Silence.
I rounded a long sheet of plywood. Someone was there in the starlight, a dim shape seated with his legs dangling over the carved cathedral facade, exactly where the malformed bellringer had sat half a lifetime ago.
The Beast.
He was looking out at the city, at the million lights spread across four hundred square miles.
How did you get here, I wondered. How did you get past the guard at the gate or, no, what? over the wall! Yes. A ladder and the graveyard wall!
I heard a ballpeen hammer strike. I heard a body dragged. A trunk lid slammed. A match lighted. An incinerator roared.
I sucked my breath. The Beast turned to stare at me.
I stumbled and almost fell off the cathedral rim. I grappled one of the gargoyles.
Instantly, the Beast sprang up.
His hand seized my hand.
For a single breath we teetered on the cathedral rim. I read his eyes, fearful of me. He read mine, fearful of him.
Then he snatched his hand back as if burned with surprise. He backed off swiftly and we stood half-crouched.
I looked into that dreadful face, the panicked and forever imprisoned eyes, the wounded mouth, and thought:
Why? Why didn’t you let me go? or push me? You are the one with the hammer, aren’t you? The one who came to find and smash Roy’s terrible clay head? No one but you could have run so wild! Why did you save me? Why do I live?
There could be no response. Something clattered below. Someone was coming up the ladder.
The Beast let out a great heaving whisper: “No!”
And fled across the high porch. His feet thudded the loose planks. Dust exploded down through the cathedral darkness.
More climbing noises. I moved to follow the Beast at the far ladder. He looked back a final time. His eyes! What? What about his eyes?
They were different and the same, terrified and accepting, one moment focused, one moment confused. His hand swung up on the dark air. For a moment I thought he might call, shout, shriek at me. But only a strange choked gasp unraveled from his lips. Then I heard his feet plunging down step by step away from this unreal world above to a more terribly unreal world below.
I stumbled to pursue. My feet shuffled dust and plaster of paris. It flowed like sand seeping through an immense hourglass to pile itself, far below, near the baptistery font. The boards under my feet rattled and swayed. A wind flapped all the cathedral canvas around me in a great migration of wings, and I was on the ladder and jolting down, with each jolt a cry of alarm or a curse trapped in my teeth. My God, I thought, me and him, that thing, on the ladder, running away from what?
I glanced up to see the gargoyles lost to view and I was alone, descending in darkness, thinking: What if he waits for me, down there?
I froze. I looked down.
If I fall, I thought, it’ll take a year to reach the floor. I only knew one saint. His name popped from my lips: Crumley!
Hold tight, said Crumley, a long way off. Take six deep breaths.
I sucked in but the air refused to go back out of my mouth. Smothered, I glanced at the lights of Los Angeles spread in a four-hundred-mile bed of lamps and traffic, all those people multitudinous and beautiful, and no one here to help me down, and the lights! street by street, the lights!
Far out on the rim of the world, I thought I saw a long dark tide move to an untouchable shore.
Body surfing, whispered Constance.
That did it. I jolted down and kept moving, eyes shut, no more glances into the abyss, until I reached and stood, waiting to be seized and destroyed by the Beast, hands outraised to kill, not save.
But there was no Beast. Just the empty baptismal font, cupping a half pint of cathedral dust, and the blown candles and the lost incense.
I looked up a last time through the half facade of Notre Dame. Whoever was climbing had reached the top.
Half a continent away, a mob on Calvary hill let go like a Saturday-afternoon football reunion.
J. C., I thought, if you’re not here, where?
41
Whoever had been sent to search Calvary hadn’t searched very well. They had come and gone and the hill lay empty under the stars. A wind prowled through, pushing dust ahead of it, around the bases of the three crosses that, for their presence, felt as if they might have grown there long before the studio was built around them.
I ran to the bottom of the cross. I could see nothing at the top, the night was dark. There were only fitful gleams of light from far off where Antipas ruled, Fritz Wong raved, and the Romans marched in a great cloud of beer from the Makeup Buildings to the Tribunal Square.
I touched the cross, swayed, and called up, blindly: “J. C.!”
Silence.
I tried again, my voice trembling.
A small tumbleweed blew by, rustling.
“J. C.!” I almost yelled.
And at last a voice came down out of the sky.
