Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  Somewhere there were birds singing in bushes.

  “I went back to our old house. The one your father built. It has had eight owners since we left. I walked through its rooms. Everything had been torn out, replaced. Even the stone fireplace your father built. Even the tree we planted that had your name. The shoebox at the end of the hall, even the patio out back.”

  “What?” Jonathan began, words trailing limply. He meant to ask, what did the owners think, with you wandering through their rooms.

  “They didn’t see me. I wasn’t really there.” She admitted it, shyly, with a sad shrug of her shoulders.

  “You never told me,” she said. “You never told me anything about yourself. You shut me out. You were embarrassed. You should always pay attention to embarrassment, Jonathan. It means there is something too tangled to deal with. And humor, when people turn things into a joke. Or when they make them weird or spooky. It means that there is something people cannot face.”

  She took off her sunglasses, and looked at him directly.

  “Have you ever noticed, Jonathan? Being an actor. Has it ever occurred to you that there are only two genres that can deal with family life? One of them is comedy.” She smiled ruefully. “And the other is . . .”

  Her voice went rough and deep and harsh and menacing, and her face blossomed out like a flower in time-lapse photography, burst out in an eruption of scar tissue and deformation, marks where knives had passed.

  “The other is horror!”

  Jonathan howled and threw himself back in his chair, nearly knocking it over. He lost all of his breath, he couldn’t pull in air, and his heart was thumping.

  He looked around his garden, and there was no one there, and it was dark. When had the sun set?

  I was dreaming, he told himself. That was all; I was dreaming.

  But he knew his eyes had been open, and he knew he had been awake. He knew his mind was beginning to go. He didn’t have as much time as he had thought.

  Behind the locked door, the telephone began to ring again, over and over.

  Finally, in 1981 when he was thirty years old, Jonathan had been offered a leading role in a film.

  It was a horror movie. His agent described the script, euphemistically, as “powerful.” The character was so disfigured that Jonathan had assumed no one would know it was him under the makeup.

  The film was called The Child Minder. Jonathan played a character called Mort. Mort’s face had been slashed by his father when he was a child. The face looked like a crazy quilt, all swellings and stitches. The character Mort loved children, and he loved killing them.

  Mort hung them from meat hooks. He pressed cheese-cutting wire through them. Mort kissed them as he killed them and called them “my sweet baby, my sweet child.”

  Jonathan needed the money. It was with a sense of dread that he showed up at 5:00 a.m. in the scanty little trailer on location in Santa Monica. He assumed he would dry again. He often did, without warning. Despite his reputation for brilliance, Jonathan would sometimes unaccountably be unable to act. It was unaccountable even to himself.

  Ira had read the script and described it with one word: pornography.

  But as the layers of latex accumulated, destroying his face, Jonathan found he began to feel pity for the character he saw being built up in the mirror. Jonathan found a voice for him—desperate, wild with sadness and humor and betrayed good grace. His voice would be cultured, his laugh hysterical and poisoned. There was something solid there, as solid as history, that Jonathan could grasp.

  Jonathan stepped out of the trailer into a grey California morning. He walked toward the lights and stepped into their magic circle. Jonathan spun on his heel once, and something alive reared out from him, took over his face, took over his voice box and cheek muscles. The latex on his face was as unresponsive as scar tissue. That was right, too.

  Children. What the world does to children. Cuts them, scars them, imprisons them, destroys them. It was all so terrible as to be a horrible joke, an embarrassment, a subject for comedy, comedy or terror.

  They filmed the last scene first.

  “Hey,” said the director, a beefy, forty-year-old ex-cameraman. “You know, that’s really good.” He was surprised. They were on to something.

  MEET MORT, said the billboards. HE LOVES KIDS. TO PIECES.

  The Child Minder was a monstrous success. For some reason, young teenagers were willing to pay to see people their own age tortured and killed in various ways. Market research showed that many of them went to see The Child Minder two or three times.

  Ira never went to see it at all. “I just think it’s a terrible shame that the only thing this society can find to do with your talent is that garbage.”

