Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  “I don’t think my voice is right. It’s too high.”

  He rose to the bait. “You don’t talk. There’s no sound in pictures. You just do what the director tells.”

  I was right. He was a madman and he lived entirely in the past. It was for this, probably, that he had fixed on the idea of renting a room in the old house in St. Albans Place.

  Aside from tea—which he made out of my tea bags without asking for them—I couldn’t see that Nesselrode ate very much. It was not clear to me just how he nourished himself. Perhaps he lived on old dreams, or the blood he sucked out of the ghosts that populated his memory. This, however, would have implied that he was the real Julius Nesselrode, and I was not convinced of that yet. According to our agreement he wasn’t supposed to do any cooking in his room. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of him floating up the stairs with a cabbage, or a bunch of carrots, which he carried loose in his hand and not in a paper bag, so that perhaps he plucked them out of somebody’s vegetable garden. He carried the teapot upstairs too—it was the only one I had and from then on I had to make my own tea in a saucepan—and once, as he went past the living room toward the stairway, I caught a glimpse of something in his hand that looked like a can of V-8 juice. Evidently he had a can-opener in there.

  The first indication I had that his eating habits might be anything like normal, or that he might be conducting any more elaborate culinary operations in his room, was when I discovered that the toaster was missing from the kitchen. This was no ordinary toaster. It had belonged, probably, to my grandfather; at least it had been in the house from the time of my earliest recollections. No question of automatic devices or of the toast popping up. This toaster, of a nickel-plated finish that was tarnished like a valuable antique, was wedged-shaped in contour and narrow at the top, with four small black legs to hold it up. On either side was a door that opened downward, with holes for ventilation. You opened the doors, put in one or two slices of bread, and turned on the switch in the cord that led to the wall. A glow could be seen from inside, through the curlicue holes in the doors. The only way to tell when the toast was done on one side was by guess, or by examination. This was why Astreé and Dirk had burned the toast so often. They decided to kiss, or have an argument over the breakfast table, and forgot to open the doors. When these doors were opened—there was a small black knob on each one so that you didn’t burn your hands—the half-toasted bread slid out and in doing so turned itself over, so that when the door was closed again the un-toasted side was presented to the glowing wires inside. This, of course, was only if the toasted side was done to your satisfaction. If it was overdone, you scraped it with a knife—I can still remember this scratchy rhythmic sound, as irritating as a finger on a blackboard. If it was underdone, you simply repeated the process of opening and shutting the door, and the slice turned itself over a second time so that the partly toasted side could be finished to the proper golden brown. On the top of this device, in ornate embossed letters, was the inscription “Omega Homemaker.” How old this appliance was I don’t know, but I can only testify that mine was still working in 1980, and made excellent toast if you paid attention and didn’t let it burn.

  I searched over the kitchen for the toaster and couldn’t find it. Usually I simply left it on the kitchen counter, or on the table in the breakfast room adjoining. Nesselrode had perhaps put it away in the wrong place; I went through the cupboards, moved around the spices and the carton of salt on the shelf over the stove, and even made a desultory examination of the broom closet. Perhaps, I thought, Nesselrode had taken it too upstairs, where he was gradually assembling an impromptu kitchen in violation of our agreement.

  There were no keys to any of the bedroom doors; they had all disappeared years ago and none of the bedrooms could be locked. It was the middle of the morning and Nesselrode was out of the house, as it happened. He frequently disappeared on mysterious expeditions of his own and sometimes stayed away overnight. I went upstairs and searched in a cursory fashion through his room. There was not very much furniture in it, and the toaster was a large object which would be hard to hide. I satisfied myself in five minutes that it wasn’t there. The empty V-8 cans were in the wastebasket, along with some carrot tops and a few old cabbage leaves, which gave off an abominable smell. Except for that, the room was much as it had been when I had occupied it as a child.

  I did discover one odd thing, however. In going through the dresser, which had four drawers, I found that two of them were empty. A third contained what little clothing Nesselrode owned that he did not actually carry around on his body—four socks, all unmatched, a spare hernia supporter, a threadbare paisley cummerbund, and three pairs of underwear complete with urine stains. The fourth drawer was full almost to the top with scraps of paper. Several of them were slips with the address of the house in St. Albans Place scrawled on them. Evidently he did have difficulty with his memory and was afraid, perhaps, that he might forget where he lived. The rest of the drawer was filled with pictures of women crudely cut out of magazines and Sears Roebuck catalogs. By preference he selected figures in their underwear. There were several hundred of these paper dolls in the drawer. I didn’t examine them all, but the dozen or so I looked at were all mutilated in one way or another. Some had daggers, drawn with a fountain pen and dripping blue blood, protruding from their breasts. Others had their heads cut off, with more inky blood running down their necks. Most of them had been slashed with a razor blade across the breasts, the middle of the body, or lower down; sometimes the face. Without exception the genitals had all been attacked in a special way, evidently as the last step in the process—by being jabbed with a fountain pen, leaving a ragged hole with traces of ink around it. I smiled, shutting the drawer. I could hardly object, considering my own rather odd sexual proclivities.

