Black Evening

  "We had an agreement once."

  He scowled. Beer dribbled down his chin.

  "I write and direct. You star. Both of us, or none."

  "Yeah. So? I've kept the bargain."

  "The studio's given me a week. To shape you up. If not, I'm out of the project."

  He sneered. "I'll tell them I don't work if you don't."

  "Not that simple, Wes. At the moment, they're not that eager to do what you want. You're losing your clout. Remember why you liked us as a team?"

  He wavered blearily.

  "Because you wanted a friend. To keep you from making what you called the same mistakes again. To keep you from fucking up. Well, Wes, that's what you're doing. Fucking up."

  He finished his beer and crumbled the can. He curled his lips, angry. "Because I want a day off on my birthday?"

  "No, because you're getting your roles confused. You're not James Deacon. But you've convinced yourself that you are, and Monday you'll die in a crash."

  He blinked. Then he sneered. "So what are you, a fortune teller now?"

  "A half-baked psychiatrist. Unconsciously you want to complete the legend. The way you've been acting, the parallel's too exact."

  "I told you the first time we met — I don't like bullshit!"

  "Then prove it. Monday, you don't go near a motorcycle, a car, hell even a go-cart. You come to the studio sober. You do your work as well as you know how. I drive you over to my place. We have a private party. You and me and Jill. She promises to make your favorite meal: T-bones, baked beans, steamed corn. Homemade birthday cake. Chocolate. Again, your favorite. The works. You stay the night. In the morning, we put James Deacon behind us and…"

  "Yeah? What?"

  "You achieve the career Deacon never had."

  His eyes looked uncertain.

  "Or you go to the race and destroy yourself and break the promise you made. You and me together. A team. Don't back out of our bargain."

  He shuddered as if he was going to crack.

  ***

  In a movie, that would have been the climax — how he didn't race on his birthday, how we had the private party and he hardly said a word and went to sleep in our guest room.

  And survived.

  ***

  But this is what happened. On the Tuesday after his birthday, he couldn't remember his lines. He couldn't play to the camera. He couldn't control his voice. Wednesday was worse.

  But I'll say this. On his birthday, the anniversary of Deacon's death, when Wes showed up sober and treated our bargain with honor, he did the most brilliant acting of his career. A zenith of tradecraft. I often watch the video of those scenes with profound respect.

  And the dailies were so truly brilliant that the studio VP let me finish the picture.

  But the VP never knew how I faked the rest of it. Overnight, Wes had totally lost his technique. I had enough in the can to deliver a print — with a lot of fancy editing and some uncredited but very expensive help from Donald Porter. He dubbed most of Wes's final dialogue.

  "I told you. Horoscopes. Astrology," Donald said.

  I didn't believe him until I took four scenes to an audio expert I know. He specializes in putting voices through a computer and making visual graphs of them.

  He spread the charts in front of me. "Somebody played a joke on you. Or else you're playing one on me."

  I felt so unsteady that I had to press my hands on his desk when I asked him, "How?"

  "Using this first film, Deacon's scene from The Prodigal Son as the standard, this second film is close. But this third one doesn't have any resemblance."

  "So where's the joke?"

  "In the fourth. It matches perfectly. Who's kidding who?"

  Deacon had been the voice on the first. Donald Porter had been the voice on the second. Close to Deacon's, dubbing for Wes in Rampage. Wes himself had been the voice on the third — the dialogue in Rampage that I couldn't use because Wes's technique had gone to hell.

  And the fourth clip? The voice that was identical to Deacon's, authenticated, verifiable. Wes again. His screen test. The imitated scene from The Prodigal Son.

  ***

  Wes dropped out of sight. For sure, his technique had collapsed so badly he would never again be a shining star. I kept phoning him, but I never got an answer. So, for what turned out to be the second-last time, I drove out to his dingy place near the desert. The Manson lookalikes were gone. Only one motorcycle stood outside. I climbed the steps to the sun porch, knocked, received no answer, and opened the door.