  Jonathan disagreed. There was something to Mort, something he couldn’t define. Mort meant something.

  There was a sequel. Mort had died at the end of the first film. Child Minder II resurrected him in a studio-bound hell.

  Hell was full of the souls of children. They were made to sing merry school songs, chained to desks. They were drilled by tormenting demons in gray clothes with spectacles and fangs and rulers that beat wrists until hands dropped off.

  There was a race of dwarves in Hell. They wore black leather harnesses, just like in certain L.A. bars. They had interesting deformities that took the better part of a day to create in makeup, and they flayed people alive. They sang and danced as they worked, like a Disney movie played backward. At the climax, Hell was harrowed by a visiting priest, and Mortimer escaped in a blaze of fire, out into the real world, an eternal spirit, to kill again and again in a chain of sequels. Mort was the wounded spirit of the eternal hatred of children.

  In each of the films, all of the adults were either fools or drunks, wrapped up in work or sleazy sex. They had failed their children utterly. The children were left to defend themselves.

  Mort materialized out of their parents. In sequences of special effects, he slimed his way out of parents’ sleeping, snoring mouths. Mortimer was wept out of their eyes, to coagulate on the floor. He climbed out of the television set as adults watched the news impassively. The news, in the form of armed alerts, terrorism and serial murders, continued to flicker on Mortimer’s face. The children died, slowly, horribly.

  Market research showed that there had to be a murder every ten minutes or the audience would get bored. In each ending, virtue triumphed in a blaze of light, and another generation would be left to grow up in peace. Except that as each sequel ended, Mort’s face would be glimpsed, reflected in a pair of adult sunglasses or waiting for a bus, reading a newspaper. CHILD MURDERED, the headline would scream. With each return, Mortimer made more money.

  Jonathan started to get letters. Many of them wanting to know about the makeup and the special effects. Some of the letters were from girls who wanted to know about his emotional life. Was he as lonely as he seemed in the movie? Did he have someone to love him? One letter was from a woman who claimed to be a vampire. Was he one himself? Did he want to become one?

  Jonathan became a star interview, in a certain kind of magazine.

  In full color, the magazines showed how rubber bodies were made so that the skin and flesh could be pulled off in realistic detail as the arms writhed, as the arteries pumped out jets of blood. There were faces of women, with tiny pig eyes and huge mouths the size of footballs full of teeth. The center-page spread would be of Jonathan as Mort, his face in healed sections.

  Jonathan endeared himself to the market by showing in the interviews that he had once been a fan of horror movies himself. He would lapse into lines of Bela Lugosi’s dialogue. He would pay tribute to the grand old Gothic tradition. He might allow himself a touch of yearning for a time when fear was achieved through suggestion rather than bloody detail. He tried to explore what he thought he saw in the character of
Mort. The audience found all of this flattering.

  Jonathan was invited as Guest of Honor to something called a Con. It was a convention for fans of what was described as dark fantasy. Darkcon it was called.

  Darkcon was held in Baltimore. Jonathan had never seen Baltimore. He spent three days in the city and still didn’t see it. He saw the inside of the convention hotel instead.

  It was a large, modern facility, with polished corridors and carpets and polite young women in orange jackets wearing name-tags. They smiled behind desks. The smiles grew uneasy as men in long hair, beards and black T-shirts began to take over the hotel.

  Jonathan was welcomed by the Con committee and given a pack of publications—program books, more magazines. A plump, fresh-faced young man called Karl had been assigned to him. Karl was in charge of Guest Relations. He took Jonathan on a tour.

  The Con had a bookroom, full of paperbacks in black jackets. Just inside the entrance there was a row of realistic, severed heads, caked in blood. Outside the bookroom, a little child was screaming, being pulled inside by her mother. Behind the severed heads, the book dealers were chuckling.

  The Con had an art show. Its largest piece consisted of five realistically re-created nude corpses, hanging from hooks over a fan of rusted, bloodstained buzz saws.

