"Do you think his father was right?"
I began peeling an apple. "Yes, I think to a degree. But it's damned hard not to get comfortable inside success. It's like falling into a soft chair at the end of a hard day. Especially when you're someone like Phil who went through years of trouble before making it. He hit on a successful formula with Midnight and more or less stuck with it. Nothing wrong with that."
"You didn't do it. Every one of your films is different."
"Sash, don't compare us. I stopped making films. I threw in the towel."
"Why? Not because of that earthquake."
"That was part of it. Phil once gave his sister a line that stuck in my head. The world doesn't need me for anything, but I need to tell the world some things.' After the quake I didn't feel I had anymore to 'tell' in films.
"Something else. Remember when I shared those dreams with Cullen James?"
She took a piece of apple off the plate. "Yes. I read Bones of the Moon."
"Cullen asked me not to talk about it, but I'll tell you this: For a few weeks in my life, I had a feeling for what the miraculous really is. It's not making films."
She was about to put the apple in her mouth when she stopped and looked at me. "Do you know what the miraculous is?"
"So far, all I've figured out is it's somewhere in real life, not in fantasy or art. You might be able to reach it through those things, but it's across the bridge."
She shook her head. "I don't know what you mean."
I took the salt and pepper shakers and put them near each other: the pylons of my bridge. "The only thing art can do is suggest how to cross this bridge. Better eyes than ours, better ears, have experienced things, maybe truths, that help instruct how to do it. What's on the other side? Salvation and peace.
"But you can find salvation without art. Sure, lots of artists like Van Gogh who had horrible lives found release through their art. But I don't think it was the art that saved them; it was the work, the love of the human act involved, that brought them peace. Their work just happened to be putting paint on a canvas, or whatever.
The miracle is somewhere in the human act. The only difference I see between an artist and a ditchdigger who loves his work is this: When the artist is working well, he's also able to control some of the chaos of his life through his work, besides enjoying the effort. The ditchdigger only moves dirt from here to there.
"But don't get me wrong – if he loves that movement, he's still a hell of a lot better off than many people."
She smiled. "You stopped making pictures because it didn't satisfy you anymore?"
"Hell, no! I loved making films. I still do. It's like having a conversation with someone you really like and admire. But when you run out of words or things to say, your listener can be the most fascinating person and you're still stuck.
"That's why I started the Cancer Theater Group. There's a million things to say there."
"Because the actors are dying?"
"No, because they're all hungry for whatever they can get. I feel that every day, and it makes me hungry too – for life, not art."
"What about art raising life to a higher level?"
"From my experience with this group, art at its best only raises life to an all-encompassing now. It forces us to forget time, or death, or anything and just allows us to live now. That's why the actors are so excited by what they're doing. For a couple of hours in their terminal day-today, they don't have to think about pills or chemotherapy. They're immortal."
"I have cancer too."
"That's what you said. Do you want to talk about it?" I didn't look up or change the tone of my voice.
"Not yet. Cancer, and I'm pregnant. Some combination, huh? Life and death living in one stomach, hand in hand! I don't even know where the baby came from."
"We can talk whenever you want. In the meantime, do you have any horseradish?"
When things are bad I often go into the nearest kitchen and cook. I try to make the acts of cutting and measuring, pouring and stirring, into little Zen masterpieces that, taken together, might someday metamorphose into mini-Satori. I don't close my eyes and shoot arrows into bull's-eyes, I stir-fry.
While I put things together, Sasha asked if it'd be all right to go in and lie down till lunch was ready. That was fine because good meals are temperamental – if, while preparing, you don't give them your full attention they often turn out flat and sulky, hiding in their room behind too much salt or spice.
About ten minutes later, deep into the secrets of shaving carrots, I didn't notice when she entered the room.
"Oh, carrots! Can I have one?" She wore a blue-and-white sailor-boy skirt and blouse, white knee socks, and patent leather shoes. The heart-breakers were the little white gloves and patent leather purse that looked brand new.
My first thought was to look beyond her, down the hall toward Sasha's bedroom.
Seeing this she spoke again, her voice pouty and hurt. "If you want me to go away, wake her up. That's all you have to do, if you don't want me around!"
"Come here!" Taking her small gloved hand, I pulled her into a room off the kitchen where Sasha kept a television and an old couch. "Where were you? Where have you been?"
"At the graveyard. I took Phil some flowers."
"Where did you go the other day? When we were up at his house?"
Snapping her shiny purse open and closed, open and closed, she just shrugged.
"Only one of you can be here at a time. Is that right?"
She looked at her purse, opened and closed it again, and nodded without looking at me.
"I don't understand something. You were around before Phil met Sasha. Why are you . . . in her now?"
"I don't know! I was with Phil when he was a little boy. I've been his friend a lot longer than she has!"
"Then why is she pregnant with you? She says she hadn't slept with him for months."
"What's 'slept with'? You mean in the same bed?"
"I mean have sex. They hadn't fucked for months!"
"What do you mean, 'fuck'?"
I glared at her, incredulous. Was it possible? To know so many things, to be pure magic, and not know that?
Yes, if she was really only a child.
"Sit down here. Sit next to me. I want you to tell me everything that's happened, from the minute you came back to be with Phil. Will you do that? I need to know everything, okay?"