  The blinds were closed. The place was in shadow. I went down a hall and heard strained breathing. Turned to the right. And entered a room.

  The breathing was louder, more strident and forced.

  "Wes?"

  "Don't turn on the light."

  "I've been worried about you, friend."

  "Don't…"

  But I did turn on the light. And what I saw made me swallow vomit.

  He was slumped in a chair. Seeping into it would be more accurate. Rotting. Decomposing. His cheeks had holes that showed his teeth. A pool that stank of decaying vegetables spread on the floor around him.

  "I should have gone racing on my birthday, huh?" His voice whistled through the gaping flesh in his throat.

  "Oh, shit, friend." I started to cry. "Jesus Christ, I should have let you."

  "Do me a favor, huh? Turn off the light now. Let me finish this in peace."

  I had so much to say to him. But I couldn't. My heart broke. I turned off the light.

  "And buddy," he said, "I think we'd better forget about our bargain. We won't be working together anymore."

  "What can I do to help? There must be something I can — "

  "Yeah, let me end this the way I need to."

  "Listen, I — "

  "Leave," Wes said. "It hurts me too much to have you here, to listen to the pity in your voice."

  "But I care about you. I'm your friend. I — "

  "That's why I know you'll do what I ask" — the hole in his throat made another whistling sound — "and leave."

  I stood in the darkness, listening to other sounds he made: liquid rotting sounds. "A doctor. There must be something a doctor can — "

  "Been there. Done that. What's wrong with me no doctor's going to cure. Now if you don't mind…"

  "What?"

  "You weren't invited. Get out."

  I waited another long moment. "… Sure."

  "Love you, man," he said.

  "… love you."

  Dazed, I stumbled outside. Down the steps. Across the sand. Blinded by the sun, unable to clear my nostrils of the stench in that room, I threw up beside the car.

  ***

  The next day, I drove out again. The last time. Jill went with me. He'd moved. I never learned where.

  ***

  And this is how it ended, the final dregs of his career. His talent was gone, but how his determination lingered.

  Movies. Immortality.

  See, special effects are expensive. Studios will grasp at any means to cut the cost.

  He'd told me, "Forget about our bargain." I later discovered what he meant — he worked without me in one final feature. He wasn't listed in the credits, though. Zombies from Hell. Remember how awful Bela Lugosi looked in his last exploitation movie before they buried him in his Dracula cape?

  Bela looked great compared to Wes. I saw the Zombie movie in an eight-plex out in the Valley. It did great business. Jill and I almost didn't get a seat.

  Jill wept as I did.

  This fucking town. Nobody cares how it's done, as long as it packs them in.

  The audience cheered when Wes stalked toward the leading lady.

  And his jaw fell off.

  In 1986, a year after the previous story was published, I made a decision that surprised me as much as it did anyone else. Since 1970, I had been teaching American literature at the University of Iowa. I had risen through the ranks, gaining tenure and a full professorshi
p. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching. It was a delight to be around young people eager to learn. The stimulation of the university environment and of my colleague friends had been a constant in my life for sixteen years.

  Then I woke up one morning and recognized that I didn't have the energy to devote myself to two full-time professions any longer. I had been working seven days a week for as long as I could remember. Balancing my teaching responsibilities with my writing needs had often required me to get up before dawn and to stay awake after my family went to sleep. The idea of a day off or of a free weekend wasn't in my universe. But while teaching was my love, writing was my passion, and when the burden of fatigue finally overwhelmed me, there wasn't any doubt what "the mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," as one critic called me, would do. In the fall of 1986, I resigned from the university.

  The adjustment was painful. After all, academia had been a crucial part of my life for even longer than my years at Iowa — all the way back to 1966 when I'd entered graduate school at Penn State. Although I now had the luxury to write full time, I continued to feel the tug of the classroom. Often I reconsidered my decision. But in a matter of months, neither writing nor teaching mattered any longer.

