“There must’ve been more than one letter,” I said. “The one I got, and others. But I’m the only one dumb enough to go see. And when I didn’t spread the word, blurt it out today, whoever put the body on the wall had to write or call in today to start the panic and send in the funeral hearse. And the guy who made the body and sent the note is in here right now, watching the fun. Why … why … why … ?”
“Hush,” said Roy, quietly, “hush.” He started his engine. “We’ll solve the half-ass mystery at lunch. Put on your innocent face. Make like naïve over the Louis B. Mayer bean soup. I gotta go check my miniature models. One last tiny street to nail in place.” He glanced at his watch. “In two hours my dinosaur country will be ready for photography. Then, all we need is our grand and glorious Beast.”
I looked into Roy’s still burning-bright face.
“You’re not going to go steal the body and put it back up on the wall, are you?”
“Never crossed my mind,” said Roy, and drove away.
11
In the middle of the far-left side of the commissary there was a small platform, no higher than a foot, on which stood a single table with two chairs. I often imagined the slavemaster of a Roman trireme warship seated there crashing down one sledgehammer, then another, to give the beat to the sweating oarsmen locked to their oars, obedient to panics, pulling for some far theatre aisle, pursued by maddened exhibitors, greeted on shore by mobs of insulted customers.
But there never was a Roman galley coxswain at the table, leading the beat.
It was Manny Leiber’s table. He brooded there alone, stirring his food as if it were the split innards of Caesar’s fortuneteller’s pigeons, forking the spleen, ignoring the heart, predicting futures. Some days he slouched there with the studio’s Doc Phillips, testing new philtres and potions in tapwater. Other days, he dined on directors’ or writers’ tripes as they glumly confronted him, nodding, yes, yes, the film was behind schedule! yes, yes, they would hurry it along!
Nobody wanted to sit at that table. Often, a pink slip arrived in lieu of a check.
Today as I ducked in and shrank inches wandering through the tables, Manny’s small platform place was empty. I stopped. That was the first time I had ever seen no dishes, no utensils, not even flowers there. Manny was still outside somewhere, yelling at the sun because it had insulted him.
But now, the longest table in the commissary waited, half full and filling.
I had never gone near the thing in the weeks I had worked in the studio. As with most neophytes, I had feared contact with the terribly bright and terribly famous. H. G. Wells had lectured in Los Angeles when I was a boy, and I had not gone to seek his autograph. The rage of joy at the sight of him would have struck me dead. So it was with the commissary table, where the best directors, film editors, and writers sat at an eternal Last Supper waiting for a late-arriving Christ. Seeing it again, I lost my nerve.
I slunk away, veering off toward a far corner where Roy and I often wolfed sandwiches and soup.
“Oh, no you don’t!” a voice shouted.
My head sank down on my neck, which periscoped, oiled with sweat, into my jacket collar.
Fritz Wong cried, “Your appointment is here. March!”
I ricocheted between tables to stare at my shoes beside Fritz Wong. I felt his hand on my shoulder, ready to rip off my epaulettes.
“This,” announced Fritz, “is our visitor from another world, across the commissary. I will guide him to sit.”
His hands on my shoulders, he forced me gently down.
At last I raised my eyes and looked along the table at twelve people watching me.
“Now,” announced Fritz, “he will tell us about his Search for the Beast!”
The Beast.
Since it had been announced that Roy and I were to write, build, and birth the most incredibly hideous animal in Hollywood history, thousands had helped us in our search. One would have thought we were seeking Scarlett O’Hara or Anna Karenina. But no … the Beast, and the so-called contest to find the Beast, appeared in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. My name and Roy’s were in every article. I clipped and saved every dumb, stillborn item. Photographs had begun to pour in from other studios, agents, and the general public. Quasimodos Numbers Two and Three showed up at the studio gate, as did four Opera Phantoms. Wolfmen abounded. First and second cousins of Lugosi and Karloff, hiding out on our Stage 13, were thrown off the lot.
Roy and I had begun to feel we were judging an Atlantic City beauty contest somehow shipped to Transylvania. The half-animals waiting outside the sound stages every night were something; the photographs were worse. At last, we burned all the photographs and left the studio through a side entrance.
So it had been with the search for the Beast all month.
And now Fritz Wong said again: “Okay. The Beast? Explain!”
12
I looked at all those faces and said: “No. No, please. Roy and I will be ready soon, but right now …” I took a fast sip of bad Hollywood tap water, “I’ve been watching this table for three weeks. Everyone always sits at the same place. So-and-so up here, such-and-such over across. I’ll bet the guys down there don’t even know the guys over here. Why not mix it up? Leave spaces so every half hour people could play musical chairs, shift, meet someone new, not the same old guff from familiar faces. Sorry.”
“Sorry!?” Fritz grabbed my shoulders and shook me with his own laughter. “Okay, guys! Musical chairs! Allez-oop!”
