“Bullshit.”
“You sat next to Regina Haglund. She was the producer’s daughter.”
My heart went on strike. In my heart, I had always wanted to believe—well, never mind that.
“Nobody who worked on the show is still alive today. Two of the children have since died. . .”
My throat closed up. I had to choke down a bottle of water before I could ask which ones.
“Tommy and Norma Gutierrez. She fell off a bridge and drowned. Just before she turned eighteen. . .”
“Jumped, fell or pushed?”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t. . . what’s it matter?”
“It matters to them,” I said. “What about Miss Iris?”
“She wrote the program. She and Haglund shared directing duties. She died over ten years ago.”
I clipped Miss Iris’s obituary June 12th, 1999. The local paper had fun with it. School’s Out Forever, it said over the picture of a drab old woman with icewater eyes. I remember feeling guilty, the first time I saw her naked face. Then it all came loose and I started laughing and crying. She wasn’t the accomplished dominatrix I’d always imagined. She looked like a retired inner city librarian, with thinning hair and huge horn-rimmed glasses that hid her eyes in twin mandalas of reflected flashburst. In accordance with her wishes, Ms. Iris Klawsen will be cremated and her ashes dispersed at sea without ceremony.
I used it as an excuse to go on a nine-day binge. I never went in the ocean again.
“There’s nobody alive, and they were nobodies. The company went under because Haglund was involved in some kind of pyramid scheme or a cult, using out-of-work actors. He committed suicide in ’75. His wife and daughter moved away and changed their names. I could find them—”
“No, please. Just believe me when I say, they’re not all gone. Somebody sent that tape—” A shadow moved behind her, swooping out of the living room to lunge into her from behind. I stifled a scream. The curtains licked out onto the balcony.
“I couldn’t find that, either, and I looked in the trash, thank you very little.” She shaded her eyes and pointed to her chest. “Your breathing sounds even worse. What’s wrong?”
“Just go back inside, please.”
“OK, but I’m not done. You should know. . .”
“What?”
“You said your memory of that time was pretty hazy. . .”
“What?”
“Their payroll records say that you were only on the show for one week.”
“That’s a lie.”
“There’s a legal brief attached to the ledger for September, 1972. It says you were removed from the show for disciplinary problems, and cites ‘inappropriate touching’ as a reason. They replaced you with—”
“Stop!”
“—With a boy named Billy Munson who fit your general description, and he took your place for the remaining episodes. There are eight William Munsons in the 818. I could call them.”
“I was in all of them. They’re trying to disown me—”
“I believe you, sweetheart.” Her humoring voice made me want to throw a rock at her.
“—Trying to cut me out so they won’t have to answer for what they did. . .”
“And what did they do to you?”
“They—” I choked up. “The last day of school, they shot another episode that never aired. They showed it to me. They must’ve been waiting for me to. . . crack up, and now they’re trying. . .”
“Is this going to make me all angry and sick? What did they—”
“They made us put on the French play.”
“The what? I’m sorry, I’m not a theater person. They made you put on a play, like a Christmas pageant?”
I didn’t want to say it over the phone, but what difference did it make? If they were listening, they already knew everything. “You’re lucky you’ve never heard of The King In Yellow.”
“The. . . isn’t that a Raymond Chandler story?”
“Don’t play games.”
She wanted to believe me. She’d cut off her arm and eat it, to convince me she accepted whatever I told her. It didn’t matter that I was the weirdo son of a grifter with two statch rape convictions, or that my trauma stemmed from being made to take part in a forgotten French play on an equally obscure children’s TV show.
“OK, but all of that is in the past. Nobody is looking for you. Nobody remembers—”
“Ouch.”
“That’s not what I mean. Your IMDB stock is up six percent this week, by the way.” She went inside and tripped over something. “God damn your clutter. . .”
I picked up the binoculars again. “How long have you been there?”
“I crashed here last night. My wi-fi is out and—”
I couldn’t seem to find my own apartment or make the binoculars focus. My eyelids twitched. Had I taken my medication? Did I forget and take too many?
