by Robert Stone
“Anyway,” Walker said. “It’s a pleasant place.”
Dr. Siriwai looked grim.
“You learn to conserve your spiritual energy here. There’s a lot of negativity about. I instruct my staff to keep a positive attitude. Hang on to the handrails, I tell my people, or they’ll drag you down with them.”
“So you do lose a few. Customers.”
“Some of them, Gordon. It’s their time and they’ve no right to be here. But one doesn’t turn down a contract. Hope is the anchor when all is said and done.”
“Too bad,” Walker said, “you can’t save them all.”
“Well,” Dr. Siriwai said, “it would be wonderful for business. I mean, are we talking philosophy or what?”
“I was just curious,” Walker said, “about whether you believed in it or not.”
“I believe in hope,” Dr. Siriwai said.
“The anchor.”
“Indeed,” said Dr. Siriwai. “Exactly so.”
“I should be on my way,” Walker said. “I have a few hours of driving.”
“Tell them at reception to give you one of our decals. It’ll ease your passage on our highways and byways. We’re not without influence in this part of the world.”
They shook hands and Walker offered his thanks for the Quaaludes.
“I remember you, Gordon. I remember some fine evenings of drink and jaw under the palm trees. I always thought you were a clever fellow and a great wit. But the thing is, I don’t remember your work at all. Nothing you ever did quite maintained itself in my memory.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Doc. I thought you liked the things I did.”
“Ah,” said the doctor, “no doubt I did, no doubt I did, Gordon. But your work—I’d have to say it—sat lightly on my recollection.”
“Work in movies can be ephemeral.”
Dr. Siriwai patted Gordon’s forearm.
“That’s it, you see. Ephemeral. Sure, it’s the nature of the medium.” Siriwai’s eyes came alight. He took Gordon by the arm and walked him around the garden. “I had a list once, Gordon—not a written list, of course, but a private mental list—of people I thought were supremely talented. Or good at certain things. Or clever but spurious. Or talented but lost or wasted it. I wasn’t just a sawbones, y’see, indifferent to the artistic aspects of the motion picture. I cared”—he touched his heart—“and I loved, I appreciated the work of the people I met in practice. But in your case, Gordon, though I love you dearly, old son, I can’t for the life of me remember the things you did. Or where on me little list you figured.”
“As one who loved his fellow man,” Walker said.
“Oh ho.” Siriwai gave a little clap with his soft hands. “Well said.”
“I was all right. I started as a kid. I had no training and I never took acting as seriously as I should. Never learned my craft until it was too late. As for writing—the kind I did was always the kind anyone can do. I never tried another kind. Except, of course, for that show. The opera.”
“Never got to direct?”
“No.”
“Pity,” Siriwai said. When they had completed their garden round, he released Walker’s arm.
“Perhaps you gave in too much. The immediate rewards were impressive to a young fellow—I remember well. And in my day there was the glamour of it all. One can’t give in too much to immediate reward, you know. You lose something, eh? Have to pay off on one end or the other.”
“That was it, I suppose.”
“Look at me,” Dr. Siriwai said. “You’d think I was well situated. I might envy myself from the outside looking in but little I’d know about it. I’m more than sixty-five, Gordon. According to the Vedas I should be free. I should return to the mountains, free as a mountain bird to meditate, and think about it all from morning till night. But I can’t, you see.”
“How’s that?”
Dr. Siriwai laughed merrily.
“Because I failed where you failed, Gordon. Failed to do the job. When I was studying in Great Denmark Street, now, I thought I’d go home to practice. Up the valleys. Into the starving villages. Over the rope bridges I’d go, risking fever and dacoits, only my books for company. In the end—not a bit of it.” He shook his head and uttered a series of reflective grunts. “I had an odd experience on my way from Dublin back up to London. Doubtless you know the Indian expression ‘karma’?”
“It’s widely used, Doc. You hear it all the time.”
