Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  David and Bathsheba, he thought.

  And then came this rupture. His kingdom had been split apart, his faith challenged, weakened. His pride and fear had made him rise to the bait of this stupid wager. But it was only pride, wasn’t it? Had the rupture happened even before that woman had stumbled upon them? Had he done what he’d accused his wives of—treating the whole belief system like a menu from which he’d choose the laws that suited his taste? That was the question. All alone in his desert, he had not kept the ordinances. He had countenanced homosexuality. He had practiced sex outside of marriage. He had been lax with the law. He had loosened his hold on the reins. He felt that God had communicated to him what He would accept. But that struck him in this moment as pride, expediency, rationalization, maybe evil. He recalled Christ from the Sermon on the Mount—“whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” Was he himself the snake in the garden? It could not be so. It could not be. What was the cure? A return to origins. Always. That was always the cure. Start at the beginning again. Reinvigorate the word, the law. The law.

  He knew he was not a murderer like King David. He hadn’t abused his power like that, had he? He hadn’t acted in such ways as to place himself beyond forgiveness, beyond the atoning blood of Christ. He quoted out loud from memory, “When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband. And when her mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”* When her mourning was over. When the mourning was over. When was this “when”? But the thing. The thing. But the thing David had done. Displeased the Lord.

  Bronson hung his head and cried.

  Since he had been sealed to her in celestial marriage, Bronson knew that Jackie’s first estate was in Heaven, and that she could hear him. He didn’t even have to speak out loud for her to hear all this about Pearl. Jackie was in his mind. She could hear his thoughts. She knew all. That was not what he had come here for tonight. He had heard his thoughts circling and circling for months now; he was all too well acquainted with them. He had come to see if he could hear Jackie. But all was silent, and that silence felt like censure, judgment. There was no wind, no rustling, no howling or scurrying of animals. His love would not speak to him. He felt a banishment; his desert paradise seemed all the world to him now a barren thing, east of Eden.

  Jackie was dead. The desert was quiet. God was AWOL. This was surely his fault. He had sinned. He could not hear his beloved, his land, or his Lord. Suddenly, without a sound or warning, with neither thunder nor lightning, it began to rain.

  19.

  HAMMER FILMS HAD EATEN her mind. There was nothing left. Just crumbs of bad horror, wooden stakes, wooden acting, and rotting celluloid. That’s it, Maya thought, that’s the only decent movie that could come out of this pile of dreck—Hammer Films Have Eaten My Brain—the story of a young professional woman with an advanced degree who catches a deadly brain virus (“More of a meme, or a deadly earworm than a virus, if you will. We’ve located it in the amygdala, Chief, the so-called lizard brain”) from watching too many shitty B movies. When our heroine tells you the plot, like that of 1970’s The Vampire Lovers from the so-called Karnstein Trilogy (“a peaceful hamlet in eighteenth-century Europe is home to a female vampire with lesbian tendencies who ravages the townsfolk”), you barf, shit yourself, and die, and your bodily fluids infect the next poor sucker with rotten ideas till he too explodes with infectious stupidity. She listened to the actual trailer voice over and over in condescending wonderment—“Sample, if you dare, the deadly passion of the vampire lovers—perverted creatures of the night.” What heinous genius!

  These creatures of the night overtook her waking and sleeping hours. The long nights especially were Hammer time—her dreams seemingly directed by that Hammer mainstay, the “uncouth, uneducated, disgusting, and vulgar” stylist, Mr. Jimmy Sangster. Perhaps Malouf would like his sexy vampires younger, as in ’71’s Lust for a Vampire, in which a “temptress does Count Karnstein’s [that kooky Karnstein again!] biting at a finishing school in nineteenth-century Styria.” Biting, not bidding, get it? Well played. Styria? She had to look up Styria. It’s a state in Austria that borders Slovenia. Maya wondered how the real estate was there. She thought maybe she’d move to Styria, start over.