  Jonathan stood before it, with an expression of rapt and dazzled wonder.

  “Toto,” he said, in a little girl’s voice. “We must be over the rainbow!”

  As a Canadian, Jonathan seemed to spend half his life signaling Americans that he had told them a joke. He wiggled his eyebrows and leered at Karl. Karl suddenly grinned and covered one eye with a hand. “Oh, I get it!” he said. Karl’s skin was brown, but his cheeks were very pink and his thick eyebrows almost met. Jonathan found himself feeling tender towards him.

  A tall, thin woman approached them, all angles. Her hair flew everywhere, and her eyes were bright, and she was the same age as Jonathan. He placed her perhaps a bit too quickly. An ex-hippie, he judged, one of his own kind, a kindred spirit.

  “I did the metalwork,” she announced, pointing to the buzz saws.

  “I’m . . . impressed,” said Jonathan, choosing his words carefully. “You’ve put a lot of effort into it.” Looking again, he had to admit that the metalwork was beautifully done. He suddenly saw the woman in his mind, slim in overalls, with a blowtorch.

  “This is Moonflower,” said Karl, coughing, shuffling. “She’s famous,” he added. “She does my fanzine.”

  “How . . .This is a strange question. You’re obviously talented.”

  “I usually draw elves,” Moonflower said. “And seagulls and stars. Stuff like that.”

  “Right. So where do the corpses fit in?”

  “You’re asking me that?” Moonflower seemed surprised. “The elves and this. They’re the flip side of the same thing.”

  Karl and Jonathan had lunch together in the Con buffet. Eye of Newt was on the menu. Karl was obviously starstruck by Jonathan. Jonathan found this charming. To please Karl, Jonathan found himself becoming Mortimer.

  “So charming to have lunch with you,” he said in Mortimer’s voice. “Are you often on the menu?”

  “Uh-oh,” said Karl, in something not unlike real fear.

  “Joke,” cooed Mortimer and batted his eyelashes. “People do say my humor slays them.”

  Mort was a pastiche of different acting styles. Mostly he spoke like a slightly camped-up Boris Karloff.

  “Yup, really kills me,” said Karl, wincing with anticipation.

  “Is that an invitation?” said Mort.

  “Ew!” said Karl in delicious discomfort. “Ew! He’s doing it! He’s doing it!”

  The fans didn’t know Jonathan’s face, but they recognized the voice. They looked up from the tables. They put down their trays and began to gather around.

  Jonathan played with Karl’s hair. Karl stood, eyes closed, bearing up like a child determined to resist a tickling.

  “My little baby,” said Mortimer in a greasy, singsong voice. “He’s rigid with embarrassment. You might say Mort-ified. Shall we play a nice little game?”

  “Eeek,” said Karl in a tiny voice. There was an appreciative murmur of laughter. Laugh at me, will you? Mortimer thought. Laugh? Then listen to this.

  And Mortimer threw himself from side to side in the chair, possessed by laughter, shrieking with it, loud and piercing as a knife.

  “Ooooooooo!” breathed out the audience in fear. It was the laugh of the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Later that night, Karl came and drank whisky in Jonathan’s room, and slept with him, even though, as far as Jonathan could determine, he was heterosexual. Karl’s last name was Rodriguez. Karl Rodriguez. Jonathan kept saying the name. Could you fancy someone for their teeth? Karl had a huge grin full of large bright teeth. Karl’s parents had come to the north from Mexico.

  The next day, Jonathan was interviewed in front of five hundred people. He sat behind a folding table, next to a scholarly looking woman with plain, pulled-back hair and glasses.

  “What’s your worst nightmare?” she asked.

  “Waking up to find I’m in Child Minder Fifteen.” There was laughter. The laughter was uneasy.

  “Do you sometimes find the violence hard to take?” the interviewer asked.

  “Oh no. I can’t see all the meat and blood,” said Jonathan. “I can’t see red. I’m color-blind.”

  And he thought: I’ve got, I’ve got to find something else to do.

