He too feels suddenly like he’s caught out in no-man’s-land on a high trapeze with pie on his face, but he can’t stop. It’s too much fun. Or something like fun He drives stampedes through upper-story hotel rooms and out the windows, moves a monster’s hideous scar to a dinner plate and breaks it, beards a breast, clothes a hurricane in a tutu. He knows there’s something corrupt, maybe even dangerous, about this collapsing of boundaries, but it’s also liberating, augmenting his film library exponentially. And it is also necessary. The projectionist understands perfectly well that when the cocky test pilot, stunt-flying a biplane, leans out to wave to his girlfriend and discovers himself unexpectedly a mile underwater in the clutches of a giant squid, the crew from the submarine meanwhile frantically treading air a mile up the other way, the crisis they suffer—must suffer—is merely the elemental crisis in his own heart. It’s this or nothing, guys: sink or fly!
So it is with a certain rueful yet giddy fatalism that he sweeps a cops-and-robbers film across a domestic comedy in which the goofy rattle-brained housewife is yattering away in the kitchen while serving her family breakfast. As the frames congeal, the baby gets blown right out of its highchair, the police chief, ducking a flipped pancake, gets his hand stuck in the garbage disposal, and the housewife, leaning forward to kiss her husband while telling him about her uncle’s amazing cure for potato warts, drops through an open manhole. She can be heard still, carrying on her sad screwball monologue down in the city sewers somewhere, when the two films separate, the gangster, left behind in the kitchen, receiving now the husband’s sleepy good-bye kiss on his way out the door to work. The hood, disgusted, whips out his gat to drill the mug (where the hell is Lefty? what happened to that goddamn bank?), but all he comes out with is a dripping eggbeater.
Lefty (if it is Lefty) is making his getaway in a hot-wired Daimler, chased through the streets of the crowded metropolis by screaming police cars, guns blazing in all directions, citizens flopping and tumbling as though the pavement were being jerked out from under them. Adjacently, cast adrift in an open boat, the glassy-eyed heroine is about to surrender her tattered virtue to the last of her fellow castaways, a bald-headed sailor with an eye-patch and a peg leg. The others watch from outside the frame, seeing what the camera sees, as the sailor leans forward to take possession of her. “Calamity is the normal circumstance of the universe,” he whispers tenderly, licking the salt from her ear, as the boat bobs sensuously, “so you can’t blame these poor jack-shites for having a reassuring peep at the old run-in.” As her lips part in anguished submission, filling the screen, the other camera pulls back for a dramatic overview of the squealing car chase through the congested city streets: he merges the frames, sending Lefty crashing violently into the beautiful cave of her mouth, knocking out a molar and setting her gums on fire, while the sailor suddenly finds himself tonguing the side of a skyscraper, with his social finger up the city storm drains. “Shiver me timbers and strike me blind!” he cries, jerking his finger out, and the lifeboat sinks.
He recognizes in all these dislocations, of course, his lonely quest for the impossible mating, the crazy embrace of polarities, as though the distance between the terror and the comedy of the void were somehow erotic—it’s a kind of pornography. No wonder the sailor asked that his eyes be plucked out! He overlays frenzy with freeze frames, the flight of rockets with the staking of the vampire’s heart, Death’s face with thrusting buttocks, cheesecake with chaingangs, and all just to prove to himself over and over again that nothing and everything is true. Slapstick is romance, heroism a dance number. Kisses kill. Back projections are the last adequate measure of freedom and great stars are clocks: no time like the presence. Nothing, like a nun with a switchblade, is happening faster and faster, and cause (that indefinable something) is a happy ending. Or maybe not.
And then . . .
THE NEXT DAY
. . . as the old title would say, back when time wore a white hat, galloping along heroically from horizon to horizon, it happens. The realization of his worst desires. Probably he shouldn’t have turned the Western on its side. A reckless practice at best, for though these creatures of the light may be free from gravity, his projectors are not: bits and pieces rattle out every time he tries it, and often as not, he ends up with a roomful of unspooled film, looping around his ears like killer ivy. But he’s just begun sliding a Broadway girlie show through a barroom brawl (ah, love, he’s musing, that thing of anxious fear, as the great demonic wasteland of masculine space receives the idealized thrust of feminine time), when it occurs to him in a whimsical moment to try to merge the choreography of fist and foot against face and floor by tipping the saloon scene over.
