Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  “The speed is perfect,” old Drogue said. “Make sure they keep it.”

  “That kid,” young Drogue said of Joy McIntyre, “everything you put her in looks overdone.”

  “Use her,” the old man said.

  “Use her for what? She can’t act. Her diction’s a joke. She’s so flamboyant you can’t tell what your scene is gonna look like if you use her to light.”

  “If you throw away that face,” old Drogue said, “… a face like that, a body like that—you have no business in the industry.”

  After a moment, the younger Drogue smiled. “You want to fuck her, Dad?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Say the word.”

  “I’ll manage my own sex life, thanks a whole lot.”

  “Patty will flip. I can’t wait to tell her.”

  “I told you,” the old man said, raising his voice, “mind your fucking business.”

  In a humorous mood, young Drogue opened the trailer door to find Hueffer and Toby Blakely awaiting him.

  “So,” he asked them, “is it gonna rain or what?”

  “I honestly don’t think so,” Hueffer said.

  Drogue studied his assistant for a long moment. “Hey,” he said to all present, “how about this guy?”

  Hueffer blushed.

  “Well,” Toby Blakely said, “obviously we can’t intercut with the trolley footage if it rains.”

  “We’ll keep shooting if it rains,” young Drogue told them. “If it stops we’ll make rain to match.”

  “Yessir,” Blakely said. “That’d be the thing to do. These chubascos can last an hour or they can last for three days.”

  “The next scene is all that concerns me,” Drogue said. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to shoot the last scene of the picture in rain. If it rains for a week we’ll wait for a week.”

  Hueffer and Blakely nodded soberly.

  Young Drogue charged toward the setup in his loping stride. Hueffer and Blakely accompanied him. His father ambled along behind.

  “So we’re home free, right? Rain or not.”

  “Unless it rains tomorrow and not today,” Blakely said delicately. “And we still have the last scene to shoot.”

  “Go away, Toby,” young Drogue said.

  Hueffer and Blakely went back to the camera setup. Drogue had caught sight of the producer, Charlie Freitag, who was standing with his production manager in the eucalyptus grove beside the trolley tracks.

  “He has to show up now,” young Drogue said bitterly. “Freak weather, there’s no cover set—Charlie arrives. You can show him four hours of magnificent dailies and he’ll give you five hours of handwringing because an extra stepped on a nail.”

  “Well,” old Drogue said, “that’s his function.”

  Lu Anne, sitting outside on her folding chair for Ricutti’s last ministrations, became aware of young Drogue’s spidery approach. She looked up at him and he offered his arm, parodying antique chivalry. When she rose to take it, she saw that the writer named Lowndes had not moved from the spot where they had left him. Charlie Freitag was speaking to him but he was watching her.

  “Is that guy bothering you?” Walter Drogue asked. “That Lowndes?”

  She told him that it was all right. But although it was her business to be watched, the concentrated scrutiny oppressed her. There were too many eyes.

  “My ride?” she asked.

  Drogue nodded. “I think you’re right about her sitting. It looks good. Would you like a rehearsal? I was thinking we might steal a jump on time if we shot it. If you were ready.”

  “Yes,” she said, “let’s do it.”

  Drogue looked her up and down. “Can you walk in the skirt? Are the shoes O.K. on this ground?”

  “Costume’s fine. If you like the colors.”

  Vera Ricutti hurried up and bent to Lu Anne’s hem, judging its evenness.

  “The hatband to match the parasol,” she told Drogue. “That’s how they did it.”

  “It’s pale green,” Drogue said. “Is pale green the color of death?”

  “Bien sûr,” Lu Anne said.

  “No rehearsal?”

  “Just let me prep, Walter.”

  “All right. Take care of it for me, kid.” As she was walking off, he called after her. “The old nothingness-and-grief routine.”

  She gave him a smile. Under the huge gum trees she paced up and down. “If I must choose between nothingness and grief,” she recited, “I will choose grief.” The words were only sounds. Voices on the wind that stirred the trees took them up. Wild palms. Nothingness. Grief.

