understand? She saw it as essential to herself to do what she could for him, at the same time, making her contribution to the expedition.'
Cartier took a swallow of his cognac. I sensed that the revelation was about to emerge and tried not to make any movement which might distract him. He seemed on the verge of abandoning the tale altogether. So I sat, quietly, waiting for him to continue.
'They were in that hut three days,' he said. 'I sent in food and drink, of course, but I didn't enter the place myself, not until I heard McArthur talking in more rational tones. I couldn't hear exactly what was being said, there was an intense quality to the speech, but the long periods of silence, punctuated by irregular sessions of screaming, had ceased.
'I went in, then. I'm afraid I interrupted them. I was expecting to see – well, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't two naked bodies locked together. I left immediately, but though Denise hadn't seen me, McArthur had ...'
I groaned, inwardly, expecting now that I would get a sob story about how much he, Cartier, had been in love with Denise, and that he had never suspected that her uncle would take advantage of her hero-worship.
'So – it was incest,' I said, hoping to ward off his outpourings. 'A fairly mild form though. Both adults – and the relationship not as close as it could have been.'
He stared at me, his dark eyes holding mine, something troubling their depths.
'Yes. That's what I thought – and no doubt Denise. She didn't know either, you see.'
'Know what?'
It was the first time since we had met that I saw anything like real discomfort registering in Cartier's features.
He said, 'She didn't know McArthur was her father.'
My thoughts did a few acrobatics and I said, instinctively, 'But Denise was his sister's daughter ...' Then I stopped. I had the whole picture. He had fathered his sister's child and had now taken that daughter to bed. What a mess! The whole thing was revolting: incest in layers.
'He told you this?' I asked.
'Shortly afterwards. We pieced together the theory of memory projection from it. You can see how it relates to the film .. .'
'And you want me to distribute this movie?'
I stared out of the cafe window, waiting for his reply, watching people hurrying along the boulevard. My distaste for this project almost made me jump to my feet and join them, but I decided to see the thing out.
'Yes – we all do. We thought you should have some background to the movie – it might help to create a little publicity, don't you think?'
Cartier's face was devoid of expression. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind. It wasn't easy.
'Let me take the £lm away with me. I'll contact you tomorrow.'
He agreed and we went outside and transferred the movie from his car to mine. I did not shake hands with him. I just climbed into my car and said, 'Tomorrow then.'
I had noticed, when we left the cafe, that he was limping.
~
As I drove home I thought about my own predicament. The bills were mounting up and I still had not found the successful movie which would get me out of the rut. My recent decisions might have been sound ones, based on my experience in the business, except that no one can predict certain success in the movie world.
That evening I watched the film in my private studio. It was a boring collage of river and forest scenes. The Herzog boat was there, the area around busy with people, but it could have been an amateur movie, taken by a camp follower, or, more likely, it had been put together from stolen discarded cuttings of Fitzcarraldo itself, and the film of the film, to form a bastardised child of both. The whole effort folded in on itself, until nothing made sense because it was too internalised. It exposed too much of its inner self, which in the revelation showed nothing but a confusion of scenes and snatches of close-ups. It revealed everything, yet it revealed nothing, because at any core, whether it is human emotion or something more substantial, there is no truth which can be grasped and understood. Everything becomes a cluttered wash of incomprehensible colour tones, weakened further by the continual rinsing of the thing in itself, until all you have is a faded copy of a copy, recurring.
When the film reached the scene where the arrows were exchanged, I paid particular attention, but even here I was disappointed. The light was all wrong, either too weak or too strong. There were figures in the gloom of the forest, and action certainly took place, but, bright and dark, what came out of it was a flurry of furtive movements, glimpsed through curtains of leaves and fences of treetrunks. There was a close-up of the wound in McArthur's leg, which looked genuine enough, as did the agony on his face, but it had been done better, by Charlton Heston in El Cid. McArthur, on film, was of course the spitting image of the man I met in the restaurant, calling himself Cartier.
There was also a single scene of the niece, or daughter, or both, half hidden behind smoke from a campfire. Either the shot was over-exposed or she was thin and pale, almost translucent, with red-rimmed eyelids. The sort of will-o'-the-wisp female that gets cast as a fairy extra in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
What it amounted to was an unholy tangle. Of course, if the story were true, there were enough vultures in the world to make the film a success in terms of sales at the box office. Artistically, it stank, but some cinema-goers would be curious about this trio and their incestuous goings-on in the South American jungle. If it was released to the media, the gutter press would provide all the publicity needed.
However, I doubted very much that the story was true and I had my integrity to consider.
I met Cartier, or McArthur, at the same cafe the next day.
I gave him the standard rejection.
'It's not good cinema,' I said.
He seemed very disappointed, leaving me his card and saying I was to call him if I changed my mind. I replied that there was little chance of that. Once I had made a decision, I told him, I usually stuck with it.
His eyes went to a corner of the cafe, where there was a door with a small window set in it. I thought I caught a flash of something behind the glass of that window and turned back to him. He had a dejected expression on his face.