There. The curtains belled out in the morning breeze, then seemed to twist against it, curling around and delineating an enormous body. It turned and showed me a pale eyeless face that somehow seemed, across a half mile of distance, to wink.
“Get out of there, now! Someone’s in the living room!”
She pushed through the curtain to stand on the balcony. “There’s nobody here but me. God only knows why I’ve tried to help you, Arthur. You want to make everyone who tries to help you an accessory in your suicide.”
“Who said anything about suicide?” Then it hit me. I thought I had no more reason to lie. I had a huge card in my hand, and foolishly, I played it. “I know why you’re spinning me round like this, why you said no and then dropped that other package—”
“What other package?”
“I know you’re one of them. . . Norma.”
A shocked inhalation sucked all the air out of the connection. “I don’t know what you’re,” she started, but gave up. “How
long. . . ?”
“I never had any reason to try, before today. You never told me who your father was, but you dropped more than enough hints. I made some calls. Your day job company is run by the same equity fund that holds the Golden Class syndication rights. I realized Him Who Must Not Be Named was originally named Gutierrez, it only made sense. I forgive you.”
“For what?”
“Hiding in plain sight. Lying about your age. For trying to snow me when. . .”
Kelsey—Norma—leaned out over the railing, raging into the setting sun as if it were my face. “You don’t understand me. You think I wanted to get forced out my life when I was a teenager? I was acting out, and my father’s agent thought he would be up for an Oscar that year. So when I jumped into the canal, they lied and said I got swept out to sea. Nobody connected me to my father, and I couldn’t prove it in court. But it had nothing to do with the goddamned show. . .”
“What about the things they did to us?”
“What things? They didn’t molest us, they didn’t drug us. . . They made us put on a dumb little show! Other kids watched it, and they grew up and forgot us, and whatever they were trying to do—”
“What were they trying to do, with us, Norma?”
She had to think about that one. “Teach kids what the world really was, behind its mask. Strange games and arbitrary punishments. A scapegoat staked out in every yard. ‘The cleanest hands, washed only in blood. . .’ You remember, it was one of her lines.”
Kelsey’s voice was like a fuse almost forty years long, burning down in seconds. Short of breath, scalded by her own tears, she rushed to get it out. “I thought I was an accident, but it was worse. Those people who get everything they want in life. Somebody has to pay for it. . .”
“You remember the play.”
She sniffed, hiccupped and sobbed. “I remember everything.”
“Do you remember what happened to me. . . in the play?”
“If you know so much, you probably figured this out already. One the group must stone to death, and one must die by their own hand, to take away all the s
in of the Golden Class, and leave them pure to enter Carcosa and rule. Those are the rules, that was the game. One must die by their own hand. That was supposed to be you, Tardy Artie. All those times I tried to off myself. . . I was trying to save you.”
“Don’t Norma please,” I begged. “I love you.”
“That’s nice. . .” She bowed her head and smiled. Behind her, the curtain swelled and became a hooded shape. “But we’re still puppets. They can make us say anything.”
She jumped off the balcony.
•
In all the tinsel and glitter make-believe of the show, there were two things we kids believed in utterly. One was the Wishing Well. The other was the puppet strings.
They didn’t have to direct us. Miss Iris held us in thrall without the constant barrage of orders and aphorisms that rasped from the mouth of her mask. When a puppet tapped you on the shoulder, whether it was Lord Tanglewood or Lady Greenteeth, Haita the Shepherd or the Raggedy Man, you didn’t know what you would do, only that you had been chosen, and then you watched yourself do it. Some of us stood up from penmanship lessons to utter haunting and beautiful, wordless songs. Others were driven to paint unearthly pictures or recite strange lines of nonsense verse, or, like me, they spilled ink or stole school supplies or sodomized another child in the coatroom. . .
When Kelsey disappeared from view over the railing of my seventh story apartment overlooking Sepulveda and Valley Vista, I felt the strings pull taut. I did not run screaming to the police. I did not call 911. I went looking for the bag lady’s axe and started ripping down the wild cucumber vines, chopping down the ailanthus and castor bean and stranger weeds and parasites, until my island resembled once more a manicured paradise, a child’s dream of a better world.
