there had not been one single bank failure as a result of the crisis, it had merely been part of a healthy purge.
• She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.
• A pastoral bell echoed across the sky, dappled with flocks of small solid clouds, while unseen birds found themselves, yet again, unable to break their bondage to their two or four notes.
• The German language, with its indecipherable serrated sounds, was part of a widespread conspiracy against him.
• the relay system he had designed to transmit information from New York and London to Bad Pfäfers was much too slow. The developments of the market reached him only as “news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.
• Now, being in command again, he looked back on the past few weeks, when he had sheepishly accepted his ailing wife’s decisions and submitted to Frahm’s charlatanry, as if they had been part of some disorganized dream.
• And above all, he ought to remember what he had been told numerous times—that convulsive therapy was based on shock and that Mrs. Rask would, therefore, be, well, yes, shocked.
• Helen turned to him. Her face was a desolate ruin. A thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being. Her eyes did not look at Benjamin but seemed to be there only so that he could peer into the rubble within. He leaned over, kissed her scorched forehead, and told her she had been so brave and done so well.
• The mountains, the ground, Benjamin’s body were drained of substance and weight. All was hollow. <> He didn’t get up; the planet sank.
• As time went by, Benjamin had to own up to a frightful fact: Helen’s death had not altered his life. Nothing, in substance, had changed—there was only a difference in degree. His mourning was simply a more radical expression of his marriage: both were the result of a perverse combination of love and distance.

---

• Where perseverance and ingenuity once dwelled, apathy and despair now loiter. Where self-reliance reigned, beggarly submission now squats.
• Although this is the capital of the future, its inhabitants are nostalgic by nature. Every generation has its own notion of “old New York” and claims to be its rightful heir. The result is, of course, a perpetual reinvention of the past. And this, in consequence, means there are always new old New Yorkers.
• Through all his endeavors William always took care to remember his beginnings during Jefferson’s embargo. This experience taught him two lessons he took to heart. The first one was that the ideal conditions for business were never given. One had to create them...  And his second and main discovery was that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good,
• Close to graduation he was urged to stay on and further his studies so he could become a professor in mathematics, a title just added to the Yale catalog.
• No enterprise can fully succeed without a true understanding of human behavior. Yet to Clarence finance was a pure mathematical abstraction.
• He was one of those rare men who, without meaning to do so, upsets every rule of propriety and etiquette while somehow making everyone more comfortable for it.
• Additionally the trials of her tender years and her always delicate health had given her the innocent yet profound wisdom of those who, like young children or the elderly, are close to the edges of existence.
• If not managed properly, philanthropy can both harm the giver and spoil the receiver. Expand. Generosity is the mother of ingratitude.
• Examples of Mildred’s innocent wisdom during this period. Her thoughts on nature and God. Our last walk in the woods. Sweet incident with an animal.
• Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt... But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.
• A selfish hand has a short reach.
• Should not our very success be convincing enough evidence of everything we have done for this country? Our prosperity is proof of our good deeds.
• Everyone was playing finance with toy money. Even women got in on the market!... Women represented only 1.5 per cent of the dilettantish speculators at the beginning of the decade. At the end they neared 40 per cent. Could there have been a clearer indicator of the disaster to come?
• In 1929, however, disgusted by the depraved greed disrupting the affairs of the Exchange on the one hand and disturbed by the unchecked interventionism of the Federal Reserve on the other, I felt obliged to take a short position. This was not only because it was the reasonable thing to do as a businessman. It was also my attempt, as a concerned citizen, at correcting and purging the market. And just like my forefathers I proved that profit, when responsibly made, is one with the common good.

---------

• Events, scenes and people I had forgotten came back with a vividness that challenged the physical reality around me. And perhaps because they came from so far back at such great speed, these questions and memories impacted and sometimes even pierced through the very image of myself that had solidified over the years.
• Sometimes, in the middle of a project—a novel about a street photographer, an article on astronomical observatories, an essay on Marguerite Duras—I realize it is about the Bevels again. No one besides me would ever notice this connection, of course. Still, these encrypted and often involuntary allusions have fueled my work from the very start.
• After staring at the façade for a while, I realize it is not the building I am looking at but my memories that, like tracing paper, cover it.
• I could not help but pause and look up. Stern, clean lines coursed up the limestone panels only to be interrupted by copper cornices with overly ornate tracery, gothic arches and busts of futuristic-looking gladiators. Greedily, comically, the building claimed all of history for itself—not just the past but also the world to come.
• Did my father preserve my numerous spelling errors out of respect for my writing or because they were invisible to him? Suspecting the latter, I never dared to ask him. Ever since his death I have inexplicably felt that those misspellings bring us closer to each other. That we meet in them.
