He shook his head. Then he went away. But he left me the book to look at.
The secret of the illusion of “The Artist’s Dream” was this: It was done by carrying the girl in, holding tight on to the back of the canvas. The canvas was supported by hidden wires, so, while the artist casually, easily, carried in the canvas and placed it on the easel, he was also carrying in the girl. The painting of the girl on the easel was arranged like a roller blind, and it rolled up or down.
“The Enchanted Casement,” on the other hand, was, literally, done with mirrors: an angled mirror which reflected the faces of people standing out of sight in the wings.
Even today many magicians use mirrors in their acts to make you think you are seeing something you are not.
It was easy, when you knew how it was done.
“Before we start,” he said, “I should tell you I don’t read treatments. I tend to feel it inhibits my creativity. Don’t worry, I had a secretary do a précis, so I’m up to speed.”
He had a beard and long hair and looked a little like Jesus, although I doubted that Jesus had such perfect teeth. He was, it appeared, the most important person I’d spoken to so far. His name was John Ray, and even I had heard of him, although I was not entirely sure what he did: his name tended to appear at the beginning of films, next to words like EXECUTIVE PRODUCER. The voice from the studio that had set up the meeting told me that they, the studio, were most excited about the fact that he had “attached himself to the project.”
“Doesn’t the précis inhibit your creativity, too?”
He grinned. “Now, we all think you’ve done an amazing job. Quite stunning. There are just a few things that we have a problem with.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the Manson thing. And the idea about these kids growing up. So we’ve been tossing around a few scenarios in the office: try this for size. There’s a guy called, say, Jack Badd—two d’s, that was Donna’s idea—”
Donna bowed her head modestly.
“They put him away for satanic abuse, fried him in the chair, and as he dies he swears he’ll come back and destroy them all.
“Now, it’s today, and we see these young boys getting hooked on a video arcade game called Be Badd. His face on it. And as they play the game he like, starts to possess them. Maybe there could be something strange about his face, a Jason or Freddy thing.” He stopped, as if he were seeking approval.
So I said, “So who’s making these video games?”
He pointed a finger at me and said, “You’re the writer, sweetheart. You want us to do all your work for you?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
Think movies, I thought. They understand movies. I said, “But surely, what you’re proposing is like doing The Boys from Brazil without Hitler.”
He looked puzzled.
“It was a film by Ira Levin,” I said. No flicker of recognition in his eyes. “Rosemary’s Baby.” He continued to look blank. “Sliver.”
He nodded; somewhere a penny had dropped. “Point taken,” he said. “You write the Sharon Stone part, we’ll move heaven and earth to get her for you. I have an in to her people.”
So I went out.
That night it was cold, and it shouldn’t have been cold in L.A., and the air smelled more of cough drops than ever.
An old girlfriend lived in the L.A. area and I resolved to get hold of her. I phoned the number I had for her and began a quest that took most of the rest of the evening. People gave me numbers, and I rang them, and other people gave me numbers, and I rang them, too.
Eventually I phoned a number, and I recognized her voice.
“Do you know where I am?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I was given this number.”
“This is a hospital room,” she said. “My mother’s. She had a brain hemorrhage.”
“I’m sorry. Is she all right?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was an awkward silence.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Pretty bad,” I said.
I told her everything that had happened to me so far. I told her how I felt.
“Why is it like this?” I asked her.
“Because they’re scared.”
“Why are they scared? What are they scared of?”
“Because you’re only as good as the last hits you can attach your name to.”
“Huh?”
“If you say yes to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it’s a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don’t risk losing status.”
“Really?”
“Kind of.”
“How do you know so much about all this? You’re a musician, you’re not in films.”
She laughed wearily: “I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?”
“No.”
“Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They’ve all got them.” Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and she put down the phone.
I couldn’t find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.
I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.
White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.
I stared at it gloomily.
“You okay?”
I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.
“You’re up early.”
“I slept badly. Too cold.”
“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”
“It never occurred to me.”
His breathing sounded awkward, labored.
“You okay?”
“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”
“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”
He nodded, slowly. “‘The Artist’s Dream’…” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”
I turned to go and then something occurred to me.
“Mister Dundas,” I said. “Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?”
He shook his head.
“You never wrote a screenplay?”
“Not me,” he said.
“Promise?”
He grinned. “I promise,” he said.
I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of Sons of Man and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn’t want it, now that they had bought it.
I tried to write “The Artist’s Dream” some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.
I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.
I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:
I’m thinking about England in the rain,
a strange theatre on the
pier: a trail
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
The fear should be of going bleak insane,
the magic should be like a fairytale.
I’m thinking about England in the rain.
The loneliness is harder to explain—
an empty place inside me where I fail,
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
I think of a magician and a skein
of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.
I’m thinking about England in the rain…
The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain
and here’s a sword, a hand, and there’s a grail
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,
tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.
I’m thinking about England, in the rain
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.
I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.
The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.
The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.
I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.
In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.
A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.
On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.
She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.
“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. “I got out, didn’t I?”
Then she stood up and walked around the room.
“I can’t believe this hotel is still standing,” she said. “I used to fuck here.” Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.
“Do you worship me?” she asked.
I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.
“Nobody remembers anything anymore,” she said. “It’s a thirty-minute town.”
There was something I had to ask her. “Where are the stars?” I asked. “I keep looking up in the sky, but they aren’t there.”