  But not before she watched The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)—yes, that’s right, you autocorrect cowards, no E in Xperiment, only one R in Quatermass, in Hammer world—wherein an “astronaut returns to Earth after an experimental space flight, afflicted by a strange fungus that transforms him into a murderous monster. After bullets and bombs fail to stop the creature, brilliant scientist Professor Quatermass [oh, she did love that name] becomes mankind’s last hope of survival.” She wasted more time than any human should contemplating the present-day ramifications in the gender politics of 1971’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, wherein “the good doctor, experimenting with ways to prolong his life, tests the formula on himself and metamorphoses into a beautiful woman” (well, she could maybe sell Malouf on that—Rob Lowe is certainly still pretty enough to do dual duty … and the Oscar goes to…).

  Jekyll’s alter ego turns out to have a very narrow nasty streak, killing prostitutes who, terrified of Jack the Ripper, believe they have nothing to fear from a woman. Aha—so tricky! But why, she mused, as a woman, did Sister Hyde, like the Ripper, kill hoes? Was that a prescient indictment of how strong the urge to murder, to commit violence upon the opposite sex, is in man, that it lasts even through the transformation to woman? Or, more stickily, and oh so politically inconvenient, was it an of-its-time, benighted condemnation of the trans existence itself as a freakish perversion? Or … was it an unconscious attack on womanness itself—because the male Jekyll/Hyde had never murdered before he had a temporary, nighttime vagina and a gravity-defying ’70s vintage push-up bra? The cleavage made me do it? Maya shook her head. Her mind was mush. She fixed herself a tequila and orange juice.

  Over the months that she disappeared down the Hammer universe rabbit hole, as she waited for reports on the kids from Rancho Cucamonga, subtle, troubling changes in her consciousness manifested. She lost some drive. Something about contemplating all the time, energy, and yes, love even, that must have gone into these ridiculous movies struck her at first as absurd, even tragic. To spend one’s life like that, taking seriously the Quatermasses and the zombies and the lesbo vampires? To be on one’s deathbed with those images swimming up in your head as you dwelled on your “achievements.” Ugh.

  Malouf was sadistically attentive to her Hammer work. Was he really looking for a diamond in the rough or was he slyly roughing her up, testing her resolve, because he could? He wanted ten synopses a week. He wanted her to identify at least one remake per month. He made her go to lunches with desperate writers who would pitch her and then try to fuck her. It wasn’t hard work, but it wasn’t what she had spent her life training for, and it hurt her somewhere inside. She lost all energy to move for a weekend in mid-November. She’d drag herself home from Praetorian wondering, And what am I making? How am I better than Hammer? I’m worse, maybe; I’m merely pushing paper, moving numbers from one side to the other. Is my entire life an abstract endeavor to move the decimal point farther and farther to the right? And at the end of it, I won’t even have the slightest comfort that my pathetic contortions blissfully occupied some bored kid or social outcast in some rainy Saturday afternoon matinee. Am I a paper clip in smart business attire? She didn’t have a shrink to tell or close friends or a lover. Her associates, the Turks, would tell her she needed to get laid. Her doofus trainer did mention that he thought she’d “plateaued” and maybe she’d like to try some black-market supplements from China, rhino horn or tiger penis powder or something gross and animal unfriendly like that.

  One winter day, Malouf called her into his office to give a twenty-minut
e presentation for a remake of The Vampire Lovers to him and the Young Turks. Taking their cue from the boss man, the Turks sat stone-faced and grim during her pitch, with their best schoolboy “listening” faces on, seeming to perk up only whenever the word lesbian made a cameo. Of course, Malouf had called the meeting for 2 p.m. so the boys were sleepy and maybe even a little tipsy from lunch. A couple of the Turks twitched and drooped. When she was finished, the boss thanked her courteously and dismissed her. She was a few yards down the hall when she heard the door shut and the room erupt in muffled laughter. She thought of quitting. If this was a test, she didn’t know yet how to pass—take the lumps or fight back? WWMD? What would Malouf do?