“Nobody by that name on this street, up this hill, on this cross,” the voice murmured, sadly.
“Whoever you are, dammit, come down!”
I groped up trying to find rungs, fearful of the dark around me. “How’d you get up there?”
“There’s a ladder and I’m not nailed in place. Just holding on to pegs and there’s a little footrest. It is very peaceful up here. Sometimes I stay nine hours fasting for my sins.”
“J. C.!” I called up, “I can’t stay. I’m afraid! What’re you doing?”
“Remembering all the haylofts and chicken feathers I rolled in,” said J. C.’s voice in the sky. “See the feathers falling down like snowflakes? When I leave here I go to confession every day! I got ten thousand women to unload. I give exact measurements, so much backside, bosom, groan, and groin, until the priest grabs his seething armpits! If I can’t climb a silk stocking, I’ll at least get a cleric’s pulse so hyperventilated he ruptures his turn-around collar. Anyway, here I am, up, out of harm’s way. Watching the night that watches me.”
“It’s watching me, too, J. C. I’m afraid of the dark in the alleys and Notre Dame, I was just there.”
“Stay outa there,” said J. C., suddenly fierce.
“Why? You been watching its towers tonight? You see something?”
“Just stay outa there, is all. Not safe.”
I know, I thought. I said, looking around suddenly, “What else you see, J. C., night or day up there?”
J. C. glanced swiftly off at the shadows.
“What,” his voice was low, “would there be to see in an empty studio, late?”
“Lots!”
“Yes!” J. C. turned his head south to north and back. “Lots!”
“On Halloween night—” I plunged on—“you didn’t happen to see—” I nodded north some fifty yards—“a ladder on top of that wall? And a man trying to climb?”
J. C. stared at the wall. “It was raining that night.” J. C. lifted his face to the sky to feel the storm. “Who’d be nuts enough to climb up there in a storm?”
“You.”
“No,” said J. C. “I’m not even here now!”
He put his arms out, grasped the crossbars, leaned his head forward and shut his eyes.
“J. C.,” I called. “They’re waiting on set seven!”
“Let them wait.”
“Christ was on time, dammit! The world called. And He arrived!”
“You don’t believe all that guff, do you?”
“Yes!” I was astonished with what vehemence I exploded it upward along his limbs to his thorn-crowned head.
“Fool.”
“No, I’m not!” I tried to think what Fritz would say if he were here, but there was only me, so I said:
“We arrived, J. C. We poor stupid human beings. But whether it’s us arriving or Christ, it’s all the same. The world, or God, needed us, to see the world, and know it. So we arrived! But we got mixed up, forgot how incredible we were, and couldn’t forgive ourselves for making such a mess. So Christ arrived, afte
r us, to say what we should have known: forgive. Get on with your work. So Christ’s arrival is just us all over again. And we’ve kept on arriving for two thousand years, more and more of us, mostly in need of forgiveness of self. I’d be frozen forever if I couldn’t forgive myself all the dumb things I’ve done in my life. Right now, you’re up a tree, hating yourself, so you stay nailed on a cross because you’re a self-pitying pig-headed dim-witted thespian bum. Now get the hell down before I climb up to bite your dirty ankles!”
There was a sound like a mob of seals barking in the night. J. C., his head thrown back, sucked air to refuel his laughter.
“That’s some speech for a coward!”
“Don’t fear me, mister! Beware of yourself, Jesus H. Christ!”
I felt a single drop of rain hit my cheek.
No. I touched my cheek, tasted my fingertip. Salt.
J. C., above, leaned out, staring down.
“God.” He was truly stunned. “You care!”
“Damn right. And if I leave, Fritz Wong will come, with his horsewhip!”
“I don’t fear his arrival. Only your departure.”
“Well, then! Come down. For me!”
“You!?” he exclaimed softly.
“You’re up high. Over on set seven, whatta you see?”
“Fire, I think. Yes.”
“That’s the bed of charcoals, J. C.” I reached out to touch the base of the cross and call softly up along its length to that figure with its head raised. “And the night almost over and the boat pulling in to the shore after the miracle of the fish, and Simon called Peter moving along the sand with Thomas, and Mark, and Luke and all the rest to the bed of baking fish. The—”
“—Supper after the Last Supper,” murmured J. C., high against the autumn constellations. I could see Orion’s shoulder over his shoulder. “You did it!?”