Applause. Cheers.
Such was the general hilarity as everyone slapped backs, shook hands, found new chairs, sat back down. Which only suffered me into further confused embarrassment with more shouts of laughter. More applause.
“We will have to seat this maestro here each day to teach us social activities and life,” announced Fritz. “All right, compatriots,” cried Fritz. “To your left, young maestro, is Maggie Botwin, the finest cutter/film editor in film history!”
“Bull!” Maggie Botwin nodded to me and went back to her omelet, which she had carried with her.
Maggie Botwin.
Prim, quiet lady, like an upright piano, seeming taller than she was because of the way she sat, rose, and walked, and the way she held her hands in her lap and the way she coifed her hair up on top of her head, in some fashion out of World War I.
I had once heard her on a radio show describe herself as a snake charmer.
All that film whistling through her hands, sliding through her fingers, undulant and swift.
All that time passing, but to pass and repass again.
It was no different, she said, than life itself.
The future rushed at you. You had a single instant, as it flashed by, to change it into an amiable, recognizable, and decent past. Instant by instant, tomorrow blinked in your grasp. If you did not seize without holding, shape without breaking, that continuity of moments, you left nothing behind. Your object, her object, all of our objects, was to mold and print ourselves on those single bits of future that, in the touching, aged into swiftly vanishing yesterdays.
So it was with film.
With the one difference: you could live it again, as often as need be. Run the future by, make it now, make it yesterday, then start over with tomorrow.
What a great profession, to be in charge of three concourses of time: the vast invisible tomorrows; the narrowed focus of now; the great tombyard of seconds, minutes, hours, years, millennia that burgeoned as a seedbed to keep the other two.
And if you didn’t like any of the three rushing time rivers?
Grab your scissors. Snip. There! Feeling better?
And now here she was, her hands folded in her lap one moment and the next lifting a small 8-millimeter camera to pan over the faces at the table, face by face, her hands calmly efficient, until the camera stopped and fixed on me.
I gazed back at it and remembered a day in 1934 when I had seen her outside the studio shooting film of all the fools, the geeks, the aut
ograph nuts, myself among them.
I wanted to call out, Do you remember? But how could she?
I ducked my head. Her camera whirred.
It was at that exact moment that Roy Holdstrom arrived.
He stood in the commissary doorway, searching. Finding me, he did not wave but jerked his head furiously. Then he turned and stalked out. I jumped to my feet and ran off before Fritz Wong could trap me.
I saw Roy vanishing into the Men’s outside, and found him standing at the white porcelain shrine worshiping Respighi’s Fountains of Rome. I stood beside him, noncreative, the old pipes frozen for the winter.
“Look. I found this on Stage 13 just now.”
Roy shoved a typewritten page onto the tile shelf before me.
The Beast Born at Last!
The Brown Derby Tonight!
Vine Street. Ten o’clock.
Be there! or you lose everything!
“You don’t believe this!” I gasped.
“As much as you believed your note and went to the damn graveyard.” Roy stared at the wall in front of him. “That’s the same paper and typeface as your note? Will I go to the Brown Derby tonight? Hell, why not? Bodies on walls, missing ladders, raked-over prints in grass, papier-mâché corpses, plus Manny Leiber screaming. I got to thinking, five minutes ago, if Manny and the others were upset by the scarecrow dummy, what if it suddenly disappeared, then what?”
“You didn’t?” I said.
“No?” said Roy.
Roy pocketed the note. Then he took a small box from a corner table and handed it to me. “Someone’s using us. I decided to do a little using myself. Take it. Go in the booth. Open it up.”
I did just that.
I shut the door.
“Don’t just stand there,” called Roy. “Open it!”
“I am, I am.”
I opened the box and stared in.
“My God!” I cried.
“What do you see?” said Roy.
“Arbuthnot!”
“Fits in the box real nice and neat, huh?” said Roy.
13
“What made you do it?”
“Cats are curious. I’m a cat,” said Roy, hustling along.
We were headed back toward the commissary.
Roy had the box tucked under his arm, and a vast grin of triumph on his face.
“Look,” he said. “Someone sends you a note. You go to a graveyard, find a body, but don’t report it, spoiling whatever game is up. Phone calls are made, the studio sends for the body, and goes into a panic when they actually have a viewing. How else can I act except out of wild curiosity. What kind of game is this? I ask. I can only find out by countermoving the chesspiece, yes? We saw and heard how Manny and his pals reacted an hour ago. How would they react, I wondered, let’s study it, if, after finding a body, they lost it again, and went crazy wondering who had it? Me!”
We stopped outside the commissary door.
“You’re not going in there with that!” I exclaimed.
“Safest place in the world. Nobody would suspect a box I carry right into the middle of the studio. But be careful, mate, we’re being watched, right now.”