  There was to be a charity performance of The Wizard of Oz in the Hollywood Bowl. Dorothy was going to be played by Cher. Nick Nolte was the Tin Man. Sam Shepard was going to play the Scarecrow, but had to pull out.

  For the first time in his life, Jonathan hustled. Ambition alone could not have made him do it. Only an overwhelming urge to play the part could have driven him.

  He went straight from reading Variety to Aaron Spelling’s office. Aaron was producing; Jonathan had appeared in “Dynasty,” another one of his tormented character roles, a priest in love with Joan Collins. The character had not been popular with audiences and was speedily dropped—but Spelling still had some time for Jonathan.

  Jonathan simply told him the truth. He was the only man alive in L.A. who could still play the Scarecrow. To prove it, he sang “If I Only Had a Brain” right in the office. He ran full speed at the wall and did a backward somersault from it. Jonathan shook his head like a saltshaker and knew that he was sprinkling from it something he could only name but not describe. The something was Ozziness, the quality of Oz.

  Spelling chuckled and shook his head. “Okay, okay, you sold me.” Maybe he needed to fill the part quickly, maybe it didn’t matter with all the star names on the bill. There were a lot of maybes.

  But word soon went around town that some horror-movie star was playing the Scarecrow. The buzz was that the horror-movie star was wonderful.

  “Well, he’s always been a brilliant actor,” said those who cared to remember the little theaters, his TV psychos, his TV academics.

  Jonathan found himself having lunch with Cher. She seemed to take a kind of rueful, maternal interest in him. He told her about his researches into Baum, into Kansas, into Oz. He told her about his visit to Lancaster, California. She changed the subject.

  “This show could do you a lot of good,” she said. “This show could really break you.”

  Jonathan was dazzled. Something alive seemed to stir in him, made out of joy. With a kind of twist and a flip of his hands, he folded, out of the corner of the tablecloth, a dog’s head. It had little knots for ears, a snout, and a punched-in, toothless mouth.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Jonathan, stroking the dog’s head. The dog turned around and looked at Cher and cocked its head with curiosity. It’s ears
rose up, attentive. The dog was alive.

  “That’s terrific,” said Cher.

  “I only wish I would stop losing all this weight,” Jonathan said to Toto.

  A week or two later, he went in for tests.

  Ira didn’t show up. Jonathan hated driving now, but he drove to Bill’s house by himself anyway, alone in the dark, and got horribly lost. He missed the exchange onto the freeway, and he missed the turn off the freeway, and then he wandered aimlessly up and down Topanga Canyon. The roads on the map wriggled under his eyes like worms.

  He arrived in a panic, sick at being lost and alone, horrified at how fragile his illness had made him.

  “I drove round and round for hours! I couldn’t find where I was!” He was sobbing. He had to sit down.

  “Muffy, get a whisky, could you?” asked Bill.

  Bill took Jonathan in his arms. It was a great comfort to be held. But it was an enfeebling comfort. Jonathan had been reduced to needing to be hugged after a simple drive in the car. Jonathan wiped his cheeks and tried to pull away, patting Bill on his great bare arms.

  “There you go, buddy,” said Bill, and let him go.

  And Bill’s wife Muffy was there, holding out a glass of whisky. A glass of whisky in Waterford crystal. Jonathan was terrified he might drop it.

  “You must think I’m a real wimp,” he said.

  “I think you’re scared,” said Muffy. “It’s not pleasant, being alone and lost.”

  It was alarming how people were the only island of safety he had against terror. As soon as he was around people, the fear went. Most of the time in L.A. he was alone.

  “I couldn’t read the map,” he said, gulping whisky and snot.

  “Let me show you around the house,” said Bill.

  The house was a museum. It was a great old farmhouse from the days when L.A. was a Western settlement of farmers and fruit trees. There were huge wooden spoons on the wall that had been used for stirring vats of lye soap. There were old homemade candles. There were shoes people had made themselves out of hides. There were family Bibles, with names of parents and grandparents.