  In January of 1987, my son was diagnosed with bone cancer. From then until his death in June, the nightmarish rollercoaster of emotions and pain through which Matt suffered made me fear for my sanity. This can't be happening, I told myself. It isn't real. But despairingly it was, and I found myself wanting to escape from reality. While sitting in Mart's intensive-care room, watching his septic-shock-ravaged, comatose body, I was surprised to discover that the novel I was holding was by Stephen King. Stephen is a friend. He knew Matt and kindly sent him letters along with rock tapes to try to distract him from his ordeal. Even so, it seemed odd to me that in the midst of real-life horror, I was reading made-up horror. Then it occurred to me that the made-up horror was paradoxically providing a barrier from real-life horror. I recalled how fans often wrote to me, describing disasters in their lives — deaths, marriage breakups, lost jobs, fires, floods, car accidents — telling me that a book of mine had helped them make it through the night. As the subject of my doctoral dissertation, John Barth, once said, "Reality is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

  While these thoughts went through my mind, another friend, Douglas Winter, a multiple talent fiction writer/critic/anthologist/attorney asked if I would contribute to an anthology he was putting together, Prime Evil. Writing was the last thing I wanted to do, and yet, with Doug's encouragement, when I wasn't visiting Matt in the hospital, I wrote the following novella which was suggested by my fascination with the paintings of Van Gogh. A tale about insanity, it helped to keep me sane. It received the Horror Writers Association award for the best novella of 1988.

  Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity

  « ^ »

  Van Dorn's work was controversial, of course. The scandal his paintings caused among Parisian artists in the late 1800s provided the stuff of legend. Disdaining conventions, thrusting beyond accepted theories, Van Dorn seized upon the essentials of the craft to which he'd devoted his soul. Color, design, and texture. With those principles in mind, he created portraits and landscapes so different, so innovative, that their subjects seemed merely an excuse for Van Dorn to put paint onto canvas. His brilliant colors, applied in passionate splotches and swirls, often so thick that they projected an eighth of an inch from the canvas in the manner of a bas-relief, so dominated the viewer's perception that the person or scene depicted seemed secondary to technique.

  Impressionism, the prevailing avant-garde theory of the late 1800s, imitated the eye's tendency to perceive the edges of peripheral objects as blurs. Van Dorn went one step farther and so emphasized the lack of distinction among objects that they seemed to melt together, to merge into an interconnected, pantheistic universe of color. The branches of a Van Dorn tree became ectoplasmic tentacles, thrusting toward the sky and the grass, just as tentacles from the sky and grass thrust toward the tree, all melding into a radiant swirl. He seemed to address himself not to the illusions of light but to reality itself, or at least to his theory of it. The tree is the sky, his technique asserted. The grass is the tree, and the sky the grass. All is one.

  Van Dorn's approach proved so unpopular among theorists of his time that he frequently couldn't buy a meal in exchange for a canvas upon which he'd labored for months. His frustration produced a nervous breakdown. His self-mutilation shocked and alienated such onetime friends as Cézanne and Gauguin. He died in squalor and obscurity. Not until the 1920s, thirty years after his death, were his paintings recognized for the genius they displayed. In the 1940s, his soul-tortured character became the subject of a best-selling novel, and in the 1950s a Hollywood spectacular. These days, of course, even the least of his efforts can't be purchased for less than three million dollars. Ah, art.

  ***

  It started with Myers and his meeting with Professor Stuyvesant. "He agreed… reluctantly."

  "I'm surprised he agreed at all," I said. "Stuyvesant hates Postimpressionism and Van Dorn in particular. Why didn't you ask someone easy, like Old Man Bradford?"

  "Because Bradford's academic reputation sucks. I can't see writing a dissertation if it won't be published, and a respected dissertation director can make an editor pay attention. Besides, if I can convince Stuyvesant, I can convince anyone."

  "Convince him of what?"