She pointed at the floor of the chalet. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places,” she said. I had never before noticed that the floor of the chalet was a sidewalk and each paving stone contained a star and a name—names I didn’t know: Clara Kimball Young, Linda Arvidson, Vivian Martin, Norma Talmadge, Olive Thomas, Mary Miles Minter, Seena Owen…
June Lincoln pointed at the chalet window. “And out there.” The window was open, and through it I could see the whole of Hollywood spread out below me—the view from the hills: an infinite spread of twinkling multicolored lights.
“Now, aren’t those better than stars?” she asked.
And they were. I realized I could see constellations in the street lamps and the cars.
I nodded.
Her lips brushed mine.
“Don’t forget me,” she whispered, but she whispered it sadly, as if she knew that I would.
I woke up with the telephone shrilling. I answered it, growled a mumble into the handpiece.
“This is Gerry Quoint, from the studio. We need you for a lunch meeting.”
Mumble something mumble.
“We’ll send a car,” he said. “The restaurant’s about half an hour away.”
The restaurant was airy and spacious and green, and they were waiting for me there.
By this point I would have been surprised if I had recognized anyone. John Ray, I was told over hors d’oeuvres, had “split over contract disagreements,” and Donna had gone with him, “obviously.”
Both of the men had beards; one had bad skin. The woman was thin and seemed pleasant.
They asked where I was staying, and, when I told them, one of the beards told us (first making us all agree that this would go no further) that a politician named Gary Hart and one of the Eagles were both doing drugs with Belushi when he died.
After that they told me that they were looking forward to the story.
I asked the question. “Is this for Sons of Man or When We Were Badd? Because,” I told them, “I have a problem with the latter.”
They looked puzzled.
It was, they told me, for I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll. Which was, they told me, both High Concept and Feel Good. It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History.
They told me that they thought it would be a good thing if our hero could rescue the young lady from her loveless marriage, and if they could rock and roll together at the end.
I pointed out that they needed to buy the film rights from Nick Lowe, who wrote the song, and then that, no, I didn’t know who his agent was.
They grinned and assured me that that wouldn’t be a problem.
They suggested I turn over the project in my mind before I started on the treatment, and each of them mentioned a couple of young stars to bear in mind when I was putting together the story.
And I shook hands with all of them and told them that I certainly would.
I mentioned that I thought that I could work on it best back in England.
And they said that that would be fine.
Some days before, I’d asked Pious Dundas whether anyone was with Belushi in the chalet, on the night that he died.
If anyone would know, I figured, he would.
“He died alone,” said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. “It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.”
It felt strange to be leaving the hotel.
I went up to the front desk.
“I’ll be checking out later this afternoon.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Would it be possible for you to…the, uh, the groundkeeper. Mister Dundas. An elderly gentleman. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him around for a couple of days. I wanted to say good-bye.”
“To one of the groundsmen?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me, puzzled. She was very beautiful, and her lipstick was the color of a blackberry bruise. I wondered whether she was waiting to be discovered.
She picked up the phone and spoke into it, quietly.
Then, “I’m sorry, sir. Mister Dundas hasn’t been in for the last few days.” “Could you give me his phone number?”
“I’m sorry, sir. That’s not our policy.” She stared at me as she said it, letting me know that she really was so sorry…
“How’s your screenplay?” I asked her.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Well—”
“It’s on Joel Silver’s desk,” she said. “My friend Arnie, he’s my writing partner, and he’s a co
urier. He dropped it off with Joel Silver’s office, like it came from a regular agent or somewhere.”
“Best of luck,” I told her.
“Thanks,” she said, and smiled with her blackberry lips.
Information had two Dundas, P’s listed, which I thought was both unlikely and said something about America, or at least Los Angeles.
The first turned out to be a Ms. Persephone Dundas.
At the second number, when I asked for Pious Dundas, a man’s voice said, “Who is this?”
I told him my name, that I was staying in the hotel, and that I had something belonging to Mr. Dundas.
“Mister. My grandfa’s dead. He died last night.”
Shock makes clichés happen for real: I felt the blood drain from my face; I caught my breath.
“I’m sorry. I liked him.”
“Yeah.”
“It must have been pretty sudden.”
“He was old. He got a cough.” Someone asked him who he was talking to, and he said nobody, then he said, “Thanks for calling.”
I felt stunned.
“Look, I have his scrapbook. He left it with me.”
“That old film stuff?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Keep it. That stuff ’s no good to anybody. Listen, mister, I gotta run.”
A click, and the line went silent.
I went to pack the scrapbook in my bag and was startled, when a tear splashed on the faded leather cover, to discover that I was crying.
I stopped by the pool for the last time, to say good-bye to Pious Dundas, and to Hollywood.
Three ghost white carp drifted, fins flicking minutely, through the eternal present of the pool.
I remembered their names: Buster, Ghost, and Princess; but there was no longer any way that anyone could have told them apart.
The car was waiting for me, by the hotel lobby. It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport, and already I was starting to forget.
On the Road to New Egypt
Jeffrey Ford
One day when I was driving home from work, I saw him there on the side of the road. He startled me at first, but I managed to control myself and apply the brakes. His face was fixed with a look somewhere between agony and elation. That thumb he thrust out at an odd angle was gnarled and had a long nail. The sun was setting and red beams danced around him. I stopped and leaned over to open the door.