by Nick Cole
Before he could react, the Smoker Who Didn’t was enveloped in a massive bear hug—the kind you get from your grandfather when you see him again for the first time in the years that pass after you have ceased being a child. Familiar, and yet, when you’re thirty-three years old and you’ve been out in the world making your mark and getting your teeth kicked in, it’s more a memory of something lost.
An embrace that reminds you unconditional love is indeed a rare thing.
“I’m glad you came,” said the Fat Man. “Right this way. You must be starving.” The Smoker Who Didn’t followed, mumbling something not prepared in his script.
“Did you have any trouble?” asked the Fat Man.
“No, none at all, sir. The people in town are very helpful.”
The Fat Man regarded him for a long moment.
“Yes, they are a helpful people.”
The door shut behind them, revealing a room furnished with an immensely huge, burnished oaken table, iron candlesticks, a crackling fireplace, and a set of matching staircases rising up on either side and disappearing into the gloom above. The large table in the center of the vault struggled under the weight of an array of roast game hens, bottles of wine, round boules of bread, flat floured squares of rosemary ciabatta, herb-spiced olive oils, wheels of hard Italian cheeses, Moroccan olives, and bowls of blood oranges draped in thickets of raspberries. Apples littered the table at various intervals, some green and intensely small, others large and majestic, stately in colors that changed from red to gold across the faces of the fruit. The flickering light from the white tallow candles made small, mephitic shadows dance in the dark places around the bowls, playing among the roasted hens. In contrast, a steady orange glow radiated out from a wide fireplace; inside, a spitted pig turned slowly on an iron spike. Drippings of fat died with a sizzle, causing flames to occasionally leap and twirl like demonic flamenco dancers suddenly inspired by lust and tempo.
“Sit there,” directed the Fat Man. A thick, gnarled finger pointed toward a chair at the end of the table.
The Smoker Who Didn’t set his briefcase on the floor next to the chair and seated himself. When he looked up, the Fat Man was staring into the fire. On a battered pewter plate resting on the table in front of the Smoker Who Didn’t was a manuscript with the Fat Man’s name on it. Typed neatly above the name was a title.
Nothing More.
The fire popped and the Fat Man reached for a poker. He jabbed it around in the fire, stabbing and brushing until he seemed fully satisfied.
“I’m looking forward to reading your novel,” stated the Smoker Who Didn’t. “I have to confess I’ve been a fan of your work since college.”
Burning dry wood split with a sudden outraged pop, and the Fat Man chuckled softly in the quiet that followed.
The Smoker Who Didn’t straightened his tie as he waited for an answer that did not emerge. This was still a business meeting. He needed to prove he was a power to be reckoned with. He forced his hands into his lap, willing himself to patient composure as the Fat Man stared unblinkingly into the fire.
“Why did you quit? Acting, to be specific.” The Smoker Who Didn’t had fired his opening shot, hoping to move the ball to the other side of the invisible net that lay between them.
“Hmmmmmmmmm…” The Fat Man let out a long monastic hum, the kind one might hear just after dark in Eastern temples, high atop snow-capped peaks. Then he spun about rapidly, and for just a moment, he became the drunken sailor that had earned him an Academy Award. Here was McBride, the sailor who had gone to sea as a young man to escape the agony and pain of a dead wife. The Fat Man as McBride loomed above the Smoker Who Didn’t, his face showing each day of the twelve salt-crusted years spent before the masts of a Yankee Clipper. If you know the movie, then the face of McBride now gracing the Fat Man is the face after the terrible storm in the North Atlantic has passed and the last moments of a forgotten classic that hasn’t even been released on Blu-ray are running out. His hands are frozen to the wheel of the ship, dead. Found by the crew and the weeping young rich girl, eyes frozen and filled with an awareness of something honorable and beautiful in the form of a misspent drunken life offered upon the altar of final sacrifice. He has saved the storm-tossed vessel. And soon the credits will roll.