'Who's behind the door?' I said.
He seemed about to argue, then must have changed his mind. I suppose that, since I had rejected his offer, he saw nothing to gain by denial.
A friend of mine – cameraman. He's filming us. I thought it would make a good postscript to the movie – you and I meeting, discussing the project ...'
I looked him straight in the eyes.
'You're McArthur, aren't you? Who's that behind the door? Cartier?'
Before he could reply, I saw his eyes widen as he looked up, over my left shoulder. Then a tremendous explosion filled my head. I felt the heat of a blast on my cheek, and smelt the acrid odour of cordite. My head rang with the noise and for a few seconds I could not see. let alone hear anything. If any sensible thought at all crossed my mind, it was that the cafe had been bombed by some terrorist organisation.
When I was able to register a conscious understanding of what was happening, I realised that McArthur was sprawled on the floor, where he had gone flying backwards. There was blood in his hair, on his collar. What I had heard was the sound of a revolver being fired close to my ear.
As I turned around, still groggy and shocked, she was just putting the barrel of the gun beneath her chin. There was another explosion, not so loud as the first, since it was muffled by soft flesh. The body struck my shoulder as it fell and I think I screamed.
The next thing I knew I was being helped to my feet and led away towards the bar. My legs were shaking violently and someone forced a brandy down my throat. I couldn't even hold the glass, my hands were trembling so much. There was a lot of shouting, which I could hear above the ringing in my ears. I remember glancing back at the woman's corpse. once. But it was impossible to tell whether the face – now covered in gore – belonged to the girl I had seen in the movie the pre
vious evening. It crossed my mind that it might even be McArthur's sister; the mother of their daughter.
An unholy tangle. The police came and took me into another room at the back. I can't recall what I told them, but I must have just recounted what had passed over the last two days, between the man on the floor and myself. I found out later that they had secretly videoed my statement. Finally, I remembered about the cameraman, behind the window in the door, and started to tell them when one of them pointed towards the corner of the room. There was another man there. talking to more policemen. He glanced across at me and I recognised him.
There was a movie camera, on the table, between him and his interviewers. He gave me a look, as he nodded at his recording device. It was difficult not to interpret that gesture into a language I knew well, that said:
'I've got it all here. on film. if you want to use it.'
That was just before the TV crews arrived, and I believe you saw what followed, for yourselves, on the six o'clock news.
Alain d'Ivry, the talk-show compère, offers me a glass of water, and with the cameras still working, I take a long drink.
'Are we still on?' I say.
He nods. 'But don't worry – we'll edit this out later. Let's get back to the cafe scene. You say you didn't recognise the woman's face after she turned the gun on herself, but now of course...'
Flying to Byzantium
Lisa Tuttle
The steady noise and pressurized atmosphere inside the plane made everything seem slightly unreal. Was she really going back to Texas?
She thought of flat, coastal plains, mosquitoes whining in the humid night air, dirty white plumes of smoke rising from industrial stacks, her mother's house, and the dreary brightness of the Woolco, and a familiar misery possessed her.
No. Her hands clenched in her lap. She was going back to Texas, but not to the stagnant little town on the Gulf Coast where she had grown up; she was flying to Byzantium.
The name of the town made her smile: how the dreams of the pioneers became the lies of property developers! She didn't know Byzantium. She had never heard of it before the invitation to spend the weekend as a guest of honor at a science fiction convention held there. According to the map, Byzantium was more than five hundred miles west of the southeastern swamp where she had grown up. West Texas to her meant deserts and dust, cowboys and rattlesnakes, rugged mountains etched against postcard sunsets: it was the empty space between Houston and Los Angeles, traversed by air.
She lived in Hollywood now, and Texas was no longer home. She was Sheila Stoller, author of Moonlight Under the Mountain, and her fans were paying for the privilege of meeting her.
Sheila pulled her traveling case from beneath the seat and took out her notebook, thinking of Damon. He had been impressed by her invitation to Byzantium, more than she was herself. But then he was an actor. Public appearances were something he understood, a sign of success. It had never occurred to him that Sheila might not accept—perhaps that was why she had. Away from him, though, she felt her confidence flag. She knew nothing about science fiction. Wouldn't the others at the convention see her as a fraud? She had written a speech in her notebook, the story of how she had written Moonlight Under the Mountain, but the speech was a fraud, too, a carefully constructed fiction. She stared down at the page wondering if she would have the nerve to read it.
The notebook had been a gift from Damon. "For your next novel," he had said, giving it to her with his famous, flashing smile. And she had taken it, unable to tell him that there would not be a next novel.
Ordinary people had ordinary jobs in Hollywood, as they did everywhere else, as sales assistants, as waiters, as secretaries and caretakers, but in Hollywood the jobs were always temporary; the people in them were really actors, directors, dancers, singers, producers, writers waiting for the main chance. Damon had been an actor working as a waiter until his pilot took off: now he had a minor but regular role in a weekly comedy series. He was the wisecracking roommate's best friend. Viewing figures and audience response were both good, and he was on his way up.
