We left San Francisco and in Oakland finally got onto Route 80, which would take us to central California. You could see stores along the sides of the road, and beyond them, as far as the eye could see, stretches of cultivated land. We’d been listening to a radio station from Pasadena, and she latched onto “Undone – The Sweater Song,” by a band that had just released their debut album; it was Weezer, she told me. Upbeat rock; they sampled noises and ambient sound in the middle of the track, and you could hear a conversation in the foreground between the bass player and a friend of the band, Nancy explained. The group had gone on hiatus, and it was unknown whether they’d play together again because the leader, a guy named Cuomo, had gone off to study art at Harvard. All very post-punk, very nerdy, super-intellectual vibe, according to her. There were hundreds of bands in the garages of California, playing that rocker scene in the style of the Beach Boys, but these idiots broke up just when they were starting to draw attention. She, it seemed, had been one of the band’s groupies, because she told me straight away that she’d spent several days of passion in bed with this Cuomo guy. “It was love between us, but love express,” she explained. “You can’t stay in love for more than three days; after that,” she said, “it’s an addiction…” and she preferred the kind you could buy… That was how she spoke, short and epigrammatic phrases, as if she was spraying graffiti on the walls of the mind.
“Listen, listen,” she said, “this one is ‘Only in Dreams,’ the best of the best”; the song went on for a very long time, with two guitars and a bass improvising in a kind of soul-bayón dance. The concept of “creating a buzz” was being thrown around (I can’t translate it well, because it loses her tone of voice: El concepto de la banda es crear entusiasmo), Nancy shouted over the very long guitar solo. It reminded me of the band Virus, which used to play in Buenos Aires in the eighties, a kind of lucid and frenetic joy. I used to go to their concerts because a friend wrote lyrics for the band. She listened to me attentively but without interest. “Why virus? Why that name? Because of Burroughs?” she asked. “Language is a virus, that whole thing?” She was a modern girl, spoke in word blocks, not sentences, and let herself be guided by excitement. She was very clearly from the California coast, and the beach was everything, the surf, the sun, the music, getting a little high. She craned her body out of the window and filmed the void and one gliding bird. “They thrive here because it’s a planting zone,” she explained. “You see tons of motionless birds on the wires and utility poles, and they suddenly take off in slow, dark flocks toward the blue sky. That was why Hitchcock came to film the movie in this area.” In the middle of the countryside you could see a great number of scarecrows, but the birds didn’t pay too much attention to them or get scared off when they saw them, they landed on the dolls’ heads and arms as though practicing for a kamikaze attack against the humanoids and their families.
We stopped several times so she could get out to film crows or clouds (and also so she could pee on the side of the road, her skirt hiked up, no panties on underneath). When it started to get dark we got off the highway and entered Vacaville, a typical rural town with saloons and sheds for loading livestock into cage trucks. There were several Skodas parked there, enormous as dinosaurs, with their trailers in the lot at the Motel La Roca, and we stayed there because, according to her, wherever the trucks stop you can be sure the place is decent and there are plenty of hookers around.
We got a room together (to save money, she said), and as we opened the door, she’d already taken off her blouse. She sat down on the bed and plugged her Japanese laptop into the phone jack and got online. She disappeared for almost an hour as she browsed with a pirate search engine that was connected to archives of the actors who worked on Hitchcock’s films. The ones who’d been children in The Birds were now elderly retirees who lived in retirement homes in California, and she was thinking about interviewing them for her thesis.
She had something of a cyberpunk about her, a hacker girl, and she showed me how she could infiltrate the airline companies and get two first-class tickets to New York, and after a few complicated operations she made the reservations and paid using a stolen account number that she’d written—like a tattoo—across her wrist in black ink. I didn’t ask many questions but followed her work with a mixture of admiration and astonishment. She knew that some students and many underground groups would routinely invade large companies’ computers and use their private phone numbers to make long-distance calls, and she told me how some people—especially the communications students at Palo Alto—had already managed to extract money from confidential accounts at the big banks, though she’d never seen someone doing it in real time. Once she got her two boarding passes for San Francisco –