  "That's what Stuyvesant wanted to know," Myers said.

  I remember that moment vividly, the way Myers straightened his lanky body, pushed his glasses close to his eyes, and frowned so hard that his curly red hair scrunched forward on his brow.

  "Stuyvesant said that, even disallowing his own disinclination toward Van Dorn — God, the way that pompous asshole talks — he couldn't understand why I'd want to spend a year of my life writing about an artist who'd been the subject of countless books and articles. Why not choose an obscure but promising Neo-Expressionist and gamble that my reputation would rise with his? Naturally the artist he recommended was one of Stuyvesant's favorites."

  "Naturally," I said. "If he named the artist I think he did…"

  Myers mentioned the name.

  I nodded. "Stuyvesant's been collecting him for the past five years. He hopes the resale value of the paintings will buy him a town house in London when he retires. So what did you tell him?"

  Myers opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated. With a brooding look, he turned toward a print of Van Dorn's swirling Cypresses in a Hollow, which hung beside a ceiling-high bookshelf crammed with Van Dorn biographies, analyses, and bound collections of reproductions. He didn't speak for a moment, as if the sight of the familiar print — its facsimile colors incapable of matching the brilliant tones of the original, its manufacturing process unable to recreate the exquisite texture of raised, swirled layers of paint on canvas — still took his breath away.

  "So what did you tell him?" I asked again.

  Myers exhaled with a mixture of frustration and admiration. "I said, what the critics wrote about Van Dorn was mostly junk. He agreed, with the implications that the paintings invited no less. I said, even the gifted critics hadn't probed to Van Dorn's essence. They were missing something crucial."

  "Which is?"

  "Exactly. Stuyvesant's next question. You know how he keeps relighting his pipe when he gets impatient. I had to talk fast. I told him I didn't know what I was looking for, but there's something" — Myers gestured toward the print — "something there. Something nobody's noticed. Van Dorn hinted as much in his diary. I don't know what it is, but I'm convinced his paintings hide a secret." Myers glanced at me.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  "Well, if nobody's noticed," Myers said, "it must be a secret, right?"

  "But if you haven't noticed…"

  Compelled, Myers turned toward the print again, his tone filled with wonder. "How do I know it's there? Because when I l
ook at Van Dorn's paintings, I sense it. I feel it."

  I shook my head. "I can imagine what Stuyvesant said to that. The man deals with art as if it's geometry, and there aren't any secrets in — "

  "What he said was, if I'm becoming a mystic, I ought to be in the School of Religion, not Art. But if I wanted enough rope to hang myself and strangle my career, he'd give it to me. He liked to believe he had an open mind, he said."

  "That's a laugh."

  "Believe me, he wasn't joking. He had a fondness for Sherlock Holmes, he said. If I thought I'd found a mystery and could solve it, by all means do so. And at that, he gave me his most condescending smile and said he would mention it at today's faculty meeting."

  "So what's the problem? You got what you wanted. He agreed to direct your dissertation. Why do you sound so — "

  "Today there wasn't any faculty meeting."

  "Oh." My voice dropped. "You're screwed."

  ***

  Myers and I had started graduate school at the University of Iowa together. That had been three years earlier, and we'd formed a strong enough friendship to rent adjacent rooms in an old apartment building near campus. The spinster who owned it had a hobby of doing watercolors — she had no talent, I might add — and rented only to art students so they would give her lessons. In Myers's case, she had make an exception. He wasn't a painter, as I was. He was an art historian. Most painters work instinctively. They're not skilled at verbalizing what they want to accomplish. But words and not pigment were Myers's specialty. His impromptu lectures had quickly made him the old lady's favorite tenant.

  After that day, however, she didn't see much of him. Nor did I. He wasn't at the classes we took together. I assumed he spent most of his time at the library. Late at night, when I noticed a light beneath his door and knocked, I didn't get an answer. I phoned him. Through the wall I heard the persistent, muffled ringing.