• at the Lawrence mills thirteen-hour-long shifts often led to severed fingers and limbs; child labor was a common practice...; life expectancy was twenty-five years.
• even though he was miles away from the scene where LoPizzo was shot. A two-month trial ensued, during which he was displayed, with two of his comrades, in a cage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Giovannitti
• The flow of immigrants from Italy to the United States at the turn of the century constituted, at the time, the greatest exodus on the planet. And the reactions against it could be equally outsized. The lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891;
• What was not made of stone was made of bronze. Nothing shone but everything emitted a pale glow. Sounds had a tactile quality, and we all did our best not to litter the space with any audible objects of our own.
• And at each desk, a girl roughly my age, her head slightly cocked to better see the page she was copying. In fact the whole trunk was shifted to the right, dissociated from the hands, which remained centered. The center was the typewriter.
• As a self-described exile, his views on both his homeland and his adoptive country were often contradictory—an amalgamation of resentment and longing, of gratitude and antipathy... He declared his disdain for the imbecilic people who had surrendered to Mussolini and his black-shirted thugs. Yet he treated Americans with the paternalist condescension often dispensed to slow learners and obedient pets.
• While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product. Needless to say, he objected to consumerism and the alienation fueling it—in a perverse circle, workers kept dehumanizing jobs in order to both produce superfluous goods and purchase them. It was for this reason that he welcomed the Great Depression
• The way they talk, with those bricks of meaning, reducing the world to one single explanation. Like religion. No, I don’t like Marxists. But Marx . . .” Again he made that face, as if he were tortured by an excessively beautiful sight. “He was right about this. Money is a fantastic commodity.
• History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That’s what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money.
• The style was florid enough to make it stand out while still showing restraint. I closed with a reflection on time and how it was up to each one of us to carve our present out of the shapeless block of the future—or something to that effect.
• The rest of us pretended not to notice anything, fully committed to our awkwardness.
• I had only seen such grand and austere examples of art deco in films—... Parallel lines chased one another in angular trajectories from the chromed furniture down onto the patterned stone floor, up the wood-paneled walls, onto the window frames and out into the city, continuing on the façades of the surrounding buildings and beyond, following the streets crisscrossing all the way into the horizon.
• This single photo has colonized the few memories I have of her. Over time I realized that in almost all the scenes I was able to recall, she appeared in the same dress and with the same hair. It was impossible to stop this simplification of my mother’s image, which now has become pretty much all I have.
• For years, between books, I worked on a novel about her. It remains both unfinished and the greatest mistake of my writing life. Because I labored unsuccessfully on that book for so long, my mother acquired, forever, the texture and weight of a half-formed character in my mind. I have even come to distrust my love for her.
• Detective fiction became an obsession. First it was Conan Doyle, S. S. Van Dine and Agatha Christie. These books (and a friendly librarian) led to others. Dorothy Sayers, Carolyn Wells, Mary Rinehart, Margery Allingham. Well into my adolescence these were the women who took care of me in the absence of my mother... There was violence in their books—a violence they controlled. These writers showed me, through their example, that I could write something dangerous. They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient:
• I had become the woman in the house. My father, the anarchist, found the fact that child labor was required to keep the gender status quo intact equally natural.
• Up close I discovered that Bevel’s face was almost two faces: the surprising boyishness of the upper half, with its very blue eyes and almost imperceptible freckles, was rebuked by his thin lips and exacting chin.
• At first Bonds was not just literature; it was evidence. And I was not just a reader; I was a detective.
• It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood at some point that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with extreme discipline—the calm precision of Vanner’s sentences, his unfussy vocabulary, his reluctance to deploy the rhetorical devices we identify with “artistic prose” while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seems to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning—much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.
• my experience of the house is even more contradictory. My unaccountable possessiveness and indignation (“I know what this place really used to be like”) mixes with the indifference I failed to feel in my youth (the loveless accumulation of Holbeins, Veroneses and Turners does not amount to a gallery but to a mere trophy room) and with a sharp sense of longing (returning to a meaningful place after several decades reveals how alien one can be to oneself).
• “We call them the Voynich manuscripts,” says the youngest of the three with a mischievous giggle. <> Librarian jokes.
• Over the years, as I shed my father’s dogmas, my ethical repulsion mellowed into indifference. I no longer have thoughts in favor of or against money in its physical manifestation
• My next stop was our landlady. The only reason we had not been evicted yet was that she loved my mother and therefore felt an obligation toward me. But she disliked my father and his semi-clandestine press in almost the same measure. And with each day we were late with the rent, I became more my father’s daughter. It always took about an hour to pay her. She wanted the money, but she also felt uncomfortable taking it and invariably felt obliged to keep me at her door for a long time while we shared neighborhood gossip. This illusion of closeness would cool off after two weeks and utterly vanish by the end of the month.