He thought that Sheila was on her way up, too. It was true she made her living doing temporary secretarial work, but she'd had one novel published, and surely it was only a matter of time until she was well-paid and famous: all she had to do was to keep on writing.
But Sheila didn't write anymore. She no longer felt the need.
Writing, for Sheila, had always been a means of escape. It took her out of herself, away from loneliness, dull school classes, and the tedium of working behind a counter at the local Woolco. When she was writing she could forget that she wasn't pretty, didn't have a boyfriend or an interesting job, had no talents and no future. She'd had no friends because she never tried to cultivate any. Girls her own age thought she was a weird, stuck-up bookworm—she thought they were boring, and didn't bother to hide her opinions. Her quirky intelligence made her reject most of the people and things around her, but did not make her special enough to be forgiven. Despite her reading, she was an indifferent student, lazy in the classroom and inept at sports. She tried to write for the school magazine and newspaper, but after several cool rejections she learned to keep her writing to herself.
She wrote another world into existence. It was a fairy-tale world full of monsters and treasures, simpler, starker, and more beautiful than the reality she felt suffocating her, and she escaped into it whenever she could. Her universe contained a vast and dangerous wasteland spotted with small, isolated villages. One of the settlements had a mountain rising from its center, towering over everything, dominating the landscape and the lives of those who lived there. For beneath the mountain was a series of maze-like tunnels where dwelt the evil, powerful grenofen. They kept the townspeople in terror until a young girl, Kayli, won her way through a series of adventures, battles, and enchantments to triumph over the grenofen and steal their sacred treasure for herself.
Sheila shared her world with no one, and never thought of publication, except as a vague fantasy. It was her mother who brought it about, indirectly. Sheila knew she was a disappointment to her mother—she almost took pleasure in it. Something in her seemed to compel contradiction, and as long as her mother nagged her about her appearance Sheila would eat too much, forget to wash her hair, and dress in unattractive, poorly fitting clothes. Her mother thought scribbling in notebooks was a waste of time, and it was her disparaging comment on a "writers' weekend" being held at a local college which made Sheila consider attending. And it was there that Sheila met the editor who ultimately published Moonlight Under the Mountain.
She didn't make a lot of money from the book—the reality wasn't like her fantasy—but it gave her enough to leave Texas, to fly to Los Angeles and buy a used car and find her own apartment before she had to look for work. On the West Coast, in the sunshine, far from her mother's nagging, Sheila blossomed. She took an interest in the way she looked, bought fashionable clothes, joined a health spa, had her hair permed, and exchanged her heavy, smudged glasses for a pair of tinted contact lenses.
Damon met her while she was temping in his agent's office. He admired her clear, emerald eyes, her smooth, tanned skin, and slim figure, but those things were the norm in California—it was her book which caught his attention. He admired writers, and liked the idea of dating one so much that Sheila didn't know how to tell him the truth. She had written a book, but that didn't make her a writer in the way that he was an actor. Writing was one of the things—like baby fat, acne, and bad manners—she had left behind her in Texas.
~
They were like ghosts of her past, standing there waiting for her in the Campbell County Airport. Sheila knew them at once, without any doubt, and knew she had been wrong to come.
"Sheila Stoller?"
They knew her, too, and that was another bad sign; like calling to like. She wished she could deny her name, but she nodded stiffly, walking toward them.
There were two of them: a fat one swathed in purple, and a thin
one in a lime-green polyester trouser suit and teased, bleached-blonde hair. She knew them—they were the unwanted. They were the sort of people she had been lumped in with at school, always the last to be chosen for teams or dances. Her mother had pushed them on her, inviting them to parties, but Sheila had preferred loneliness to their company. She always shunned them rather than admit that she was like them.
"How do you do," said the thin one. "I'm Victoria Walcek, and this is Grace Baxter."
Victoria would be smart. Sheila knew. Too smart for her own good. A bookworm with a sharp tongue and too many opinions, no one would like her, but she would exert a special influence over one or two followers; dull, timid outcasts like her fat friend.
"Your plane was late," said Victoria.
The tone was reproving and before she could catch herself Sheila said, "I'm sorry."
Victoria smiled. "That's all right. We didn't mind waiting. Do you have much luggage coming?"
"Only this." She indicated the small case.
Victoria gave a dainty shriek. "That's all? How do you manage? I couldn't possibly ... my hot-curlers and makeup would just about fill that little bag. I always need a big garment bag whenever I go anywhere. I suppose I worry too much about the way I look... . I like to have everything just right. It's much more sensible to travel light and just not think about that."
"Sheila looks very nice," said Grace with so much emphasis that it sounded like a lie. Sheila tried not to mind, but she wished Grace hadn't felt obliged to defend her. She knew how she looked: more fashionable and far more comfortable in her pink and gray tracksuit than Victoria in her ugly green polyester and high-necked ruffled blouse.
Infinity Plus: Quintet Page 2