“Well,” the doctor continued, “there I was, years ago and I’m just off the ferry from Dun Laoghaire on the Holyhead—Euston train. Somewhere—Bangor it must have been—the guard comes through first class, shouting his head off for a doctor. Well, I thought, who’s that excellent thing if not myself? So I went with the man and what do I find a few cars back but a lad in an empty compartment who’s stinking of Jameson’s and going cyanotic before our eyes. There’s an empty tube of Nembutal in his fist.
“ ‘Stop the train,’ I cried, and they did and off I went with this chap, my very first patient, to the nearest hospital and they pumped him out and he awoke to the light of day. Now, I later learned, Gordon, that the fellow recovered completely. In hospital he chanced to meet a beautiful young Welsh nurse with whom he fell madly in love—as she with him—and whom he subsequently strangled. Naturally they hanged him. I was a bit put off by it. First patient, value of life and all that. I daresay I’d have been sued today. In any case, finally, I went for the big bucks and the bright lights just as you did.”
“First you think it’s the money,” Walker said. “Then you’re not so sure.”
“Well, there’s no going back to the mountains for me now, Gordon. I have to stay here and die. With my customers.”
“I guess,” Walker said, “I’d better be rolling. To get down there before dark.”
“Do get yourself straight, old fellow. Hope the anchor, eh? Who knows but you may do something worthwhile one day. Only remember what the holy book says, Gordon: ‘We are not promised tomorrow.’ ”
“Thanks, Doc. I hope you continue to prosper.”
“Gordon, as long as there’s … well”—he smiled broadly and, as Gordon had remembered, some of his teeth were indeed of gold—“you know what I mean. I’ll be in business for a while.”
As Gordon went out the doctor’s hands were pressed together in benediction.
In the air-conditioned gloom of their trailer, the Drogues, father and son, watched a videotape of the last take. It was Lu Anne on the trolley, a continuous medium-close shot. Eric Hueffer and Lise Rennberg, Drogue’s Swedish cutter, watched with them. They sat in a semicircle on folding metal chairs.
“We have some very nice cutaways for this if you need them,” she told the director.
“Neat,” young Walter Drogue said, and switched on an indirect light over his desk.
“Walter,” Eric Hueffer said good-humoredly, “just so you don’t think I’m a complete nut, could I offer my arguments for a fourteen-millimeter lens in that scene? Or the next one?”
“Interesting idea, Eric.”
“Well, jeez,” Hueffer said, “you dismissed it out of hand an hour ago.”
“Did I?” Walter asked. “How rash of me. Of course we could use a fourteen there, Eric. But we’d need painted backdrops instead of the trees. Do you think we could work that out?”
“Come on, Walter,” Eric said.
Lise Rennberg smiled sedately.
“Maybe we could use footage from Caligari, huh, Eric? To show that the character’s at the end of her tether?”
“Obviously I was wrong,” Hueffer said, and got out of his chair. He was a tall young man, almost a head taller than Walter Drogue junior, and his height compelled him to stoop when he stood in the trailer.
“Don’t even think about it,” young Drogue said.
When they were alone the Drogues ran the videotape over again.
“Man,” young Drogue said, watching the screen, “that’s what I call inhabited space.�
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Old Drogue reached out and stopped the tape, freezing the frame.
“You had her crying?”
“She cried. I thought I’d keep it.” He turned to his father. “You don’t like it?”
“I like it but something bothers me.”
He started the tape over again, stopping it about where he had before, on very nearly the same frame.
“Something,” old Drogue said softly, and shook his head.
“What’s the trouble?” young Walter asked. “You want it shot through a fourteen too?”
“You’re very hard on that young man,” Drogue senior told his son. “He’s efficient. He’s enthusiastic. I mean … a fourteen-millimeter—it’s off the wall but you can see how he’s thinking. He comes out of the schools.”
“So do I,” Drogue junior said.