“Why?” rumbled the Fat Man as McBride. “Because I was creating other people’s illusions, their realities. I was doing well, I suspect. But, I was only doing so much.” He reached forward and plucked a ruby-faced apple from the table. “I wanted to do more. Not just to comment or re-create, but to actually create.” He took a crunchy bite out of the apple. “To be the image I was made in.” He chewed the fruit slowly.
After a moment, the Smoker Who Didn’t fumbled for his pack of cigarettes and lit one, bending forward to use the table candle, his eyes fixed beyond the flickering flame. When he spoke, his voice was just as dry and cracked as the roasting logs.
“I read your novel Jesus Wept one rainy Sunday afternoon… my second year in college. My first girlfriend—first real girlfriend, that is—had just broken up with me. I read the whole thing in one day. By the time I’d finished, the sun had broken through the clouds and I went for a walk in the wet streets. Just like in the book. I think, for the first time, I heard the music you wrote about in Jesus Wept.”
The Smoker Who Didn’t turned his gaze away from the past and back to the Fat Man as McBride. “I grew up that day,” he whispered.
The Fat Man let go of McBride and raised his eyebrows, a now quixotic smile in bloom. “Good,” he rumbled, more a judgment and less an appreciation. And now he was just the Fat Man once again.
“Before you is my latest and last offering. Read it. Eat if you like. When you’ve finished the manuscript, we’ll talk terms. Follow these stairs to the top, go to the door at the end of the hall. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours. The reading, that is.”
The Fat Man walked to the foot of the stairs and began to climb, leaning heavily on the rail with each ponderous step. Halfway up, he paused.
“I hope you find it worth the price I’m going to want.” Something malevolent flickered across his face before he turned and vanished into the shadows at the top of the stairs.
The Smoker Who Didn’t picked up the manuscript. By the time he’d reached the second page, he was too engrossed in the story to give pause to the whisper of danger dancing across his frontal lobe. He was already caught up in the action. He didn’t eat, but he smoked a lot.
***
THE END.
The Smoker Who Didn’t lit the last cigarette in the pack, inhaled, slumped back in the chair, and exhaled, spilling white smoke that climbed and spun in the light of the dying fire. He felt he understood his life and the ways of the world now more than ever. Two lives, love, friendship, the gamble to live a life dreamt, and finally the acceptance of a life lived. It was the story of a roller coaster lost weekend spent by the main character in the arms of a haunted woman. A morality tale of two accidental lovers finding something in each other to hold on to for a brief moment before the momentum of the world flung them apart into the oblivion beyond forever.
This manuscript was a ship any Studio Head would greenlight for the opportunity to chart a course through the waters it would soon sail. From a steady rise on the bestseller lists to the “Important Late Winter Release” of a movie aimed straight at an Academy Award nomination for whichever actor, subsequent to a pitched battle fought by means of his agent’s polished teeth and manicured nails, secured the starring role. A movie edition tie-in cover and several printings meant outrageous distribution profits, which translated to “Great American Novel” in the corporate-speak of these present days.
This manuscript could be all those things. It could be the vehicle that would make the masses see something they didn’t even know was missing in their lives and drive them to see it again and again. To stay awake late into the ni
ght in coffee shops, arguing its meaning and reconciling the details. The film rights to the story would be responsible for a million calls across Tinseltown. Lifestyles, ways and means, jobs and futures would hang in judgment, and the Great Director who owed a film to the studio would surely direct.
The Studio Head will have this; and I, thought the Smoker Who Didn’t, I will become something else, someone new. Something more. The someone I have always wanted, and known, I could be. I will become… an Executive Vice President of Production.
Time to deal.
He picked up the manuscript and climbed the stairs, rapidly generating offers and proposals that would be both economic and acceptable.
“I am the very model of a modern major-general,” he phonated, limbering up his tongue, repeating it as he climbed, at first softly, then with more emphasis, until finally at the terminus of his ascent, no player of Gilbert and Sullivan would have objected to his performance of the line. His bearing was erect, his carriage straight, his diction precise. Whoever he had once been was down there at the bottom of the stairs. Whoever he would be from now on, lay ahead. Both Plucky and Adventurey.