  Then the pendulum started to swing back. It came when she was contemplating the life and times of Peter Cushing, Hammer’s preeminent star from the ’50s through the ’70s. Cushing played Baron Frankenstein six times and Dr. Van Helsing five times, along with numerous other heroes and villains. Doctors Frankenstein and Van Helsing; he’d looked at clouds from both sides. She imagined Cushing on his deathbed, surrounded by loved ones in a huge mansion in the English countryside that all that child’s play had bought. And she thought—he knew. He knew the truth. Not the truth of how to make a living man out of killing corpses or the best way to dispense with a gay Styrian vampire, or even the inner life of Grand Moff Tarkin, but the truth of life itself—it didn’t matter. None of this shit mattered. It was all child’s play after all. And that was fucking beautiful, not tragic. And the energy expended! The energy endowed by the creator, in Mr. Cushing’s case, had been used, over and over again, in his mock fight for truth or evil or whatever that week called for. Cushing didn’t need an Oscar on his deathbed in Canterbury in 1994 to make it all worthwhile; he was whole, and holy.

  Through Cushing contemplation, Maya’s condescension flipped to wonder, and her lethargy turned around. She still didn’t know what exactly the fuck she was doing with her life, but it seemed to matter less. If Praetorian was her Hammer, then so be it. Was this growing up or giving up? She didn’t know. She wondered if there was a difference.

  She turned her revitalized attention back to the Powers deal, and thought maybe it was a good time to visit Bronson, poke the bear. She drove to San Bernardino to see Janet Bergram. For her part, Janet seemed invested in the project almost against her own better judgment. She cared about the kids. But the news Janet relayed was not good for Maya. Deuce was doing well, but not Pearl or Hyrum. The California educational system was failing them. It looked like Powers might be winning this wager and his land, and her all-or-nothing gambit would end up a zero.

  Maya couldn’t stand by passively and watch her unicorn die like this. Maybe it was time for some horse-trading. Maybe a little meddling was called for. Maybe if I put a stone in Bronson’s boot, he’ll do something stupid, and we can turn things back the Praetorian way so that my outside-the-box production of The Mormons Come to Town might one day soon pay huge dividends. I will move the decimal point to the right of eight zeroes. There was still plenty of time left to improvise. Conditions were ripe to hit the desert again, without the ’shrooms.

  As Maya was leaving her tiny office, Janet said, “And oh, that hundred grand your boss promised the San Bernardino school system? No sign of it.”

  “No?” Maya bristled. Malouf was like his buddy Trump in this regard, making a show of charitable donations without any actual follow-through. It was morally disgusting—everything to men like that was gesture and signal with no meat, like a tweet, and it reflected badly upon her as well, tainted her.

  “Neither hide nor hair. Not a penny,” Janet groused.

  “Maybe it was anonymous.” Maya looked at Janet’s face to see if that was a good joke. Nope. “Here,” Maya said, taking a checkbook from her bag. “Can I write you a check for ten thousand, say?”

  “Well, not to me, but yes.” As Maya wrote the check, she flashed on that bitchin’ new silver Tesla truck she could not now afford, “But ten is not one hundred,” Janet added.

  Maya spent a pleasurable night at Twentynine Palms, putting in some time in the spa and a few interminable hours on her iPad with soul-destroying fare—The Devil Rides Out and The Gorgon. In the morning, she drove to a meeting point arranged with her favorite park ranger to get off-roaded out to Powers’s land.

  Ranger Dirk was happy to see her, and very talkative; she was a big tipper. “Back for more Hollywood research, huh?”

  She laughed because this time, immersed as she was in the world of Hammer, he was closer to the mark than before. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m making money moves.”

  “I grew up on Westerns. I miss a good Western,” Dirk confided in her. Oh God, she didn’t want to talk about movies with this guy. She didn’t even like movies. Period. He droned on to his captive audience, “Costner was good for a while, but Clint Eastwood. That’s my man. ‘Go ahead, punk, make my day.’”

  “Clint Eastwood, sure.” She could tell Dirk was quoting something, but she didn’t know what. All she remembered of that guy was when he talked to a chair like a loon at some political convention. She always got him mixed up with the crazy gray-haired dude from Back to the Future.

