by Paula Guran
“I slept badly. Too cold.”
“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”
“It never occurred to me.”
His breathing sounded awkward, labored.
“You okay?”
“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”
“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”
He nodded, slowly. “ ‘The Artist’s Dream’ . . . ” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”
I turned to go and then something occurred to me.
“Mister Dundas,” I said. “Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?”
He shook his head.
“You never wrote a screenplay?”
“Not me,” he said.
“Promise?”
He grinned. “I promise,” he said.
I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of Sons of Man and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn’t want it, now that they had bought it.
I tried to write “The Artist’s Dream” some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.
I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.
I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:
I’m thinking about England in the rain,
a strange theatre on the pier: a trail
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
The fear should be of going bleak insane,
the magic should be like a fairytale.
I’m thinking about England in the rain.
The loneliness is harder to explain—
an empty place inside me where I fail,
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
I think of a magician and a skein
of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.
I’m thinking about England in the rain . . .
The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain
and here’s a sword, a hand, and there’s a grail
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,
tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.
I’m thinking about England, in the rain
of fear and magic, memory and pain.
I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.
I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.
The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.
The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.
I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.
In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.
A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.
On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.
She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.
“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. “I got out, didn’t I?”
Then she stood up and walked around the room.
“I can’t believe this hotel is still standing,” she said “I used to fuck here.” Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.
“Do you worship me?” she asked.
I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.
“Nobody remembers anything anymore,” she said. “It’s a thirty-minute town.”
There was something I had to ask her. “Where are the stars?” I asked. “I keep looking up in the sky, but they aren’t there.”
She pointed at the floor of the chalet. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places,” she said. I had never before noticed that the floor of the chalet was a sidewalk and each paving stone contained a star and a name-names I didn’t know: Clara Kimball Young, Linda Arvidson, Vivian Martin, Norma Talmadge, Olive Thomas, Mary Miles Minter, Seena Owen . . .
June Lincoln pointed at the chalet window. “And out there.” The window was open, and through it I could see the whole of Hollywood spread out below me—the view from the hills: an infinite spread of twinkling multicolored lights.
“Now, aren’t those better than stars?” she asked.
And they were. I realized I could see constellations in the street lamps and the cars.
I nodded.
Her lips brushed mine.
“Don’t forget me,” she whispered, but she whispered it sadly, as if she knew that I would.
I woke up with the telephone shrilling. I answered it, growled a mumble into the handpiece.
“This is Gerry Quoint, from the studio. We need you for a lunch meeting.”
Mumble something mumble.
“We’ll send a car,” he said. “The restaurant’s about half an hour away.”
The restaurant was airy and spacious and green, and they were waiting for me there.
By this point I would have been surprised if I had recognized anyone. John Ray, I was told over hors d’oeuvres, had “split over contract disagreements,” and Donna had gone with him, “obviously.”
Both of the men had beards; one had bad skin. The woman was thin and seemed pleasant.
They asked where I was staying, and, when I told them, one of the beards told us (first making us all agree that this would go no further) that a politician named Gary Hart and one of the Eagles were both doing drugs with Belushi when he died.
After that they told me that they were looking forward to the story.
I asked the question. “Is this for Sons of Man or When We Were Badd? Because,” I told them, “I have a problem with the latter.”
They looked puzzled.
It was, they told me, for I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll. Which was, they told me, both High Concept and Feel Good. It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History.
They told me that they thought it would be a good thing if our hero could rescue the young lady from her loveless marriage, and if they could rock and roll together at the end.
I pointed out that they needed to buy the film rights from Nick Lowe, who wrote the song, and then that, no, I didn’t know who his agent was.
; They grinned and assured me that wouldn’t be a problem.
They suggested I turn over the project in my mind before I started on the treatment, and each of them mentioned a couple of young stars to bear in mind when I was putting together the story.
And I shook hands with all of them and told them that I certainly would.
I mentioned that I thought that I could work on it best back in England.
And they said that would be fine.
Some days before, I’d asked Pious Dundas whether anyone was with Belushi in the chalet, on the night that he died.
If anyone would know, I figured, he would.
“He died alone,” said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. “It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.”
It felt strange to be leaving the hotel.
