Battlefield ReX is a depiction of a UFO sighting by artist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995), in Pasadena, in January or February 1946. Recognized mononymously as Cameron, she was an influential figure of the American midcentury underground and a spiritual and artistic mentor to many radical thinkers and artists of the era. The sighting was a pivotal moment in Cameron’s life, precipitating her exploration of the concept of the divine essence and the return of the matriarchal era. Cameron was introduced in part to esotericism through her marriage to rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons. The story opens on their wedding day in October 1946.
X
Chapter Zero
OCTOBER 19TH, 1946. She’s wearing a suit from Saks. The lining of the suit is about the same color as her skin, and the blouse delicately frames her shoulders, morphing collarbones into a splayed butterfly. She’s never thought of herself as having beautiful collarbones, the ones that shine like antlers on 1920s starlets. But when she catches herself in the car’s side mirror, she’s startled. It’s like she’s grown thick wings from the foot of her trachea. Clavicle, she remembers from the anatomy book she would look at in Iowa, means key. Clavicle, it’s an ugly word. A small bow atop all the guts. Ornate boned keys to a different ether.
Her mother took her to Saks when she first arrived in Los Angeles. It was 1945 and she decided to stay put. She wasn’t AWOL, she told her mother, she just wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She explained that they let her go because of what the war had done to her brother. It wasn’t as hard as some people thought to leave the US Navy.
It scarred her brain to think of it.
Saks opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1939. Throughout the war, it acted like a box of what could be, what was coming, what had been, and what people wanted. The lines of the store, all curves and u-shapes, were teak. The whole concrete box was filled with ribbons. Wood ribbons. Sashed ribbons. Folds. It was like living flesh in a rigid box on a rigid boulevard.
Jack bought the suit without her. He knew how to take care of new things, not old things. New things he wore beautifully, old things he would safety-pin. He wanted a new suit for her. The rings he had designed himself, with sapphire, her birthstone. He preferred sapphire to emerald, the other choice for Taurus. Sapphire glinted in the sun. It was as if the ring could travel anywhere, he thought foolishly, because it contained everywhere in its softly chiseled surface. They were both ruled by Venus and by a 29-degree Pisces moon on the fixed star Scheat. He would later tell her it was an evil star.
They marry in San Capistrano, California. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles. The moon is in Leo. It’s sunny, but cold, 59 degrees. The summer has been an eternity. “I’m the same,” she insists to her brothers and sister. But, she’s not the same. It’s the autumn after a heated summer. She doesn’t like the magic, but she also doesn’t like the people who don’t like the magic, like Ed. She hugs the silk against her breasts, still misshapen, she believes, due to the early pregnancy Jack had her terminate. It was the first. The second will come later, and they will file divorce papers because of it.
Her bones. The clavicle. She’s about to point it out to Jack, who’s driving. His mouth curls despite a feigned austere concentration on the road ahead. Driving doesn’t suit him. He has two cars. He prefers this one. The convertible, a big black car. It doesn’t really look like he’s driving, more like he’s herding an oversized shiny beetle from its helm.
Although she’s marrying him, she’s still somehow not sure how he will interpret her. He’s looked at her so many times with incredulity and swollen tears, part of some uneven logic. Its presence gives her an uncanny power—a force which rearranges her on a molecular level. “It’s the emblematic distance required for desire,” she later tells the analyst Jack has enlisted for her. But it’s not that. And the cunning and threatening veneration by others for his eccentric fragility—a fissure in an otherwise stable mind—gnaws at her.
She decides not to tell Jack about her bones that are keys. Instead, she looks back to Ed and Jeanne in the backseat, who look smug, constantly, as if they are sharing a joke, and she’s the joke. Normally she doesn’t mind, since it includes her while excluding her as she’s their subject. On her wedding day, though, she wants more control. She taps Jeanne’s knee. “Thank you for coming!” Ed laughs and yells, “Don’t turn back! There’s no turning back now!” He would say that.