At the top of the stairs a hallway led off into a murky darkness, illuminated by a sickly and guttering candle. The candle guarded a plain rough wooden door, and beyond that, thought the soon-to-be Executive Vice President in Charge of Production, destiny.
He reached the door and knocked gently. Three soft raps.
No answer.
He knocked again, firmly.
No answer.
He took a deep breath, opened the door, and walked into the darkness beyond.
As soon as he entered the room, the door was pulled shut behind him. He heard bare feet scrabbling up and away. For a moment he was smothered in a black darkness only Poe would have understood. Pitch-covered tendrils clutched and tugged at his vision and sanity. He could feel the crunch of sand beneath his shoes, and the air hung heavy and still about him.
A neon orange flare ripped to life in the darkness above. A seething python of light as it burst to life, it arched over his head and landed at his feet. The burning glare blinded him, and in a moment a thousand whispering voices erupted about him into screams. The wild exultant yells of the Mexicans crashed against his ears like a flock of ecstatic seabirds, their voices turning and wheeling on a sonic sea of chaos.
His vision returned as he blinked and stared. Above him, the grandstands of an arena were filled with laughing, mad, brown faces. Two titanic torches sprang to life, illuminating a small coliseum and a character like no other found in the movies of the Fat Man. Here he was, the Fat Man revealed. The Warlord. The savage adjudicator of value. He was simply and terribly medieval. His face was the unforgiving visage of a long forgotten carved image, a false idol surrounded by a flock of joyous demons.
“So.” His voice was primal and ancient. “You want the story.”
The brown gargoyles about him cackled with satisfaction.
“Silence!” roared the Fat Man. Then, softly, “Do you?”
“Yes,” answered the Smoker Who Didn’t in a faltering voice he barely recognized as his own.
All was quiet, save the petulant hiss of the flare. No one moved.
The Fat Man stood.
“THEN YOU MUST FIGHT THE ROOSTER!”
The hellish crowd erupted in a sudden roar.
From somewhere in the press above, an ivory-handled antique straight razor with a gleaming blade was flung through the air. It landed near the seething flare at the feet of the Smoker Who Didn’t.
“FIGHT THE ROOSTER AND THE STORY IS YOURS!” bellowed the Fat Man.
“What?” screamed the Smoker Who Didn’t, his voice cracking.
The crowd began to chant, “FIGHT THE ROOSTER, FIGHT THE ROOSTER, FIGHT THE ROOSTER!” louder and louder, until he was deafened by its swollen bellow. A hurtling mass of crimson and black feathers catapulted into the arena and transformed itself into a rooster the size of a small dog. Its chest heaving with angry indignation, the rooster rose to its full height and faced the Smoker Who Didn’t.
The rooster advanced.
Chapter Two
The Great Director Meets Death
Seconds before Hollywood called, Death walked through the door. It was a late fall evening outside a Turkish coffeehouse in Olympia, Washington. Auburn leaves mixed with the cold wind and wet to make for a blustery harvest season evening.
Death was still wearing the same old black shroud it had been exhausting for years, managing to catch eyes and turn heads with the grinning iron scepter of mortality it carried in its bony hands as a constant and only companion. Death strode quietly across the polished linoleum floor, heading straight for the Great Director.
It had been a long day, and the Great Director was just sitting down to a hot cup of deep, dark, Turkish coffee and his second date mamul when he noticed Death heading straight for him. The first date mamul had been so good that before even trying a sip of his spiced coffee, seasoned with cinnamon and cardamom and boiled three times over, he’d ordered a second date mamul.
With just seconds left before the end of his life, the Great Director took a bite of the second date mamul. He considered it the best use of the time left to him. He’d been running from Death for over twenty-four hours now. It had followed him everywhere, and now, tired and far from home, he realized there was nowhere left to run. If Death was coming for you, then it was going to find you.