“Where?!” I cried, and turned swiftly.
“If I knew that, it would all be over. C’mon.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Strange,” said Roy, “why do I feel I could eat a horse?”
14
On our way back into the commissary I saw that Manny’s table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place.
“Damn fool,” I whispered.
Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled.
“Sure am,” he said gladly. “Move.”
I moved to my place.
Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect.
Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult.
“Pay attention!” Fritz snapped his fingers. “The introductions continue!” He pointed along the table. “Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenin’s very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenin’s body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!”
“Lenin’s makeup man?” I said.
“Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.
He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
“Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!”
“Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!”
An empty place.
“For who?” I asked.
Someone coughed. Heads turned.
I held my breath.
And the Arrival took place.
15
This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths. After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldn’t imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet.
There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen.
I put my hand out to take his. His hand turned, and I saw the mark of the driven spike in the middle of the wrist. He turned his other hand over, so I could see the similar scar in the middle of his left wrist. He smiled, reading my mind, and quietly explained, “Most people think the nails were driven through the palms. No. The palms could not hold a body’s weight. The wrists, nailed, can. The wrists.” Then he turned both hands over so I could see where the nails had come through on the other side.
“J. C.,” said Fritz Wong, “this is our visitor from another world, our young science-fiction writer—”
“I know.” The beautiful stranger nodded and gestured toward himself.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
I stepped aside so he could sit, then fell back in my own chair.
Fritz Wong passed down a small basket full of bread. “Please,” he called, “change these into fish!”
I gasped.
But J. C., with the merest flick of his fingers, produced one silvery fish from amidst the bread and tossed it high. Fritz, delighted, caught it to laughter and applause.
The waitress arrived with several bottles of cheap booze to more shouts and applause.
“This wine,” said J. C., “was water ten seconds ago. Please!”
The wine was poured and savored.
“Surely—” I stammered.
The entire table looked up.
“He wants to know,” called Fritz, “if your name is really what you say it is.”
With somber grace, the tall man drew forth and displayed his driver’s license. It read:
“Jesus Christ. 911 Beachwood Avenue. Hollywood.”
He slipped it back into his pocket, waited for the table to be silent, and said:
“I came to this studio in 1927 when they made Jesus the King. I was a woodworker out back in those sheds. I cut and polished the three crosses on Calvary, still standing. There was a contest in every Baptist base
ment and Catholic backwash in the land. Find Christ! He was found here. The director asked where I worked? The carpenter’s shop. My God, he cried, let me see that face! Go put on a beard! ‘Make me look like holy Jesus,’ I advised the makeup man. I went back, dressed in robes and thorns, the whole holy commotion. The director danced on the Mount and washed my feet. Next thing you know the Baptists were lining up at Iowa pie festivals when I dusted through in my tin flivver with banners “THE KING IS COMING,” “GOING ON BEFORE.”
“Across country in auto bungalow courts, I had a great ten-year Messiah run, until vino and venality tattered my smock. Nobody wants a womanizing Saviour. It wasn’t so much I kicked cats and wound up other men’s wives like dime-store clocks, no, it was just that I was Him, you see?”
“I think I see,” I said gently.
J. C. put his long wrists and long hands and long fingers out before him, as cats often sit, waiting for the world to come worship.
“Women felt it was blasphemy if they so much as breathed my air. Touching was terrible. Kissing a mortal sin. The act itself ? Might as well leap in the burning pit with an eternity of slime up to your ears. Catholics, no, Holy Rollers were worst. I managed to bed and breakfast one or two before they knew me, when I traveled the country incognito. After a month of starving for feminine acrobats, I’d run amok. I just shaved and lit out across country, pounding fenceposts into native soil, duck-pressing ladies left and right. I flattened more broads than a steamroller at a Baptist skinny dip. I ran fast, hoping shotgun preachers wouldn’t count hymens and hymnals and wallop me with buckshot. I prayed ladies would never guess they had enjoyed a laying on of hands by the main Guest at the Last Supper. When I wore it down to a nubbin and drank myself into a stupor, the studio’d pick up my bones, pay off the sheriffs, placate the priests in North Sty, Nebraska, with new baptismal fonts for the birth of my latterday kids, and tote me home to a cell on the backlot, where I was kept like John the Baptist, threatened with losing both my heads until they finished one last fish fry at Galilee and one more mystery tour up Calvary. Only old age and a dilapidated pecker stopped me. I was sent out to the bush leagues. Which was great for I ravened for leagues of bush. There was never a more woman-oriented man than this lost soul you see here. I was undeserving to play J. C. when, in thousands of theatres across country, I saved souls and lusted for dessert. For many years I have solaced myself not with bodies but with bottles. I’m lucky Fritz renovated me for this new film, in long shots, with tons of makeup. That’s it. Chapter and verse. Fade out.”