He stirred. I pursued quietly: “And more! I’ve got a true ending now, for you, never filmed before. The Ascension.”
“Can’t be done,” murmured J. C.
“Listen.”
And I said:
“When it is time for the Going Away, Christ touches each of his disciples and then walks up along the shore, away from the camera. Set your camera low in the sand, and it looks as if he were climbing a long slow hill. And as the sun rises, and Christ moves off toward the horizon, the sand burns with illusion. Like highways or deserts, where the air dissolves in mirages, imaginary cities rise and fall. Well, when Christ has almost reached the top of a dune of sand, the air vibrates with heat. His shape melts into the atoms. And Christ has gone. The footprints he left in the sand blow away in the wind. That’s your second Ascension following the Supper after the Last Supper. The disciples weep and move off to all the cities of the world, to preach forgiveness of sin. And as the new day begins, their footprints blow away in the dawn wind. THE END.”
I waited, listening to my own breath and heart.
J. C. waited, also, and at last said, with wonder, softly, “I’m coming down.”
42
There was a vast glare from the waiting outdoor set ahead, where the extras, the bed of fish baking on charcoals, and Mad Fritz were waiting.
A woman stood in the mouth of the alley as J. C. and I approached. She was silhouetted against the light, only a dark shape.
Seeing us, she ran forward, then stopped when she saw J. C.
“Good gravy,” said J. C. “It’s that Rattigan woman!”
Constance’s eyes glanced from J. C. to me and back again, almost wildly.
“What do I do now?” she said.
“What—”
“It’s been such a crazy night. Crying an hour ago at a terrible photo, and now—” she stared at J. C. and her eyes flowed freely— “having wanted to meet you all my life. And here you are.”
The weight of her words caused her to sink slowly to her knees. “Bless me, Jesus,” she whispered.
J. C. reared back as if summoning the dead from their shrouds. “Get up, woman!” he cried.
“Bless me, Jesus,” Constance said. And then, almost to herself, “Oh, Lord, I’m seven again and in my white first communion dress and it’s Easter Sunday and the world is good just before the world got bad.”
“Get up, young woman,” said J. C. quieter.
But she did not move and closed her eyes, waiting.
Her lips pantomimed, Bless me.
And at last J. C. reached out slowly, forced to accept and gently accepting, to put his hand on the top of her head. The gentle pressure forced more tears from her eyes, and her mouth quivered. Her hands flew up to hold and keep his touch on her head a moment more.
“Child,” said J. C. quietly, “you are blessed.”
And looking at Constance Rattigan kneeling there, I thought, Oh, the ironies of this lost world. Catholic guilt plus actor’s flamboyance.
Constance rose and, eyes still half shut, turned toward the light and moved toward the waiting bed of glowing charcoals.
We could but follow.
A crowd was gathered. All the extras who had appeared in other scenes earlier that night, plus studio executives and hangerson. As we approached, Constance moved aside with the grace of someone who had just lost forty pounds. I wondered how long she would remain a little girl.
But now I saw, stepping into the light, across the open-air set, beyond the charcoal pit, Manny Leiber, Doc Phillips, and Groc. Their eyes were so steadily upon me that I hung back, fearful of taking credit for finding the Messiah, saving the Saviour, and trimming the budget for the night.
Manny’s eyes were full of doubt and distrust, the Doc’s with active venom, and Groc’s with good brandy spirits. Perhaps they had come to see Christ, and myself, roasted on a spit. In any event, as J. C. moved steadily to the rim of the fiery pit, Fritz, recovering from some recent fit, blinked at him myopically and cried, “About time. We were about to call off the barbecue. Monocle!”
No one moved. Everyone looked around.
“Monocle!” Fritz said again.
And I realized he wished the loan of the lens he had so grandly handed me a few hours ago.
I darted forward, planted the lens in his outstretched palm, and jumped back as he jammed it into his eye as ammunition. He fired a gaze at J. C. and heaved out all the air in his lungs.
“Do you call that Christ! It’s more like Methuselah. Put on a ton of skin pancake color thirty-three and fish-hook his jawline. Holy jumping Jesus, it’s time for the dinner break. More failures, more delays. How dare you show up late! Who in hell do you think you are?”