  Joe Ricutti was weighting the elements of his portable makeup table against the breeze. Drogue stood beside him watching Lu Anne.

  “How is she?” he asked the makeup man.

  “Fine, Mr. Drogue. She talks normal. Pretty much.”

  Drogue turned to Vera, who nodded silent assent.

  Hueffer came up to them earnest and sweating.

  “I had a thought, Walter.”

  Drogue said nothing.

  “What would happen if we used a sixteen-millimeter lens on her ride. Maybe even a fourteen?”

  “Nothing would happen,” Drogue told him. “It would look like shit, that’s all.”

  Hueffer pressed him. “Seriously?”

  “If you like,” Drogue said pleasantly, “we’ll talk about it later. Let’s get everyone standing by.”

  Hueffer went back to the setup.

  “Standing by in two minutes,” he shouted. “Everybody out of the set.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Drogue told the Ricuttis. “A gold-plated shit-head.”

  The Ricuttis made no reply. Joe Ricutti shrugged.

  “If I must choose between nothingness and grief,” Lu Anne recited as she paced the dry ground, “I’ll have the biscuits and gravy. I’ll have the jambalaya and the oyster stew.”

  It was Edna choosing. Lu Anne’s path took her toward the trolley and she saw them all watching her. Lowndes. Bly. Walker was coming down. But Edna was the one in trouble here. The pretty woman in the mirror.

  “Hush,” said Lu Anne. Edna would be at home among the Long Friends.

  Edna was independent and courageous. Whereas, Lu Anne thought, I’m just chickenshit and crazy. Edna would die for her children but never let them possess her. Lu Anne was a lousy mother, certified and certifiable. Who the hell did she think she was, Edna? Too good for her own kids? But then she thought: It comes to the same thing, her way and mine. You want more, you want to be Queen, you want to be Rosalind.

  Edna walking into death was conscious only of the sun’s warmth. So it was written. Walker’s notes had her dying for life more abundant. All suicides died for life more abundant, Walker’s notes said.

  She walked on through the light and shadow of the huge trees. It was, she thought, such a disturbing light. She could see it when she closed her eyes.

  The woods were filled with phantoms and she was looking for Edna. Only her children came to mind, as though they were lost and she was looking for them. As though she were lost.

  In such a light, she had knocked on the door of their first house in town. It was the first time, so far as she could remember, that she had ever knocked on a door in the manner of grown-ups. For a long time—she remembered it as a long time—the door stood closed above and before her. Then, as she remembered, it had opened and her father loomed enormous in the doorway, his blank gaze fixed at the far and beyond.

  So she had said: I’m down here, Daddy.

  His swollen drunk face turned down to hers after a while. His eyes were red and lifeless.

  I thought it was somebody real, he had said. Someone had laughed. Maybe he had laughed.

  I’m real, Daddy.

  Life more abundant, Lu Anne thought, that’s the ticket. That’s what we need.

  Then they were ready and Ricutti was wiping her down.

  “You been crying,” he said. He started to daub under her eyes. “Your eyes a
re all red.” When she stared at him he lowered the cloth.

  I’m real, she thought.

  “Let’s go with it.”

  “I don’t know,” Joe Ricutti said. “Maybe he don’t want that, Lee.”

  “Leave it,” she said. “Just get the damn sweat off me.”

  When they were ready to roll she sat in her marks on the trolley bench. Drogue called for action, the trolley bore her along, and she saw that the field around her was filled with fake camomile. In that moment she found Edna. Edna knew what living was worth to her and the terms on which she would accept it. She knew the difference between living and not living and what happiness was.

  It occurred to Lu Anne that she knew none of these things. Too bad, she thought, because I’m the one that’s real, not her. It’s me out here.

  When they had pulled the trolley around for another take, she saw Walter looking at her through the viewfinder. Who does he think he’s looking at? she wondered. Or is he just seeing movies? Across the reflectors, she saw Bly and Lowndes and Charlie Freitag, all looking. She began to cry again.