• The text sounded, I believed, manly. It conveyed an impatience with style, and this was intended as a tacit yet vehement denunciation of Vanner’s novel.
• autobiographies written by “Great American Men.” Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Henry Ford... If Bevel’s own voice, transcribed without any embellishment or modification, was not enough, I would make a new one for him out of all those other voices. And they would all be stitched together with my father’s bluster and pride. Like Victor Frankenstein’s creature, my Bevel would be made up of limbs from all these different men.
• Because thanks to my wild and uncompromisingly disorganized approach, the books started to merge into one another. What was individual about each man—Carnegie’s self-serving sanctimoniousness, Grant’s essential decency, Ford’s matter-of-fact pragmatism, Coolidge’s rhetorical thrift and so on—yielded to what I thought, at the time, they all had in common: they all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard. They all had the same unwavering certainty my father had.
• My father exerted an emotional monopoly. His happiness tolerated no dissent.
• If my text did not sound exactly like him, it captured how I thought he should sound. It is not impossible that some of the overconfidence I had given my fictional Bevel had rubbed off on me, but I was certain I had found his voice—and that it would work.
• “I can’t . . . Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done without Mildred. Where I would be.” There was an unusual depth to these rather banal words. “She . . . I mean to say . . .” <> I found Bevel’s speechlessness to be his greatest show of eloquence up to that point. The man whose job it was to always be right, the man who never indulged in the luxury of doubt, was at a loss for words.
• the overall giddiness around the possibility of bloodshed made me believe it was all bluster.
• During my research into my father’s past I found that between 1870 and 1940 about five hundred anarchist periodicals were published in the United States. That virtually no trace remains of that vast number of publications and the even vaster number of people behind them shows how utterly anarchists have been erased from American history.
• “Isn’t taking the book out of circulation enough?”
  “Bending and aligning reality.”
  At the time, I was not entirely sure if the phrase applied to this situation. But I did know that most men enjoy hearing themselves quoted.
  “Exactly. And reality needs to be consistent. How incongruous would it be to find traces of Vanner in a world where Vanner never existed?”
• He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was spotting the nick and face of the next one. “Now” did not seem to exist. He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward. This was the main thing typesetters and revolutionaries had in common: they knew the matrix of the world was reversed, and even if reality was inverted, they could make sense of it at first glance.
• These had to be the “untraditional” performances that “barely sounded like music” that Andrew Bevel asked me to edit out of his memoirs. <> In Bevel’s autobiography sweet, sickly, sensitive Mildred just loved pretty melodies. Like a child with a music box.
• And this scrapbook also feels out of place in Vanner’s version of Mildred. Helen Rask, the quiet aesthete, would never dissect and gloss the news. And precisely because the image of her that comes forward in this scrapbook differs so drastically from the portrait offered by those two men, I feel this is my first glimpse of the real Mildred Bevel.
• But reading these pages, it seems that more than vindicating Mildred he wanted to turn her into a completely unremarkable, safe character—just like the wives in the autobiographies of the Great Men I read during that time to come up with Bevel’s voice. Put her in her place.
• He forced her into the stereotype of fated heroines throughout history, made to offer the spectacle of their own ruin. Put her in her place.
• Toward the end of that secluded week I realized that writing a completely made-up tale for the extortionist served as a major inspiration for the other story I was developing for Bevel. These narratives informed and fed one another. What was a dead end here proved to be an open avenue there.
• I could tell already that my strokes were too broad and that the stories lacked those little details (a mundane object, a specific place) and verbal trinkets (a brand name, a mannerism) often used to bribe readers into believing that what they are reading is true.
• I drew from Woodrow Wilson’s speeches, Roger Babson’s bizarre treatise on prosperity, William Zachary Irving’s Autobiography, Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism, Henry Adams’s Education (perhaps the only of the books by Great Men I enjoyed)
• Among them I remember immensely disparate writers such as Dawn Powell, Ursula Parrott, Anita Loos, Elizabeth Harland, Dorothy Parker and Nancy Hale. Only a few of them turned out to be germane to my work—and none captured the atmosphere of subdued wealth I wanted for Mildred.
• Chaos is a vortex that spins faster with each thing it swallows.
• The pain of having been betrayed by someone so close to me seemed irrelevant compared with the consequences of a breach of confidentiality. what made it all doubly dispiriting is that it was true: suffering the loss of a friend was nothing next to facing Bevel’s wrath. Such was the extent of his power. His fortune bent reality around it. This reality included people—and their perception of the world, like mine, was also caught in the gravitational pull of Bevel’s wealth and warped by it.
• We stared at the threshold as if we were standing at her grave. After a suitable pause it seemed the right time to be bold and carefully impertinent again.
