Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
Man Walking at 24 Frames Per Second
from The Adventures of Lucky Pierre
Robert Coover
As he enters the jostle, getting dragged down the street
through the snow and civil litter, the illusion of freedom fades and
an enfeebling depression creeps over him like a slow lap dissolve,
loosening his limbs and probing his sinuses like the onset of a new
cold. News photos stare at him from wastebins and the corners of
park benches, but he cannot bring himself to animate them. His feet
crush something or other about once every eighteen frames, but he
doesn't want to know what-what do I care about causes, he insists.
He looks up. Just the usual snow, clouds hanging heavy like the dugs
of a wet nurse, the odd suicide, nothing new. What then? He feels
like he’s lost something, something infinite and irrecoverable. Ah
well. Time probably, that's all, the old rue. He's always losing it,
always in grief about it. Laymen pass, hardly even counting, content
with shouldering one another off the frozen sidewalks and singing
their timeworn mating hymns. He envies them, chins tucked in their
collars, living in lyric time, suffering only on the odd birthday when
they fail to forget. He probably lived like that once himself. Not any
more. Ever since they hit him with the news that time was something
that got shot past at twentyfour frames per second, he's been in an
absolute panic about it.
Well, at least he knows who he is, why he suffers-he should
be carrying his jewels of office out in the open, but he feels
vulnerable in this spectral flux, and faintly irreverent. No, no, he
does not know who he is, who does he think he's kidding? Maybe in
fact that's just what he's been losing. Laying waste his identity at 24
fps. Maybe it's Cassie's fault, maybe she's messing him up. He
remembers sitting at an editing bench with her one afternoon,
looking at a reelfull of spliced-together goof-ups from the
cuttingroom floor: the tagends of orgasms, flash frames, miscues,
foggy runouts and blistered closeups, jittery tracking shots, clumsy
wipes-all of it joined together just as she's picked it up: forwards,
backwards, emulsion in or out, grease-penciled, notched, or
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