She hated Jack’s house and the large doors, she also hated the wood. It was oppressive and, she thought, probably filled with maggots, a lifelong phobia. She leaned against the thick oak turned into a stupid door and rested one temple against its jamb. Beyond, she could see Jack on the floor, his wiry hair filled into a halo. His spine curved backwards, his shoulders tightened a shawl across his chest. She rubbed her eyes. He struck a long incantation in a language she could not recognize, his voice spiraled back and forth through the house.
Three years later, at Manhattan Beach, she would look down at his back, where a black stain from the sun, purple when superimposed on his skin, a temporary bruise, reminded her of all the damage and unending broken nervous synapses he suffered in their time together. She had asked Jack for protection a week earlier, after the first official FBI visit. He had invented a round amulet with a small spring inside, and when she pressed it, a secret compartment popped open to reveal an amber colored capsule, for her. A small anathema, a small drop of deadly poison—homeopathic when worn, lethal when ingested. She wore it. Like the evil eye, a poison meant to ward off more poison, like the newly popular Penicillin. The amulet would be one of the last pieces of jewelry he made for her, in the same way he made his wand, part scientific instrument, metal soldered to crystal, part charged beam. You could say there was no division, but the two were not the same.
They took the amulet from her in a bust shortly after his death. A raid. The cop pulled and it broke. A drop fell on his finger, but it had to be swallowed to work. She growled like a dog in his face. This was later, when she didn’t care as much. “No fucks,” the kids outside the Hollywood Trader Joe’s would say as she passed, dressed like a Renaissance beggar, at the end of her life.
The first two weeks after meeting Jack, his house was ticking with people. Heinlein was there. She told him one night how she was catatonic, the opposite of epileptic. He waxed on about the fakirs in India, who could remain immobile forever. She really did not like him and explained to him that she had trained herself to leave her body at these moments as a young child, but the famous science fiction writer wasn’t listening, he was drinking and talking about earthly rotation.
After the UFO sighting, everyone in the house—even those she had come to fear and hate—had to respect her. This was the sign. It was only after Jack’s death that she realized—going through his papers—that it was the sign, the shift. She felt like a spy, looking at everything again, his records, differently, without him—a small but necessary betrayal.
The whole earth stops and fades, whistles. Her body freezes, there’s a dull feeling, when blood sugar levels are too high and fixed, a slow fizzing that begins in the brain.
It was a UFO, it wasn’t a UFO. It was like saying, I’m pregnant, I’m not pregnant. It was outside of her control, outside of anything she tried to organize in her mind or to discount or account for. “It moved like this. It moved from that part of the sky like this—enough for me
to see the glint of the sun upon it, and it was absolutely silent.”
“I didn’t know what I was seeing. Since then, I have researched the Inquisition, and this was one of the most famous occurrences. It was cause for heresy, to see these things in the sky. ‘The ships in the sky came,’ they called them then. They were the elements. They were here to restore paradise to Earth. UFOs are not high-tech. This is the restoration of the elemental powers that are available to the matriarchy.”1
The shape was round and smooth, silver and silent, she would later explain it as “cigar-shaped.” But this was not really its form, it was just round, rounder than anything she thought possible. She ran to tell Jack, who had gone inside to get blankets. When he came out he listened to her, amused. But his eyes darted elsewhere, a shaking of the iris and pupil she had learned to associate with Uranus or Aquarius, a sharpening, something like knowledge from the future. As she explained the structure, he drew it for her, the shape that had been so inexplicably 3D and beyond dimensions now devotedly knotted into his yellow lined paper with graphite.
Margaret Haines is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. She is a recent resident of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. Her work has been presented at the East End Film Festival, Carroll Fletcher, Auto Italia South East, and the ICA, in London; 1646 in The Hague; VISIO lo schermo dell’arte, Florence; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Spazi Murate, Bari, Italy; and Western Front Exhibitions, Vancouver. Haines’s forthcoming book On Air: Purity, Corruption and Pollution expands on this project for X-TRA. The book is a narrative biography of Cameron and pairs Haines’s formal archival work with a wider analysis of the contemporary moment and an alignment with the tangential and apophenic. Haines is the author of Love with Stranger X Coco (New Byzantium, 2012), which includes a discussion of Cameron and her work. She has been a board member of the Cameron Parsons Foundation since 2014.