“Maybe if your name was Hueffer you’d be his A.D., huh? Then he could be sarcastic to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son told him. “You don’t know what it was like. You can’t.”
“If your name was such a burden,” old Drogue said, “you should have changed it.”
“I was Walter Drogue the Less.”
“Tough shit,” the old man said.
“And I was never allowed to be as much of a fool as fucking Hueffer.”
“Stop picking on him,” old Drogue said. “You’re lucky to have him. He could go all the way, that kid.”
“His day will come,” young Drogue said.
“Will that be good news for him?”
“He’ll get his own picture. Little by little things will get out of hand. He’ll try weird shit—like spooky lenses. He’ll try to do everything himself. Presently they’ll smell his blood. They’ll sabotage him and laugh at him behind his back. His actors will panic. His big opportunity will turn to shit before his eyes. He’ll be afraid to show his nose on his own set.”
“Well,” the old man said, “that’s how movies get made. Myself, I’m too superstitious to wish disaster on my own assistants.”
“It’s not my wish. It’s inevitable. It’s the kind of guy he is.”
Drogue senior started the tape again. He and his son watched Lu Anne take her ride.
“I could watch that for twenty seconds, couldn’t you?” young Drogue asked. “Do most of the ride in one continuous medium-close, then maybe cut away to her point of view?”
“Why did you have her cry?”
“Hell, she was crying. Why not?”
“It looks out of character.”
“Only to us.”
“What do you mean?” old Drogue demanded. “It’s her cracking up.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dad, don’t you think I know that? It’ll play just fine.”
“Ever try to edit around somebody going bananas? You end up as crazy as them.”
“Well, I have two options, don’t I? I can make her not be crazy. Or I can get the picture completed with her as she is. Which do you recommend?”
“She has a way of being crazy,” old Drogue said, “that photographs pretty well.”
“Right,” his son said.
“Some do, some don’t.”
“She does. Ever since her old man started packing, her energy level out there has been a hundred and twenty percent.”
“She could do a complete flip. She has before.”
“Then I guess I fly in Kurlander or nourish her with my blood or something.”
“You don’t have too far to go.”
“I have some of Walker’s literary scenes to do up in L.A. Some important interiors. I need her coherent for that.” They watched the trolley tape run to its completion. “I’ll have Walker down here. I’ve got that peckerhead novelist to keep amused. If I can get her through this weekend, I can get her the rest of the way.”
“Good luck,” the old man said.
They went out into the afternoon; young Drogue looked at the sky. Overhead the sky had cleared and the wind had slackened. The storm hung on the horizon out to sea, a distant menace.
Hueffer and Toby Blakely had discovered a tarantula hiding in the shade of the trolley’s undercarriage and were tormenting it with a stick.
“They can jump really well,” Drogue told his men. Hueffer got to his feet.
“I was raised with tarantulas,” Blakely said. “Learned to love ’em.”
“I think maybe you’re right about the rain, Eric.”
“You thinking about shooting Lee’s walk tonight?” Blakely said.
“I’m thinking if it doesn’t rain we better do it. We’ll never get a better match and it could be pissing buckets tomorrow.”
“I’ll go on record,” Hueffer said. “Beautiful sunset tonight. Indicating chubasco in the morning. A day and a half of solid rain.”
“You predict weather on my set, you better be right,” Drogue said. “I have vast powers of evil. I don’t like bad predictions.”
“I think he’s right,” Blakely said. “If it was my money I’d pay the overtime and keep everybody out. Be better than looking at the rain tomorrow.”
“I’ll talk to Lu Anne,” Drogue said to Hueffer. “And since we have the producer here we can consult with him. Which is always fun.”
He looked down and discovered the tarantula approaching the tip of his Tony Lama boot. “You fuckers better be right,” he told them. He raised his foot, brought it down on the creature and mashed it into the sandy ground. “Or else.”
Blakely looked at him evenly. “That’ll just make it rain, boss.”