  The most logical explanation, I thought, was that he had pawned the toaster. He still hadn’t paid me even the first month’s rent, even though he had lived in the house now for several months. Surely they couldn’t have given him much for the toaster, unless it was old enough to have become a valuable object of nostalgia for some collector. Still it didn’t cost much to buy a can of V-8 juice now and then, and you could live on a modest budget if you didn’t pay your rent. Perhaps he was a shoplifter; he had the shifty and beady alertness of a person who would be adept at stealing small objects, and there were certainly enough pockets in his odd overcoat to hold many cans of V-8 juice. I thought of asking him downstairs to dinner now and then, or even taking him out to the Italian restaurant on Melrose. But I decided against it. Neither did I ever take up with him the matter of the missing toaster.

  I thought no more about it until the next object turned up missing. This was more serious, since the object was more valuable and I had a certain personal attachment to it. It was the camel saddle that had stood at the side of the fireplace in the living room for as long as I could remember. It was an odd object, looking not very much like the saddles used for horses, and consisting of a framework of oiled wood with a leather seat suspended in it. The leather was dark and stained. Evidently it was a souvenir my grandfather had brought back from his travels; on the leather at one side was embossed “Cairo 1928” in a curly script, with an enormous decorative C as big as a man’s hand. It had a good smell: old seasoned wood, oiled leather, and some other spicy and exotic odor like an Algerian souk. You could use it for many things. I sat in it when I was a child, Astreé sometimes lay on the floor and used it for a pillow when she was reading, and in the winter we stacked the kindling in it for the fireplace.

  The camel saddle was gone. There was no question of its being in Nesselrode’s room; it was not the kind of thing that you would absentmindedly take away and forget to bring back, like a toaster. Nesselrode had done something with it. I was sure that nobody had broken into the house, and besides what thief would take a camel saddle and leave the sterling silver, the Sisleys by the fireplace, and my several thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment?r />
  “Have you seen my camel saddle?” I demanded of Nesselrode the next time I saw him.

  “A what?”

  “Camel saddle.”

  “I didn’t know you went riding. A fine sport.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t caught the word camel, or perhaps it was his idea of a joke,

  I seized him by the lapel and prevented him from going upstairs. I even shook him a little. I was still amused with him, but I was a little annoyed too.

  “Mr. Nesselrode. There was a camel saddle sitting there by the fireplace, the last time I looked. It’s been there for fifty years. It had a wooden framework and a leather seat and it said Cairo on it. Now did you take it or not?”

  He disengaged his lapel from my fingers, gently and with dignity. “Young man, you should treat me with more respect. I am not nobody. I am Nesselrode after all. I could get you into pictures.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m the type. What did you do with the camel saddle?”

  “It is probably on a camel somewhere. What else is there to do with a camel saddle?”

  “If you give me the ticket I’ll go and redeem it. I don’t care about the money.”

  “So Nesselrode is a thief now.”

  “Listen, Mr. Nesselrode. Would you like to come downstairs and have dinner with me tonight?”

  “No. I don’t eat. Nothing.”

  And then finally there was the table. This was a heavy and cumbersome piece of furniture that my grandfather had shipped out from Cambridge when he retired from Harvard. It was round and at least eight feet in diameter, built of solid oak. It was supported by a massive column in the middle, which split up into four legs with ball-and-claw feet. It had never been moved from its position in the dining room in all the years I had lived in the house; I doubted that four men could have lifted it. Yet it was gone. Nesselrode, I conjectured in a way not very convincing even to myself, had hired movers and had them carry the thing away to an antique dealer, or to some fantastic pawnshop that accepted oaken tables with ball-and-claw feet. I hadn’t been out of the house for several days except to duck out briefly for groceries or to go to the library. I was left with two alternatives: that Nesselrode was a professional thief and had muscular accomplices, or that he was a sorcerer who could make things disappear.

  I never saw the table again in this world. But I did catch a glimpse once of the saddle or one very much like it. It was a couple of weeks later and I had gone out to a program in the classic film series at UCLA. The feature was some flamboyant thing about a border war in the Khyber Pass: the British in pith helmets firing their Martini rifles from horseback, and the Afghan tribesmen, led by a bearded ruffian of a white man who wanted to be king, responding with their antiquated flintlocks. Puffs of smoke appeared silently at the muzzles of the guns. Then the screen went black and some white letters bobbed into view, as though floating in the darkened room.

  “YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE”

  There was a cut to the bugler. He strained at his instrument in absolute silence, his cheeks working in and out. The screen went black again.

  CHARGE!

  Another cut to the bearded ruffian of a white man, on top of a camel that appeared to be stuffed, since it remained motionless while the grips rolled the canvas scenery behind it. He threw away his flintlock and drew a long curved saber. Just at that moment a British bullet struck him.

  THE END OF A RENEGADE.

  commented the white letters with detachment. Dropping the saber and clutching his breast, he slid slowly away from the camera. The round O of his mouth appeared in the middle of his beard. A spurt of blood sprang out of the tunic under his fingers, and then he fell off the camel completely. The last thing to go over was his leg in a ragged puttee. As it disappeared from view it clearly revealed a large embossed C on the leather underneath. The rest of the inscription was too small to read at a distance, at least for someone who didn’t know what it said.