• The blotting paper caught my attention. It was covered in a multitude of words, numbers and symbols traced and retraced chaotically on top of one another in purple ink. Everything was backward, of course. I thought of my father and his inverted truth.
• “There is a better world,” a man said. “But it’s more expensive.” The quip stayed with me not only because it was a drastically different take on my father’s utopian visions but also because it pointed to the otherworldly nature of wealth, which I confirmed during my time with Bevel. I had never coveted any of his luxuries. They had intimidated and angered me, yes, but above all they had always made me feel unwelcome and alien. As if I were a displaced earthling, alone in a different world—a more expensive one that also thought itself better. <> That evening, however, in Bevel’s car I experienced, for the first time, the cool rush of luxury.
• I found some of the beautiful posters my father had made to cheer me up or celebrate the accomplishments of my childhood. “Ida Partenza! Ten Wild Lions! One Performance Only! This Thursday! Carroll Park!” “EXTRA! Miss Partenza Emerges Victorious from Third Grade!”
• Despite everything, I had consistently chosen to respect and look up to him. Only now did I realize how active and conscious that choice had been. Sometimes he made it easy for me, and it was a joy. More often it fell entirely on me to make a father of him. Year after year I had made up for his shortcomings. Helped him be my parent.
• It was one of the scenes I had made up for Mildred, following his request to create homey episodes using my “feminine touch.” I had based it on my dinners with my father, who listened, riveted, to my recounting of the latest Dorothy Sayers or Margery Allingham book I had borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library branch on Clinton Street. And here was Bevel, telling me my story to my face... I was acquainted with this parasitic form of gaslighting... There was a bizarre sort of violence in having my memories plagiarized.
• a fortune seldom has one single owner. Many interests and parties are tied to it. Rather than a block of granite, wealth resembles a river basin with multiple tributaries and branches.

--------

• Church bells. D F♯ E A. Followed by retrograde response: A E F♯ D. The most conventional chime. (Same as Big Ben?) Archaic in its pentatonic simplicity, it condenses most of our musical past: tonal hierarchies, symmetry, tension, release. But here the E bell is louder + more sustained than the others. And a tad flat, in the most exquisite way. If the call/response motif contains our history, that strange lingering 9th is the sound of our musical future. Grazing against the D, it makes the air oscillate.
• So nicely put. This defines the classical form. Music that one almost doesn’t need to listen to, because its development is all implied by the form. Just as Rhys says in her passage, “you always know what’s going to come next.” This music creates an unavoidable future for itself. It has no free will. There’s only fulfilment. It’s fatal music.
• Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one.
• Kitsch. Can’t think of Engl. trans. for this word. A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself... Kitsch can also be in the eye: “The sunset looks like a painting!” Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty. Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype.
• I know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.
• A just called from Z (again), asking for advice. Kolbe, Lenbach, London, NY, etc., etc., etc., etc. As always, he mistakes doubt with depth, hesitation with analysis.
• We cared for each other, but care’s demanding. Did our best to fulfil what we imagined the other’s expectations were, repressed our frustration when we failed, and never allowed ourselves to be pleased when we were the recipients of those same efforts. It’s unsurprising that we should soon slip into politeness. No graceful way out of manners.
• We fell into our rôles. Where there’s a ventriloquist, there’s a dummy. The latter word only sounds worse than the former. He disliked being told what to do. I disliked being pushed further into the shadows + speaking only through him.
• For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.
• Something endearing about his stiff softness. But I’ve the feeling he’s (unknowingly) trying to create a bank of future memories for himself. These are the scenes he’ll go back to when I’m gone. He’ll see his own hand arranging my pillow and stroking my cheek.
• By trading in outsized amounts + inciting bursts of general frenzy, I started creating the lags. The ticker fell behind me, and for a few minutes I owned the future.
• Pain outside me, like the surrounding mountains, swelling in wild-crested waves, petrified right before breaking.
• The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from us.
• Nurse never feigns gaiety. Never makes shows of sympathy. Never pretends to know what I feel. Calling her a friend would be an insult to the dignity of her impersonal care. And yet.
• Something miraculous + sad about the glass on the table. Water disciplined into a vertical cylinder. The depressing spectacle of our triumph over the elements.
• I distrust the surge of well-being within me when I make him feel good.
• Priest came with soggy offerings of comfort. <> God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.
• But with a tinge of caution. I sometimes had to find new ways for him to adopt my ideas. They had to become his thoughts first. Call and response: I gave him D F♯ E A so he could think he’d come up with A E F♯ D on his own.
• My 1929 plan was much like the bell motif. <> Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future. <> Like a retrograde or a palindrome... My wager against the mkt. was a fugue that would read backwards and upside down.
• The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory
• In and out of sleep. Like a needle coming out from under a black cloth and then vanishing again. Unthreaded.