Whereupon the chorus-line ingenue, going on for the ailing star, dances out into the spotlight, all aglow with the first sweet flush of imminent stardom, only to find herself dropping goggle-eyed through a bottomless tumult of knuckles, chairs and flying bottles, sliding—whoosh!—down the wet bar, and disappearing feet-first through a pair of swinging doors at the bottom of the frame. Wonderful! laughs the projectionist. Worth it after all! The grizzled old prospector who’s started the brawl in the first place, then passed out drunk, wakes up onstage now as the frames begin to separate in the ingenue’s glossy briefs and pink ankle-strap shoes, struggling with the peculiar sensation that gravity might not know which way it wants him to fall. Thus, his knees buckle, suggesting a curtsy, even as his testicles, dangling out of the legbands of the showgirl’s briefs like empty saddlebags, seem to float upward toward his ears. He opens his mouth, perhaps to sing, or else to yelp or cadge a drink, and his dentures float out like ballooned speech. “Thith ith dithgratheful!” he squawks, snatching at air as he falls in two directions at once to a standing ovation. “Damn your eyeth!”
Over in the saloon, meanwhile, the brawl seems to have died down. All eyes not closed by fist or drink are on the swinging doors. He rights the projector to relieve the crick in his neck from trying to watch the film sideways, noting gloomily the clunk and tinkle of tumbling parts within, wishing he might see once more that goofy bug-eyed look on the startled ingenue’s face as the floor dropped out from under her. There is a brief clawed snaggle as the film rips erratically through the gate, but an expert touch of his finger on a sprocket soon restores time’s main illusion. Of which there is little. The swinging doors hang motionless. Jaws gape. Eyes stare. Not much moves at all except the grinding projector reels behind him. Then slowly the camera tracks forward, the doors parting before it. The eye is met by a barren expanse of foreground mud and distant dunes, undisturbed and utterly lifeless. The ingenue is gone.
He twists the knob to reverse, but something inside the machine is jammed. The image turns dark. Hastily, his hands trembling, he switches off, slaps the reels onto a spare projector, then reverses both films, sweeps them back across each other. Already changes seem to have been setting in: someone thrown out of the saloon window has been thrown back in, mouth crammed with an extra set of teeth, the stage is listing in the musical. Has he lost too much time? When the frames have separated, the old prospector has ended up back in the town saloon all right, though still in the ingenue’s costume and with egg on his face, but the ingenue herself is nowhere to be seen. The ailing star, in fact, is no longer ailing, but is back in the spotlight again, belting out an old cowboy song about the saddleback image of now: “Phantom Ri-i-i-ider!” she bawls, switching her hips as though flicking away flies. “When stars are bright on a frothy night—”
He shuts both films down, strings up the mean gang movie with the little orphan girl in it: the water spots are there, but the loft ladder is empty! She’s not in the nunnery either, the priest croons to an empty stall, as though confessing to the enthroned void—nor is she in the plummeting plane or the panicking mob or the arms, so to speak, of the blob! The train runs over a ribbon tied in a bow! The vampire sucks wind!
He turns off the projectors, listens intently. Silence, except for the faint crackle of cooling f
ilm, his heart thumping in his ears. He is afraid at first to leave his booth. What’s happening out there? He heats up cold coffee on his hot plate, studies his pinned-up publicity stills. He can’t find her, but maybe she was never in any of them in the first place. He’s not even sure he would recognize her, a mere ingenue, if she were there—her legs maybe, but not her face. But in this cannibal picture, for example, wasn’t there a girl being turned on the spit? He can’t remember. And whose ripped-off heat-shield is that winged intergalactic emperor, his eyes glazed with lust and perplexity, clutching in his taloned fist? The coffee is boiling over, sizzling and popping on the burners like snapped fingers. He jerks the plug and rushes out, caroming clumsily off the doorjamb, feeling as dizzy and unhinged as that old prospector in the tights and pink pumps, not knowing which way to fall.