  I went on sitting through the rest of the picture. It was almost the end anyhow. I was in a curious emotional state. I was not excited exactly; I was quite calm. With a dispassionate clarity I examined the two alternatives. It was possible that the saddle had been used in the film and then afterward bought by my grandfather on his trip around the world. But this explanation didn’t really convince me. The film had obviously been shot in a studio and not in Egypt, and it was unlikely that the saddle had been brought to Hollywood for the film and then somehow found its way back into a tourist bazaar in Cairo. Besides the dates didn’t work out. I checked the program. The film had been made in 1915. The inscription on my saddle had read “Cairo 1928.”

  The second explanation was that it wasn’t the same saddle. As the image on the screen gradually faded from my memory I became less certain on this point. After all in the picture I had made out only the large C on the saddle; perhaps the date that was too small to read had been 1915 or even earlier. It was quite possible that there were two such camel saddles in the world; by all odds, in fact, there were probably hundreds. But neither of these theories, it occurred to me, explained what Nesselrode had done with the saddle only a month before. I was sure now that the saddle I had seen in the film was my own.

  Yet I never mentioned the saddle to him again, just as I had made no mention of the disappearance of the toaster. Instead I decided to build my strategy around the oaken table, which was unwieldy and unique enough so that its disappearance couldn’t be put down to chance or turned off as a joke. I decided to confront him directly on this point—not so much to get the table back, since this was probably impossible, but mostly to amuse myself, and also to confirm my growing suspicion about what had happened to the table.

  Through some sort of delicacy, although I had ransacked Nesselrode’s room when he was away, I never went there when he was occupying it—perhaps I was afraid I would find him jabbing a pen into paper dolls. Instead I managed to cut him off one morning just as he was leaving, crossing the hallway in his shabby overcoat and assuming, as soon as he caught sight of me, his pasty and unconvincing smile.

  “Mr. Nesselrode.”

  “Well, what is it? I can’t talk all day. I have business.”

  “I want my table back.”

  He muttered in an undertone, “Table?” Rather than responding to my demand, he seemed to be asking himself if he had ever heard of a table. He didn’t seem to think that he had. Without meeting my eyes, he looked furtively past me at the front door, as though hoping that I would step aside and let him go out of it.

  “It sat right there.” I pointed through the arched opening into the dining room. “It was very large. You couldn’t miss it. It isn’t there any more.”

  “I don’t remember it,” he said vaguely.

  “Please don’t pretend ignorance. We are both too intelligent to play games.”

  This bald flattery was exactly the right tactic. After another regretful glance at the front door, he twitched his nose and turned directly to me. He pursed his lips. He examined me with his lucid protruding eyes and then looked away again.

  “Well then, let us talk about it. Perhaps my business is not so important.”

  “There’s no need to talk about it. I want it back.”

  “That is not so easy.”

  I examined him. His manner was still furtive rather than uneasy. He gave the impression that there was something he could tell me if he wished, but he hadn’t yet decided whether to do so or not. After a moment I said firmly, “I know where it is, and so do you.”

  There was a silence. Then he said, with another darting and diagonal glance at me, “I’ve already said that I could get you into pictures.”

  “Let’s go then,” I said shortly.

  We left the house together. I took nothing; I didn’t even lock the front door.

  4.

  He waited patiently while I unlocked the rusty chain on the pedestrian gate opening out onto Olympic. It must have been this gate that he himself went in and out by—unless he made himself invisible
in some way and came in past the guard’s kiosk on Wilshire, which seemed unlikely —but he gave no sign that he had ever seen the gate before, let alone that he possessed a key to it. Once out on the sidewalk he set off briskly, in a kind of uneven lope, and I had to exert myself to keep up with him. It was somewhat extraordinary. I wouldn’t have expected a man of his age to be so energetic. His two legs one after the other sprang out from the skirts of the unbuttoned coat, like the limbs of a mechanical doll, propelling him along the sidewalk at a pace of perhaps four miles an hour. He said nothing. He hardly seemed to notice that I was walking beside him. Another odd thing was that in some way he seemed to adjust his pace to the traffic lights that he could see coming up toward him as he passed the cross streets, so that we never had to stop for a red light and always crossed on the green, while at the same time I had no impression that he was slowing down his pace at any time for this purpose. On the contrary he seemed to accelerate his speed from block to block until my legs began to ache. This, evidently, was what he did with himself in those mysterious periods when he was gone from the house. I had sensed from the beginning that there was something queer about him that I had not yet identified, in addition to all his other queernesses, and now I knew what it was: he was a pedestrian in Los Angeles, a city where such animals were as rare as auks or Siberian cranes.

  At Fairfax he turned left without warning, leaving me striding along in a straight line and then veering around abruptly, like a character in an old comedy, to catch up with him. “I am surprised that a young man like you is not more athletic,” he mumbled as though to himself. “You should work out with dumb-bars.”

  “Do you work out with dumb-bars?”