And as the sunlight failed, I hunkered down in the bushes with my axe and waited for my class reunion.
I could not watch more than ten minutes of the final episode, because I was quite overcome by hallucinations. Out of the stiff, strange delivery of incomprehensible lines by hypnotized children, I saw what had traumatized me. In between the frames of stultifying order dissolving into cardboard madness, I saw flickering visions of everything that didn’t happen.
Miss Iris at the board, and all the children in a circle with their hands in each others’ laps, moaning in unison—all the children clapping in time with Susie slamming her heavy pine desktop down on Bully Billy’s broken head—the door to Carcosa opens in the wall and a torrent of rats floods the set, scurrying up our legs as we climb onto desks and each other to get away—screaming, laughing like rabid monkeys, all of us set fire to the books and throw them at each other until our masks and clothes burn and the set and the studio and the whole world burns. . .
This was not an accident of my clashing meds or a symptom of my trauma. This was what every child saw, every time they watched the Golden Class every time they blinked their eyes, in the little theater of their minds. This was the message of the show, and the secret of its enduring appeal.
But it unlocked everything I had made myself forget. There is no one so free as a condemned man.
Before he dropped me off, my father had tried to confess. He didn’t expect me to understand. I was only six, more scared of him than anything else.
“I joined this group—they’re powerful people, connected in the industry. . . but they let me in, and I didn’t ask why, until it was too late. When you don’t have money, people can control you, and when they do for you, there’s always strings attached. They got me to do some. . . favors for them, and they promised things would change for me.
“But they just wanted me to be part of their group to push them up, you know? Like kids on the playground. . . Listen, inside, everybody in a group thinks they’re the phony, and they’re afraid of being found out, so they go along with the group. But if the group can put all their weakness into one person, then it dies with them, and they can live and rule without doubt or fear. It’s their world, little man.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked out the window. Dad’s radio only got AM, and some awful song about someone called Mellow Yellow leaked through the waves of static.
“I know Mom runs me down a lot, and she’s right, even if she’s a crazy bitch. But I only want the best for you. I want for you to be somebody, so nobody will ever put their strings on you, so you’ll never have to hide behind a mask.
“That’s why I’m doing. . . what I’m doing.” He wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t even looking at the road. “I won’t jump. I’m going to make them push me.”
I hadn’t seen my father for a month when I got the invitation in the mail to audition for Golden Class. It had hardly entered my mind then that I might never see him again, and it wasn’t until much too late that I realized that the two were connected.
I did not need to watch more than ten minutes of the last episode because, in the intervening years, I had read The King In Yellow.
My father’s pyramid scheme cult must have used the expurgated text. The Golden Class alumni took no chances. Tommy had died ambiguously, which must have driven them crazy, maybe explained why they waited so long to close the circle. Now Kelsey had taken her own life, perhaps because she knew I was too weak. For I knew that the one who laid down their life for the class would don the Teacher’s black mask and serve in sunlight. One more had to be sacrificed, to make the Hidden Crown manifest itself. This one would be easy. All they had to do was murder me.
Ten minutes after eleven, a wave of cloying perfume drifted through the thicket, and she came into the grove. Alone. She glided through the clinging overgrowth, but she didn’t trip, for I had cleared the way with the axe I now held up as I leapt into her path.
“I’m not helpless,” she said, holding the gun up before her mask. It fit her now. Our masks were huge and grotesque when we were children, because they were our adult faces. In the play, she was Cassilda.
I looked, but did not see the gun. The scar on her hand caught the iodine glow of the arc sodium lamps, shiny like teeth.
“I looked for you,” she said, under her breath.
“You didn’t,” I started to say, but she stopped the words with her mouth. She drove me backwards into the freshly tilled dirt, into dismembered roots and recycled sewage and the perfume of graves.