  “They shot all those old Westerns out here,” Dirk proclaimed. She was pretty sure that wasn’t true, though. “When I’m driving around out this way, I’m always on the lookout for a familiar backdrop. Yup, I was born in the wrong era. A six-shooter, right? Haha, I’m a Western guy.”

  “You sure are, Dirk,” she said, thinking, I’d like a six-shooter right now.

  “You look sleepy.” Dirk misinterpreted her abject boredom, then added in a semi-leer, “Rough night?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Do you mind if I close my eyes and try to nap?”

  “Not at all, but good luck on this terrain. I’ll do my best to make it smooth, m’lady.”

  “Thanks, Dirk. You’re my hero.” She closed her eyes and faked sleep for the hour or so it took to get to the Powers property.

  “Last stop, Princess. Wakey-wakey.” Maya opened her eyes to see Yalulah and some of the Powers kids walking toward her, drawn to the intruders the way she imagined zombies are when they smell living flesh, but nicer, if only slightly.

  “Thanks, Dirk, you’re amazing, but I can take it from here.”

  “You want a ride back?”

  “I could be a while. Why don’t you head back and if I need you I’ll call.” She really didn’t want him around to annoy Bronson or any of the kids with his friendly nonsense. Maybe Bronson could give her a ride back to Twentynine Palms.

  “Sounds good to me. These folks give me the creeps.” Maya got out of the vehicle and walked toward Yalulah and the kids as Dirk turned tail back to civilization.

  “Hi, Fam!” Maya called out, though she knew that the hipness of the salutation would be lost on them. “How is everyone doing?”

  “What’s wrong?” Yalulah asked immediately. “Did something happen in Rancho Cucamonga? The kids? Mary?”

  Maya realized now that her mere presence might have spooked everyone, and instantly felt stupid and callous. “Oh no, no, no…” She calmed Yalulah down. “I’m sorry. Everyone is fine. Everyone is doing great.”

  “They’re all dead,” a little boy of about seven said. “Everyone is dead of cancer.”

  Yalulah chided the child, “Cut it out, Alvin, you know they’re not dead. That’s not funny. You’re scaring your brothers and sisters.”

  “You’re a philistine, Little Big Al.” Beautiful sighed.

  “Aliens took them so they could look at their buttholes,” Lovina offered.

  “Wow,” Maya said.

  “Do you have cancer, too?” Alvin asked Maya.

  “Interesting sense of humor,” Maya said, patting the boy on the head, secretly thinking maybe she should have chosen this loser weirdo for the test.

  “Please don’t touch the children.”

  “Oh right, I’m sorry.”

  “God only knows what viruses and diseases
you all are cooking up out there. What have you come for, then?” asked Yalulah, not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.

  “Just to give you a general update and to go over some logistical stuff. Is Bronson around?”

  “No, he most likely won’t be back till sundown. Maybe later.”

  “Shit.”

  The children laughed at the curse word.

  “You ride a horse?” Yalulah asked.

  “Well, I’ve ridden a horse, I wouldn’t say I’m a horse rider.”

  “I can put you on one of the kids’ ponies and give you directions.”

  Maya didn’t know if she was joking. “Directions?”

  “I can’t leave the kids, can I? He might not even be back tonight. If you wanna see Bronson, that’s the only way you’re gonna see him today.”

  “You’re gonna die,” that little shit, Alvin, said.

  “Alvin, cut it out,” Yalulah scolded him, but she looked pleased. “I’ll give you a compass. It’s simple, head straight east.”

  “Well, giddy up,” Maya joked.

  Maya was terrified she’d get lost. She was told the journey might take over an hour and to simply head east straight for a peak that would never be out of view. Simple enough, but she was in the Mojave, all alone, a rain-shadow desert absent of landmarks to the uninitiated, with redundant, similar-looking (to her) peaks in every distance, and eventually it would get dark. She wondered if Yalulah was trying to kill her. That thought started small and idle, but grew bigger and louder as the sun passed its zenith and started angling back toward the earth. She kept hearing Alvin say, “You’re gonna die.” She thought she was in a Hammer flick and lizard zombies might attack at any moment. Actually, that thought comforted her in its absurdity, and she laughed.