I went up to the front desk.
“I’ll be checking out later this afternoon.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Would it be possible for you to . . . the, uh, the groundskeeper. Mister Dundas. An elderly gentleman. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him around for a couple of days. I wanted to say good-bye.”
“To one of the groundsmen?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me, puzzled. She was very beautiful, and her lipstick was the color of a blackberry bruise. I wondered whether she was waiting to be discovered.
She picked up the phone and spoke into it, quietly.
Then, “I’m sorry, sir. Mister Dundas hasn’t been in for the last few days.”
“Could you give me his phone number?”
“I’m sorry, sir. That’s not our policy.” She stared at me as she said it, letting me know that she really was so sorry . . .
“How’s your screenplay?” I asked her.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Well—”
“It’s on Joel Silver’s desk,” she said. “My friend Arnie, he’s my writing partner, and he’s a courier. He dropped it off with Joel Silver’s office, like it came from a regular agent or somewhere.”
“Best of luck,” I told her.
“Thanks,” she said, and smiled with her blackberry lips.
Information had two Dundas, P’s listed, which I thought was both unlikely and said something about America, or at least Los Angeles.
The first turned out to be a Ms. Persephone Dundas.
At the second number, when I asked for Pious Dundas, a man’s voice said, “Who is this?”
I told him my name, that I was staying in the hotel, and that I had something belonging to Mr. Dundas.
“Mister. My grandfa’s dead. He died last night.”
Shock makes clichés happen for real. I felt the blood drain from my face; I caught my breath.
“I’m sorry. I liked him.”
“Yeah.”
“It must have been pretty sudden.”
“He was old. He got a cough.”
Someone asked him who he was talking to, and he said nobody, then he said, “Thanks for calling.”
I felt stunned.
“Look, I have his scrapbook. He left it with me.”
“That old film stuff?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Keep it. That stuff’s no good to anybody. Listen, mister, I gotta run.”
A click, and the line went silent.
I went to pack the scrapbook in my bag and was startled, when a tear splashed on the faded leather cover, to discover that I was crying.
I stopped by the pool for the last time, to say good-bye to Pious Dundas, and to Hollywood.
Three ghost-white carp drifted, fins flicking minutely, through the eternal present of the pool.
I remembered their names: Buster, Ghost, and Princess; but there was no longer any way that anyone could have told them apart.
The car was waiting for me, by the hotel lobby. It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport, and already I was starting to forget.
Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, and the recipient of numerous literary honors. Originally from England, he now lives in the U.S.
The best-known street in Las Vegas is The Strip, but the roadway across the top of Hoover Dam (although in our world it is now closed to traffic) plays a role here too. The protagonist, Jack, is himself magical, as is—to an extent—his friend Stewart. So are, unfortunately, Goddess and Angel.
One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King
Elizabeth Bear
It’s not a straight drop. Rather, the Dam is a long sweeping plunge of winter-white concrete: a dress for a three-time Las Vegas bride without quite the gall to show up in French lace and seed pearls. If you face Arizona, Lake Mead spreads out blue and alien on your left hand, inside a bathtub ring of Colorado River limestone and perchlorate drainage from wartime titanium plants. Unlikely as canals on Mars, all that azure water rimmed in massive red and black rock; the likeness to an alien landscape is redoubled by the Dam’s louvered concrete intake towers. At your back is the Hoover Dam visitor’s center, and on the lake side sit two art-deco angels, swordcut wings thirty feet tall piercing the desert sky, their big toes shiny with touches for luck.
That angled drop is on your right. À main droite. Downriver. To California. The same way all those phalanxes and legions of electrical towers march.
It’s not a straight drop. Hoover’s much wider at the base than at the apex, where a two-lane road runs, flanked by sidewalks. The cement in the Dam’s tunnel-riddled bowels won’t be cured for another hundred years, and they say it’ll take a glacier or a nuke to shift the structure. Its face is ragged with protruding rebar and unsmoothed edges, for all it looks fondant-frosted and insubstantial in the asphyxiating light of a Mojave summer.
Stewart had gotten hung up on an upright pipe about forty feet down the rock face beside the dam proper, and it hadn’t killed him. I could hear him screaming from where I stood, beside those New Deal angels. I winced, hoping he died before the rescue crews got to him.