“Christ,” said J. C. with proper modesty. “And don’t you forget it.”
“Get him out of here! Makeup! Dinner break! Back in an hour!” shouted Fritz, and all but hurled the lens, my medal, back into my hands, to stand bitterly regarding the burning coals as if he might leap to incineration.
And all the while the wolfpack across the pit, Manny counting the lost dollars as each moment fell like blizzards of paper money to be burned, and the good Doc itching his scalpel in his fisted pockets, and Lenin’s cosmetologist with his permanent Conrad Veidt smile carved in the pale thin melon flesh about his chin. But now their gaze had shifted from me to fix with a terrible and inescapable judgment and condemnation upon J. C.
It was like a death squad letting go an endless fusillade. J. C. rocked and swayed as if struck.
Groc’s assistant makeup men were about to guide J. C. away when—
The thing happened.
There was a soft hiss as something like a single drop of rain struck the bed of burning coals.
We all looked down and then up—
At J. C., whose hands were thrust out over the charcoals. He was studying his own wrists with great curiosity.
They were bleeding.
“Ohmigod,” Constance said. “Do something!”
“What?” cried Fritz.
J. C. said, calmly, “Shoot the scene.”
“No, damnit!” cried Fritz. “John
the Baptist, with his head off, looked better than you!”
“Then,” J. C. nodded across the set to where Stanislau Groc and Doc Phillips stood, as merry Punch and dark Apocalypse, “then,” said J. C. “let them sew and bandage me until we’re ready.”
“How do you do that?” Constance was staring at his wrists. “It comes with the text.”
“Go make yourself useful,” J. C. said to me.
“And take that woman with you,” ordered Fritz. “I don’t know her!”
“Yes, you do,” said Constance. “Laguna Beach, July 4th, 1926.”
“That was another country, another time.” Fritz slammed an invisible door.
“Yes.” Constance paused. The cake fell in the oven. “Yes, it was.”
Doc Phillips arrived at J. C.’s left wrist. Groc arrived at his right.
J. C. would not look at them; he fixed his gaze on the high fog in the sky.
Then he turned his wrists over and held them out so they might see his life dripping from the fresh stigmata.
“Careful,” he said.
I walked out of the light. A small girl followed, becoming a woman along the way.
43
“Where are we going?” said Constance.
“Me? Back in time. And I know who runs the Moviola to make it happen. You? Right here, coffee and sinkers. Sit. I’ll be right back.”
“If I’m not here,” said Constance, seated at an outdoor extras’ picnic table, and wielding a doughnut. “Look for me at the men’s gym.”
I moved off alone, in the dark. I was running out of places to go, places to search. Now I headed toward one place on the lot I had never been. Other days were there. Arbuthnot’s film ghost hid there and perhaps myself, as a boy, wandering the studio territories at noon.
I walked.
And suddenly wished I hadn’t left what remained of Constance Rattigan’s laughter behind.
Late at night a motion picture studio talks to itself. If you move along the dark alleys past the buildings where the editing rooms on the top floors whisper and bray and roar and snack-chatter until two or three or four in the morning, you hear chariots rushing by in the air, or sand blowing across Beau Geste’s ghost-haunted desert, or traffic coursing the Champs-Elysées all French horns and derogatory cries, or Niagara pouring itself down the studio towers into the film vaults, or Barney Oldfield, on his last run, gunning his racer around Indianapolis to the shout of faceless mobs, while further on as you walk in darkness someone lets loose the dogs of war and you hear Caesar’s wounds open like rosebuds in his cloak, or Churchill bulldogging the airwaves as the Hound bays over the moors and the night people keep working these shadowed hours because they prefer the company of Moviolas and flicker-moth screens and closeup lovers to the people stranded at noonday, stunned by reality outside the walls. It is a long-after-midnight collision of buried voices and lost musics caught in a time cloud between buildings, released from high open doors or windows while the shadows of the cutter-editors loom on the pale ceilings bent over enchantments. Only at dawn do the voices still and the musics die as the smilers-with-the-knives head home to avoid the first traffic of realists arriving at 6 A.M. Only at sunset will the voices start again and the musics rise in tender strokes or tumults, as the firefly light from the Moviola screens washes over the watchers’ faces, igniting their eyes and prompting razors in their lifted fingers.