The cavernous auditorium, awhisper with its own echoey room presence, seems to have shrunk and expanded at the same time: the pocked dome presses down on him with its terrible finitude, even as the aisles appear to stretch away, pushing the screen toward which he stumbles further and further into the distance. “Wait!” he cries, and the stage rushes forward and slams him in the chest, knocking him back into the first row of seats. He lies there for a moment, staring up into what would be, if he could reach the switchboard, a starlit sky, recalling an old Bible epic in which the elders of a city condemned by the archangels were pleading with their unruly citizens to curb their iniquity (which looked something like a street fair with dancing girls) before it was too late. “Can’t you just be friends?” they’d cried, and he wonders now: Why not? Is it possible? He’s been so lonely . . .
He struggles to his feet, this archaic wish glimmering in the dark pit of his mind like a candle in an old magic lantern, and makes his way foggily up the backstage steps, doom hanging heavy over his head like the little orphan girl’s water-spotted behind. He pokes around in the wings with a kind of lustful terror, hoping to find what he most fears to find. He kicks at the tassels and furbelows of the grand drapery, flounces the house curtains and travelers, examines the screen: is there a hole in it? No, it’s a bit discolored here and there, threadbare in places, but much as it’s always been. As are the switchboard, the banks of lights, the borders, drops, swags and tracks above. Everything seems completely normal, which the projectionist knows from his years in the trade is just about the worst situation he could be in. He tests out the house phone, pokes his nose in the empty trash barrels, braves the dusky alleyway behind the screen. And now our story takes us down this shadowed path, he murmurs to himself, feeling like a rookie cop, walking his first beat and trying to keep his chin up, danger at every strangely familiar turn, were there any in this narrow canyon. Old lines return to him like recalled catechism: She was the sort of girl who . . . Little did he know what fate . . . A few of the characters are still alive . . . He’s aware of silhouettes flickering ominously just above his head—clutching hands, hatted villains, spread legs—but when he looks, they are not there. It’s all in your mind, he whispers, and laughs crazily to himself. This seems to loosen him up. He relaxes. He commences to whistle a little tune.
And then he sees it. Right at nose level in the middle of his precious screen: a mad vicious scatter of little holes! His untuned whistle escapes his puckered lips like air from a punctured tire. He shrinks back. Bullet holes—?! No, not so clean as that, and the wall behind it is unmarked. It’s more like someone has been standing on the other side just now, kicking at it with stiletto heels. He’s almost unable to breathe. He staggers around to the front, afraid of what he’ll find or see. But the stage is bare. Or maybe that is what he was afraid of. Uneasily, watched by all the empty seats, he approaches the holes punched out in the screen. They form crude block letters, not unlike those used on theater marquees, and what they spell out is: BEWARE THE MIDNIGHT MAN!
He gasps, and his gasp echoes whisperingly throughout the auditorium, as though the palace itself were shuddering. Its irreplaceable picture sheet is ruined. His projections will always bear this terrible signature, as though time itself were branded. He steps back, repelled—just as the huge asbestos fire curtain comes crashing down. Wha—?! He ducks, falls into the path of the travelers sweeping across him like silken whips. The lights are flaring and vanishing, flaring again, colors changing kaleidoscopically. He seems to see rivers ascending, clouds dropping like leaded weights. He fights his way through the swoop and swat of rippling curtains toward the switchboard, but when he arrives there’s no one there. The fire curtain has been flown, the travelers are tucked decorously back in the wings like gowns in a closet. The dream cloth with its frayed metallic threads has been dropped before the screen. The house curtains are parting, the lights have dimmed. Oh no . . . !
Even as he leaps down into the auditorium and charges up the aisle, the music has begun. If it is music. It seems to be running backwards, and there are screams and honkings and wild laughter mixed in. He struggles against a rising tide of garish light, bearing down upon him from the projection booth, alive with flickering shades, beating against his body like gamma rays. “I don’t need that spear, it’s only a young lion!” someone rumbles through the dome, a bomb whistles, and there’s a crash behind him like a huge mirror falling. “Look out! It’s—aaarrghh!” “Sorry, ma’am!” “Great Scott, whaddaya call that?!” “Romance aflame through dangerous days and—” “You don’t mean—?!” The uproar intensifies—“What awful truth?”—and his movements thicken as in a dream. He knows if he can reach the overhanging balcony lip, he can escape the projector’s rake, but even as he leans against this storm of light—“I’m afraid you made one fatal mistake!” —he can feel his body, as though penetrated by an alien being from outer space, lose its will to resist. “No! No!” he cries, marveling at his own performance, and presses on through, falling momentarily blinded, into the musky shelter of the back rows.
