DL

DL is a member of 24fps whose work as a filmmaker and training under Inoshiro Sensei converge when Frenesi disappears into state custody. She responds by tracking her to a guarded detention site and entering it alone, but later recognizes that the rescue was driven by personal passion rather than the selfless discipline she had been taught.

Filmmaker at a Moment of Rupture

At a gathering on the campus, DL is among the 24fps members who have brought cameras to observe what unfolds. She operates an Arri while Zipi Pisk assists with a spring-wound Bolex. The meeting has no posters, announcements, or official notices; it simply forms around a fountain as evening falls. In the gathering’s confusion, people no longer recognize one another, and the group senses an approaching break with the recent past. The Nixon monument rises against the red sunset while the failing megaphones go largely unheard. DL’s camera work places her in the role of witness to a political community losing its coherence, even as the scene’s atmosphere suggests that observation alone may not preserve what is coming apart.

After the convoy carrying Frenesi has left, DL returns to Berkeley with Howie and Sledge Poteet. They are more or less all that remains of 24fps. The loss is not only organizational: DL is so disoriented that she often cannot tell who is present and who is absent. A persistent ringing in her ears and intermittent blurred vision, with flickering light at the edges of things, accompany her effort to recover her bearings. Reports place Frenesi among the convoy’s passengers, but attempts to follow it have failed in a maze of side roads and one-way streets. The maps are vague and disagree with one another; they reveal no destination inside the FEER Emergency Evacuation Route except the Security Services Reservation. The hidden endpoint turns the disappearance into a practical problem of locating a person whom official geography has made difficult to find.

The Search for Frenesi

DL and two companions set out in 24fps’s 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, a four-wheel-drive vehicle fitted with an altered engine, off-road tires, reinforced bumpers, and winches at both ends. At the site, before dawn, Howie and Sledge part from her with the collective’s old farewell. DL puts on black tights and a ski mask and proceeds alone. At the gate, she uses a technique called Kasumi, or the Mist, taught by Inoshiro Sensei: by moving her fingers before the guard’s face, she makes herself selectively invisible to him. He continues his watch, but no longer registers her presence.

Inside, DL searches among the sleeping detainees and reaches a distressed young woman, whom she already knows is not Frenesi. The woman tells her Frenesi has been taken to the administrative office. DL’s search thus depends on more than stealth: she has to question someone who is frightened and learn what little she knows about the camp. When she finally reaches Frenesi, the encounter initially unfolds through confusion. Frenesi has been absorbed in a dream of a flood and a voice promising the return of what was lost; then she sees DL removing her mask and slowly connects DL’s face with her name and with the night Weed Atman was killed. DL immediately urges her to find shoes and trousers, making escape a matter of time and movement rather than explanation. Frenesi insists that the man DL expects is no longer there and left hours earlier.

The rescue is an act of personal loyalty, but the text later complicates its success as a measure of discipline. Looking back on the operation, DL understands that she had not become an agent without a self, acting according to another’s will. She had acted from her own passions. In her own reckoning, that motive compromised the act, however well it was carried out, and she concludes that it would have been better to leave Frenesi to her fate. Her judgment does not erase the risk she took; it reveals the moral cost she attaches to using trained skill in the service of attachment.

Surveillance and the Threat of the Roundup

DL’s account of mass detention gives the search a wider political frame. At home with Prairie Wheeler and Ditzah Pisk, she identifies a crude listening device in the laboratory after using a radio to sweep for bugs. DL has already dismantled the telephone and found nothing, but suspects a Title III wiretap. The device they locate is conspicuously rudimentary for 1984, its wires exposed. Its poor workmanship does not reassure her: it may have been planted to be found, or the authorities may have exhausted their better equipment. The bug makes surveillance tangible inside a private home, while DL’s uncertainty about its purpose shows how monitoring can produce suspicion even before its operator is known.

DL calls the prospect of mass arrests the Last Roundup, a specter that activists once used to frighten one another but never considered wholly unreal. She describes a prison camp in which detainees would officially cease to count as human beings and instead be treated as livestock. When asked whether she has seen such camps, she answers that she has, then tells Prairie that her mother was confined in such a prison. Her warning connects Prairie’s family history to preparations for mass detention: Nixon had established the facilities, she says, and Reagan had them ready for use in Nicaragua. DL does not present the danger as an abstract conspiracy; she points Prairie toward the record and urges her to investigate it.

The destruction of 24fps’s archive makes that warning concrete in another way. When Prairie arrives at Takeshi Fumimota’s office, DL and Takeshi have just returned from what remains of Ditzah Pisk’s home. On the way, they encountered a formation of identical, neutral-colored Chevrolet sedans, each carrying four Anglo men and bearing an exemption-marked plate. Near the house, a roadblock forced them to stop at a distance; DL used Inpo to disappear into the landscape and investigate. She found a youth-authority bus with barred windows carrying agitated young prisoners, then smelled burning material and saw black smoke. Outside Ditzah’s garage, film reels, canisters, and typed papers were burning as workers swept surviving fragments back into the flames. The coordinated force and public spectacle transform the archive’s destruction into more than a private loss: the films and papers that might preserve a record are being physically eliminated.

Training, Agency, and Consequence

DL’s specialized techniques make her effective, but they do not settle the question of what her actions mean. Kasumi enables her to pass a sentry without being seen; Inpo lets her vanish from the roadblock’s view. Yet her retrospective assessment of the rescue insists that technical mastery is not the same as fidelity to her teacher’s discipline. The distinction between acting skillfully and acting without self-interest becomes the measure by which she judges herself.

The same tension shapes her role in the larger narrative. As a camera operator, DL witnesses a community at the edge of political rupture; as an infiltrator, she moves through a detention system designed to hide its prisoners and its destination. As a speaker, she warns Prairie that mass detention has precedent and that seemingly domestic spaces can be monitored. These roles meet in the destruction of 24fps’s archive: images, records, and people are all vulnerable to systems that decide what can be seen, traced, or erased. DL acts against that erasure, but the rescue leaves her with no simple triumph. Her own account preserves the difference between bringing someone back and believing that the means, motive, and consequence of doing so were spiritually clean.