He and Drogue watched the young assistant director set out purposefully in search of Axelrod, the unit manager.
“You like that kid?” Drogue asked his photographer.
“Yeah,” Blakely said. “I kind of like him. Don’t you?”
Drogue had begun to scrape the hairy remnants of spider leg and thorax from the bottom of his boot and onto the edge of the trolley.
“Don’t you think he has a certain assholish quality?”
Blakely stood looking into the director’s eyes for several seconds.
“Maybe,” he said at length.
Drogue nodded affably. “I kind of like him too.”
Lu Anne was having her hair combed out as Vera Ricutti folded the last of Edna Pontellier’s cotton dresses, putting the pins in a cardboard box.
“God,” Lu Anne said, “they did you up like a celestial. Then they turned you loose with more spikes and prongs than a bass lure. There must have been young boys cut to ribbons.”
“That taught them respect,” Joe Ricutti said. “They should bring it back.”
Shortly afterward young Drogue appeared at the trailer; Josette and the Ricuttis took their equipment and left, unbidden.
“How are you?” young Drogue asked. She told him that she was fine. The pins on the dress made her think of defense and escape. Thorns. If I could, she thought, I would emit the darkness inside me like a squid and blind them all and run.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Drogue said.
They walked in a wide circle among the trees, hand in hand, Lu Anne wearing the thin white beach robe over her underwear.
“The most important question to me,” Drogue told her, “is whether you want to do it tonight. If you don’t, we’ll wrap.”
She said, after all, it was just walking in the water. She told him she would do it and that was what he wanted to hear.
Back at the trailer Vera Ricutti asked her if there was anything she wanted. Darkness was what she thought she wanted. Cool and darkness.
“Just to put my feet up awhile,” she told Vera.
When she was in the cool and dark the Long Friends emerged and began to whisper. She lay stiff, her eyes wide, listening.
Malheureuse, a Friend whispered to her. The creature was inside her dresser mirror. Its face was concealed beneath black cloth. Only the venous, blue-baby-colored forehead showed and part of the skull, shaven like a long-ago nun’s. Its frail dragonfly wings rested aga
inst its sides. They always had bags with them that they kept out of sight, tucked under their wings or beneath the nunnish homespun. The bags were like translucent sacs, filled with old things. Asked what the things were, their answer was always the same.
Les choses démodées.
She turned to see it, to see if it would raise its face for her. Their faces were childlike and absurd. Sometimes they liked to be caressed and they would chew the tips of her fingers with their soft infant’s teeth. The thing in the mirror hid its face. Lu Anne lay back down and crossed her forearms over her breasts.
Tu tombes malade, the creature whispered. They were motherly.
“No, I’m dead,” she told it. “Mourn me.”
In the next moment she found herself fighting for breath, as though an invisible bar were being pressed down against her. She turned on the light and the Long Friends vanished into shadows like insects into cracks in the walls; their whispers withdrew into the hum of the cooler. Delirium was a disease of darkness.
Her pills were on a shelf in the trailer lavatory. She went in and picked up the tube. Her body convulsed with loathing at the sight of the stuff.
Outside, the sun was declining, almost touching the uppermost layer of gray-blue storm cloud over the ocean. Wrapping the beach robe around her, she stood for a moment close to panic. She had no idea where to go, what to do. In the end she went to the nearest trailer, which was George Buchanan’s.
Buchanan rose in answer to her knock; he had set his John D. MacDonald mystery on the makeup counter.
“George,” she said breathlessly. “Hi.”
“Hi, Lu Anne.” He looked concerned and cross. He was a stern-faced man, a professional villain since his youth in the fifties. “I’m not here, you know. I’m hiding out.”
“Are you, George?”
“My son is with his girlfriend back at the bungalow. I came out here to give them a little … what shall we call it?”
“George,” she said in a girlish whine, “do you have a downer? Please? Do you?”
He looked stricken. He was so shocked by her request that he tried to make a joke of it.