He sprawls there in the dark, gripping a cold bolted foot, as the tempest rages on behind him, wondering: now what? Which calls to mind an old war film in which the two surviving crewmembers of a downed plane, finding themselves in enemy territory, disguise themselves as the front and back end of a cow to make their escape. They get caught by an enemy farmer and locked in a barn with the village bull, the old farmer muttering, “Calves or steaks! Calves or steaks!” “Now what?” the airman in back cries as the bull mounts them, and the one up front, sniffing the fodder, says: “Well, old buddy, I reckon that depends on whether or not you get pregnant.” Such, roughly, are his own options: he can’t leave, and staying may mean more than he can take. Already the thundering light is licking at his heels like an oncoming train, and he feels much like she must have felt, gagged and tied to the humming track: “Not all of us are going to come back alive, men, and before we go out there, I—” “Oh, John! Don’t!” “Mad? I, who have solved the secret of life, you call me mad?” WheeeeeooOOOOoo-ooo! “Please! Is nothing sacred?” He drags himself up the aisle, clawing desperately—“Catch me if you can, coppers!”—at the carpet, and then, driven by something like the downed airmen’s craving for friendly pastures, clambers—“We accept him, one of us, one of us . . .”—to his feet. If I can just secure the projection booth, he thinks, lumbering forward like a second-string heavy, maybe . . .
But he’s too late. It’s a disaster area. He can’t even get in the door, his way blocked by gleaming thickets of tangled film spooling out at him like some monstrous birth. He hacks his way through to cut off the projectors, but they’re not even there any more, nothing left but the odd takeup reel, a Maltese cross or two like dropped coins, a lens blotted with a lipsticked kiss. His stuffed peacock, he sees through the rustling underbrush of film, has been plucked. Gelatin slides are cooking in his coffeepot. He stares dumbly at all this wreckage, unable to move. It’s as though his mind has got outside itself somehow, leaving his skull full of empty room presence. Ripped-up publicity stills and organ scores, film tins, shattered glass slides, rolls of punched tickets lie strewn about
like colossal endings. All over his pinned-up poster for Hearts and Pearls, she has scribbled: FIRST THE HUNT, THEN THE REVELS! The only publicity photo still up on the wall is the one of the cannibals, only now someone is on the spit. He is. The spit begins to turn. He flees, one hand clapped over his burning eyes, the other clawing through the chattery tentacles of film that now seem to be trying to strangle him.
He staggers into the mezzanine, stripping scraps of clinging celluloid from his throat, his mind locked into the simplistic essentials of movement and murder. He throws the light switch. Nothing happens. The alcove lights are also dead, the newel post lamps on the marble staircase, the chandeliers in the grand foyer. Darkness envelops him like swirling fog, teeming with menace. Turning to run, he slaps up against a tall column. At least, he thinks, hanging on, it didn’t fall over. The marble feels warm to his touch and he hugs it to him as the ingenue’s insane giggle rattles hollowly through the darkened palace, sweeping high over his head like a passing wind or a plague of twittering locusts. The column seems almost to be moving, as though the whole room, like a cyclorama, were slowly pivoting. He recalls an old movie in which the killer finds himself trapped on a merry-go-round spinning out of control, sparking and shrieking and hurling wooden horses into the gaping crowd like terrorists on suicide missions. The killer, too: he lets go, understanding at last as he slides helplessly across the polished terrazzo floor the eloquent implications of pratfalls. What he slams into, however, is not a gaping crowd, but the drinking fountain near the elevator lobby, its sleek ceramic skin as cold to the touch as synthetic flesh. He can hear the cavernous gurgle and splatter of water as though the fountains throughout the movie palace might be overflowing. Yes, his pants are wet and his toes feel squishy inside their shoes.