Strangely, he felt no panic, no fear, no desire to cry or even bargain. If he felt anything beyond the road weariness of his constant flight, it was remorse at having only just discovered so heavenly a treat as date mamuls only moments before his own demise.
One could easily spend an entire life eating date mamuls.
The Grim Reaper reached out a pale white hand, made even sicklier by the shop’s fluorescent lighting, and moved aside a chair that blocked his fated path. The Great Director lifted the date-stuffed shortbread dusted with powdered sugar to his mouth and took another bite. Any thought of remorse faded away. If it was raining outside… all the better. What is there to be afraid of anymore when once your fear finds you despite all your best efforts? He was here, inside this warm coffeehouse, far away from Hollywood. Here, it was clean and bright and smelled good. It reminded him of elementary school.
Of food.
Of safety.
Of Peace.
For the first time in a long time he’d found happiness again. Sad, he thought, that Death had to be here. But, oh well, it had to happen sooner or later. He closed his eyes and chewed slowly, deliberately, feeling a smile spread across his lips.
He was tired of running from Death.
***
Two days earlier the Great Director had awoken in his own bed somewhere in the wilds of Beverly Hills. The last film had nearly killed him. He’d had chest pains all through the eighty-day shooting schedule and subsequent editing marathon for Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. That was his first conscious thought upon waking. The last one had nearly killed him. And he was convinced the next one would finish the job. He had dodged this bullet one too many times. Soon enough the chest pains would start, and then it would be time for the everlasting dirt nap. Not me, he thought. I’m going to live forever, or die trying in the attempt. And he meant it.
SCENE: It is six thirty in the morning and the Great Director is lying in bed next to his Perfect Robot Wife. In two minutes she will awake and rise from their bed. Though she will seem to perform a myriad of tasks, they will all be meaningless distractions to disguise her true and most important task: turning on the phone. If his Perfect Robot Wife turns on the phone, which they normally leave off during the hours of night, then THEY can get to our hero, the Great Director. And if THEY can get to our hero, then he, the Great Director, will be dining on grave dust.
Not me, he thought again.
Thirt
y seconds have elapsed. Time is moving too swiftly and he is not moving at all. In just moments the phone will begin to ring and THEY will begin to ask him questions about doing his next movie. Questions he cannot possibly say “no” to.
PAN RIGHT. CLOSEUP ON PHONE.
This is what I do; I make movies, the Great Director thought to himself. Right now I’m in really big trouble. My mortality is at stake and I’m making movies in my head. I should be running. Fleeing for my life, as it were. The phone is going to ring. THEY are going to ask me a question and no matter what response I give THEM, any response I can think of, it’s still going to be the answer THEY want. Even if I say, “The next movie I shoot will be an eight-hour epic set in Outer Mongolia with subtitles about an old man making rugs”… I might as well say, “Sure, I’ll shoot League of Heroes Five! Love to!” Whatever the question, the answer’s still going to be yes as far as THEY are concerned.
Last night at Gelina, he and his Perfect Robot Wife had been having their usual perfect dinner of angel hair pasta and rock shrimp when THEY had approached his table in the form of an old friend. THEY said the rights to the Fat Man’s new book had been secured and THEY were ready to greenlight a project.
And I, he thought, had the audacity to say something witty like, “Great, I’d love to take a look.”
What am I, a moron? I was basically telling THEM to count me in. He shuddered. THEY had already counted on counting me in. That’s why THEY were probing last night. I should have said something like: “I’d love to do it, after I finish pre-production on my documentary about professional bass fishermen. It’s only at three hours right now but once I get it up around five and half I figure it’ll be ready for a theatrical release.” Yeah, that’s right, a good five and a half hour triumph-of-the-spirit arthouse release about bass fishermen. I couldn’t have invented a better brand of box office poison than a bass fishing epic. Why didn’t I go with that!