Plexiglas along a portion of the walkway wall discourages jumpers and incautious children: a laughable barrier. But then, so is Hoover itself—a fragile slice of mortal engineering between the oppressive rocks, more a symbol interrupting the flow of the sacred Colorado than any real, solid object.
Still. It holds the river back, don’t it?
Stewart screamed again—a high, twisting cry like a gutted dog. I leaned against the black diorite base of the left-hand angel, my feet inches from this inscription: 2700 BC IN THE REIGN OF THE PHARAOH MENKAURE THE LAST GREAT PYRAMID WAS BROUGHT TO COMPLETION. I bathed in the stare of a teenaged girl too cool to walk over and check out the carnage. She checked me out instead; I ignored her with all the cat-coolness I could muster, my right hand hooked on the tool loop of my leather cargo pants.
With my left one, I reached up to grasp the toe of the angel. Desert-cooked metal seared my fingers; I held on for as long as I could before sticking them in my mouth, and then reached up to grab on again, making my biceps ridge through the skin. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe. Eyepatch and Doc Martens, diamond in my ear or not, the girl eventually got tired of me. I saw her turn away from the corner of my regular eye.
They were moving cars off the Dam to let emergency vehicles through, but the rescue chopper would have to come from Las Vegas. There wasn’t one closer. I checked my watch. Nobody was looking at me anymore, despite dyed matte-black hair, trendy goatee, and sunburned skin showing through my torn sleeveless shirt.
Which was the plan, after all.
I released the angel and strolled across the mosaic commemorating the dedication of the Dam. Brass and steel inlaid in terrazzo express moons and planets: Alcyone, B Tauri, and Mizar. Marked out among them are lines of inclination and paths of arc. The star map was left for future archaeologists to find if they wondered at the Dam’s provenance: a sort of “we were here, and this is what we made you” signature scrawled on the bottom of a gl
ue-and-glitter card. A hundred and twenty miles north of here, we’re leaving them another gift: a mountain full of spent nuclear fuel rods, and scribed on its surface a similar message, but that one’s meant to say “Don’t Touch.”
Some card.
The steel lines describe the precession of equinoxes and define orbital periods. They mark out a series of curves and angles superimposed across the whole night sky and the entire history of civilized mankind, cutting and containing them as the Dam cuts and contains the river.
It creeps me out. What can I say?
THEY DIED TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM, an inscription read, across the compass rose and signs of the zodiac on my left, and near my feet CAPELLA. And ON THIS 30TH DAY OF THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER IN THE YEAR (ANNO DOMINICÆ INCARNATIONIS MCMXXXV) 1935, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, 32ND PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEDICATED TO THE SERVICE OF OUR PEOPLE THIS DAM, POWER PLANT, AND RESERVOIR. A little more than ten years before Bugsy Siegel gave us the Flamingo Hotel and the Las Vegas we know and love today, but an inextricable link in the same unholy chain nonetheless. I try to be suitably grateful.
But Bugsy was from California.
I passed over or beside the words, never stopping, my ears full of Stewart’s screaming and the babble of conversation, the shouts of officers, the wail of sirens. And soon, very soon, the rattle of a helicopter’s rotors.
The area of terrazzo closest to the angels’ feet is called the Wheel of Time. It mentions the pyramids, and the birth of Christ, and the Dam. It ends in the year AD 14,000. The official Dam tour recommends you stay home that day.
Alongside these dates is another:
EARLY PART OF AD 2100
Slipped in among all the ancient significances, with a blank space before it and the obvious and precise intention that it someday be filled to match the rest.
Stewart screamed again. I glanced over my shoulder; security was still distracted. Pulling a chisel from my spacious pocket, I crouched on the stones and rested it against the top of the inscription. I produced a steel-headed mallet into my other hand. When I lifted the eyepatch off my otherwise eye, I saw the light saturating the stone shiver back from the point of my chisel like a prodded jellyfish. There was some power worked into it. A power I recognized, because I also saw its potential shimmer through my right eye where my left one saw only the skin of my own hand. The Dam, and me. Something meant to look like something else.