I could never endure the touch of another human being, male or female, but now, something twisted inside me was severed and I reveled in the soft heat of her flesh through layered white damask and silk. Everywhere I touched her with my filthy paws left grievous stains, as if she’d been trampled by hogs.
Stripping off my rags, she rolled over and laid the gun down, ground her pelvis against me a few times, and grunted in mild surprise when I spent against her thigh.
“Don’t sweat it, sweetie,” she said. “It still counts.”
She got up with the gun and backed away. I tried to find the axe, but I couldn’t even find my pants. I was still naked when the others began to come into the clearing.
“His wish has been granted,” Regina called out, wiping her leg as she picked her way over to the group. They surrounded me and filled the clearing, a mob of masked men and women. Three of them, two men in black suits and Regina (Cassilda) in her mud-smeared gown, advanced on me with long ceremonial knives.
“You’re going to fuck it up,” I growled. “All the years of planning, of crushing anything good in my life to try to drive me to suicide, and you’re going to fuck it up.”
The man in Thale’s haughty mask snapped, “The sacrifices have been made and accepted.” I recognized his voice from two of last summer’s top-grossing films. “She’s laid down her life to serve in sunlight, and Tom went down to wait in twilight. Only one remains, to wear the Pallid Mask and serve in shadow.”
“Let’s get this shit over with,” Uoht said—which was strange, Uoht was Tommy’s mask. But the show must go on, the players were ultimately, disposable. Uoht lunged with his dagger.
I stepped back and let the pepper s
pray fall out of my sleeve, gave him a blast that flooded his right eye and filled his open mouth. He went down and I stepped over him, but the others were a frozen tableau. “You think Tom was an accident? You based that on what, the coroner’s report? A Variety obit? Jesus, you’re all cracked. If I knew everything I had came to me because I was on some stupid kids’ show, sooner or later, I’d snuff it, too.”
That started them mumbling.
“And Norma wasn’t alone in my apartment. She wouldn’t kill herself, she knew what was at stake. Somebody pushed her.”
The woman, Cassilda, reached up to take off her mask, but Thale stopped her. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Bullshit,” Thale said. “Nobody pushed her. She was a coward, and she did herself in because she knew to stand in our way would be even worse. Our way, do you hear? This world is ours.” The crown, he didn’t have to say, will be mine. Jesus, that insane sonofabitch could act.
“I did it,” I said. “ I pushed her.”
Most of them laughed. I recognized their voices from film and television, from local and national news. In the ones I didn’t recognize, I heard the sneer of real power, of producers and lawyers and accountants. “You never left your little island, Tardy Artie. We’ve had you boxed in for two days now.”
“I did it over the phone. I told her I knew about her, and. . . I told her I loved her. She was out of her head, and I pushed her.”
They were laughing too hard to hear anything. “Her wish was granted!”
“She jumped,” Thale said, helping Uoht to his feet. “Tom was weak inside, but maybe it was murder. More than a few of us hated him. No way to be sure, you’re right. But The Black Mask has been cast. This thing wants to happen. So let’s do it.”
I backed up until I ran into stiff arms that pushed me towards the knives. I twisted away, but through the mob, I saw that the twentieth member of our party wore Miss Iris’s mask.
I wept aloud. I had murdered her with words, but my hands were clean, according the ultimate court, and now she was the Teacher. Now I laughed, because they thought they had me.
The favored kids who wore the special masks made a wish almost every week, but sooner or later, every student in the Golden Class got to make one wish in the Wishing Well. Even the bungled and the botched among us, the slow ones and the cursed, got a rigged question right or did some good deed that allowed us to approach the decorated trashcan in the corner of the classroom beside the door to Carcosa, and throw a golden coin with a tiny slip of paper. I remember how the sound effect of the echoing plop of the coin drowned out the muted thud of the coin hitting the pillow on the bottom of the trashcan, yet believing that my wish would come true. When Miss Iris escorted me to the Wishing Well—even then, expecting mischief—she squeezed the tightly rolled note into my fist along with the coin. There was no time to balk, so I simply palmed it and threw in the coin with the slip of paper I had written on my own.
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