  “How about it, Edna?” Walter Drogue asked. He spoke without taking his eye from the viewfinder. “What’s it gonna be?” He was just chattering to keep their spirits up. “Nothingness or grief?”

  “Beats me,” Lu Anne said.

  A few hours south of the border, Walker sat in a vast cool room whose upper walls disappeared into darkness. Four columns of light descended from an unseen source in the ceiling to form rectangles of light beneath them like campfires on a plain. One column lit a reception station where a young oriental woman in nurse’s whites attended a bone-white desk. Another fell upon an altar-like two-tiered platform arranged with desert plants, Indian ceramics and feathered rattles. The contrast between the sun-drenched barrens outside and the deep, almost submarine gloom within was very striking.

  The room’s combination of primitive sanctity and futurism was a bit stagey, Walker thought, which was hardly surprising in the establishment of Dr. Er Siriwai. There were no devices of therapy or prosthesis in sight; nothing visible in the great room was suggestive of sickness. Yet it seemed to Walker that something in the refrigerated air was subtly foul. This was almost certainly, he decided, imagination.

  Presently his name was called by the young woman at the white desk. Smiling, she handed him a shiny brochure and directed him through a dark doorway that opened at his approach. He found himself following a barefoot Mayan servant along a corridor of cool brown tiles.

  The Mayan led him to a garden with a fountain in the center, a pleasant and restrained reproduction of an old Spanish cloister garden. There were herbs of all kinds and orange and lemon trees. An entire section of the garden was given over to the cultivation of red and yellow poppies. The air was fragrant and pure as sound doctrine.

  Taking a stone bench in the shade, Walker had a glance at the brochure the smiling young woman had given him. It told the story of Er Siriwai, M.D., Ph.D., who, born on the roof of the world and reading, Mulligan-like, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, arrived in America to discover his preternatural curative gifts and become Physician to the Stars. The brochure went on to describe the doctor’s renunciation of self-serving, his carefully documented researches, his traduction by medical pharisees and finally his withdrawal to the wilderness in which his healing visions had taken shape and blossomed forth like the fig, the date, the almond and other such evocative trees.

  After a few minutes of reading, Walker looked up to see his old friend come into the garden.

  “Hello, Doc,” Walker said. “I guess you’re doing well, huh?”

  Dr. Siriwai, a tiny man, who in his medical whites complete with reflector and band resembled a child’s doctor doll, struck an attitude.

  “Come,” quoth Dr. Siriwai, “let’s away to prison;

  We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies …”

  The doctor seemed so moved by his own recitation that he was unable to continue. Walker was impressed by the facility with which he was able to quote poetry about prison, since he had only escaped its humiliations by a matter of minutes. At one time, Dr. Siriwai had been the film colony’s most eminent writing doctor and on two or three occasions something very like a medical hit man.

  “And take upon’s,” the little doctor said, recovering, “the mystery of things,

  As if we were God’s spies.”

  Dr. Siriwai spoke an English that combined traces of his cloud-capped homeland and sporting Dublin.

  “I’d love to have seen you, Gordon,” he said. “Bigod, it’s many years since I’ve seen Lear. I think it was Donald Wolfit I saw. Sir Donald Wolfit.”

  “Well,” Walker said, “too bad you couldn’t make it.”

  “I saw it in Variety,” Dr. Siriwai said. He sat on the end of Walker’s stone bench with his legs folded beneath him. “My immediate thought was this: Is he old enough for Lear? Does he know enough—from chasing skirt and bending his elbow—to essay a tragedy of that dimension?”

  “Yes,” Walker said.

  “Can it be, Gordon?”

  “Remember how it is up there, Doc. You hang around, people tell you you’re terrific. You make a few big mistakes. People aren’t as nice. You know enough before you know it.”

  “Still hacking away at the lingo, are you? On your way to B.H., I suppose? The Awakening?”

  “I guess that was in Variety too.”

  “You’ll never learn, Gordon. No hope for you.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Downers, is it?”

  “It is. If you’d be so kind, Doc.”

  “Righto,” Dr. Siriwai said. He unwound from his posture, disappeared among the dwarf citrus and presently returned with three small cardboard boxes marked in Spanish.

  “This is the only genuine Quaalude in the state,” he told Walker. “The rest of it’s counterfeit. Made from mannite, foot powder, God knows what.”

  “I appreciate it, Doc,” Walker said, and reached for his wallet.

  “Keep your money, man. A tiny favor. Pass it along. The favor, I mean, not the downers necessarily.”

  “When I get down to B.H.,” Walker said, “down to the location, I’ll tell them hello. Lots of people down there remember you fondly.”

  Dr. Siriwai settled Western-wise on the edge of the bench.

  “No doubt,” he said, “they remember my little bag fondly. My uppers and my downers and my come-into-the-garden-Mauds.”

  Walker saw that there was still dew on the trilliums in one shaded corner of the garden.

  “You were much in demand at poker games, I recall.”

  “Right,” the doctor said. “I was a wanton player, a desperate case. Lost. Always. Heavily.” He was watching Walker. “You’re not well,” he said after a moment. “You look very badly off indeed.”

  “I thought I might put myself away for a while after B.H.,” Walker said. “Clean up my act.”

  “If you want my advice,” Siriwai said, “you’ll do it now. Leave the coke and the ’ludes alone. You’re doing coke, I can tell you are. You’d better stop the lot, Gordon. You’re not a boy, you know.”

  “My life’s a little out of hand,” Walker explained. “I’d like to make one stop before I rest.”

  “In peace, Gordon. That’s how you’ll bloody rest. Christ’s sake, man, when I first saw you I thought you were one of the customers.”

  “Well, I don’t feel that bad. I’m going down to B.H. to see them shoot my movie. By the way,” he asked Dr. Siriwai, “why do you call them customers? I mean instead of patients or something more … agreeable.”

  “I call them as I feel them to be,” Dr. Siriwai explained. “I don’t call them squeals, or marks or tricks. I call them customers. I�
��m their dealer.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re going to see that schizophrenic poppet, eh? That little southern creature with the booby eyes? Lee Verger?”

  “She always liked you, Doc. I think she’d hope you might always speak well of her.”

  “Don’t give her cocaine, Gordon. No coke for her. You want to see fair Heebiejeebieville, my lad, give one of them cocaine. Mark my words. Hide it. Throw it away before you let her have any.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Walker said.

  “And for God’s sake take care of yourself. Alcohol especially—it’s such rubbish. And when your liver goes, well …” Dr. Siriwai shuddered with distaste. “It’s a jolly unpleasant way to die, Gordon. Almost as bad as … what we treat here.”

  “I know what it’s like,” Walker said. “My father died of it.”

  “Do you remember what W. C. Fields said about death?”

  “He said he’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

  “I don’t mean that. He called death the Man in the Bright Nightgown. Do you see? It has the originality of delirium. Fields was in total bibacious dementia. So when he went out, his death probably looked to him like a man in a bright nightgown.” Dr. Siriwai giggled.

  “I like your poppies,” Walker said. “I always think of them as wildflowers. I don’t associate them with gardens.”

  Dr. Siriwai smiled at the fine blue sky.

  “Poppies, yes. Sweet forgetfulness.” He closed his eyes.

  “If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.”

  “This stuff you give your … customers, does it work?”

  “Work? My dear man, assuredly it works. It cures cancer.”

  “Really?”

  “I wish I had a tanner for every abandoned life we’ve saved here, Gordon. I myself have been awestruck with some of our turnabouts. It gives you a mighty respect for nature’s capacity to heal, I’ll tell you.”

  “Is it what you give them or is it attitude?”

  Dr. Siriwai seemed to find the subject trying.

  “There are no miracles, Gordon. I mean to say, old chap, I don’t believe in miracles, do you? There is attitude, yes. Also herbal therapy, diet, exercise, the lot. Holism. The holistic method.”