Wonder belongs to children, so when they talk about it, it's usually in the relaxed, reasonable voice of long-time residents. More than real life, wonder is their home. They believe in miracles, people with successful wings, religion. "Impossible" is an enemy, gravity too, our mundane and inappropriate schedules for them. Many of their days aren't even spent on this earth with us. They are just very good at pretending they're here.
Pinsleepe said she was eight. I later assumed that meant Phil created her when he was eight and she never got older. But if that were true, how could she have written "Mr. Fiddlehead"?
"I didn't write it! I only saw it was Phil's and thought it was a good trick to change it. I touched the pages."
There was a pad of paper on the television set. I picked it up and riffled through the pages to make sure there was nothing on them. Completely blank. I needed some other irrefutable proof from her, another miracle to convince me that what Pinsleepe said was true.
"Touch this one. Do the same thing with this. Make 'Mr. Fiddlehead' again."
She took the pad, drummed her fingers on it once, handed it back.
Every page was filled with Phil's handwriting, on both sides. It must have been a very long story handwritten, because the entire pad was full. I put it down and looked at her.
"Did Phil make you up when you were children?"
"Sorta."
3
She took the videocassette from me and, sliding it into the machine, pressed all the right buttons to get it going. Phil appeared on the television screen.
"Hi, Weber. I'm glad you got this
far. I thought you would, but there's always the possibility of being wrong about people you love. That's the worst mistake you can make. But I wasn't wrong about you.
"Obviously you want to know about Pinsleepe. And 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' What has she said so far? It doesn't matter; I'll tell you what I can, and if you have other questions she'll answer them."
What followed was unexpected. I assumed Phil would tell the story in the concise, lucid sentences I was so accustomed to from him. Instead, for the next quarter of an hour he showed home movies, the same kind I'd seen of my mother's last minutes.
Only Strayhorn's were of a lonely child talking to an imaginary, invisible friend named Pinsleepe. But there was no real friend in his films. Certainly not the mysterious little beauty who sat next to me.
Phil (and Pinsleepe) climbed trees, built a fort, had a sword fight. Throughout, he did a voice-over about their time together: how he'd originally invented her to fill his forlorn eight-year-old life, what other purposes she served, when she went away.
"I fell in love with Kitty Wheeler when I was ten. Since there was suddenly a real girl in my life, I didn't need Pin anymore. After Kitty came Debby Sullivan and then Karen Enoch. I just stopped . . . needing her. I had real girlfriends.
"Remember them, Weber? Fourth-grade girlfriends? Who'd we ever love more?"
Pinsleepe sat next to me, watching. The only time she moved was to bang her feet back against the bottom of the couch when something bored her.
When he was done reminiscing about their early history together, the film faded expertly and came up again on Phil sitting on his living room couch.
"The first time I'd really thought of her in years was when I talked to a guy recently about having imaginary childhood friends. That's where the idea for 'Mr. Fiddlehead' came from.
"While we were in Yugoslavia filming, I wrote a few pages of dialogue. Rough-draft stuff, nothing polished or even good. I thought I'd get back to it when Midnight Kills was done. But when I looked at it again, a short story'd already been written. A finished story."
Some of this I knew from Finky Linky; some of it was new. The child continued to kick the couch until I put my hand on her knee and squeezed it to make her stop.
I wanted to ask questions, straighten out things that were confusing me. You can't ask a television set questions.
When he began talking specifically about her, I felt her grow tense and still beside me.
"What people don't really know, Weber, is we make up our own guardian angels. People picture angels as New Yorker cartoons – muses with harps, looking over the shoulders of writers having trouble.
"But it's more complicated than that. They're there, all right, but they come custom-made to our specifications.
"Pinsleepe wasn't there when I was a kid; I just cooked up a picture of the perfect friend I needed. I obviously didn't know I needed a real-life Kitty Wheeler more. Because as soon as Kitty arrived – zoop! No more Pinsleepe.
"My guardian angel, or perfect friend, came when I did need her most.
"We were in this shitty rundown church in Watts filming one of the first scenes of Midnight Kills. I looked up and there she was." He snapped his fingers and smiled wryly. "I could say she appeared out of nowhere, but that's silly. She appeared out of my own fucking head!
"Remember, I'd already started working on the idea of Mr. Fiddlehead, so, unconsciously, I wasn't completely shocked to see her.
"That, combined with the fact I knew her face from way back in my own youth. Like looking at an old school yearbook and seeing the face of someone you haven't thought about in twenty years? 'Oh, yeah. I remember that kid!' That was my first reaction.
"Only it was closer, under the skin. I didn't recognize her immediately, but I sure as hell knew that face had been important somewhere in my life.
"The first thing she said was –"
The television went black.
"I want to tell it." She turned to me with the remote control in her hand. "He was really in trouble! He was making those gross movies that made everybody sick and scared. You know what happens when you do that? You know what they do to you? A lot! They get you! Really bad!"
"Who are you talking about?"
"God, stupid! When God gets mad at you, you'd better do what he says or else you're in big trouble!"
"God didn't want Phil to make his movies?"
"That's right." She nodded her head exaggeratedly and handed me the remote control. The discussion was over. She'd said what she wanted.
It was another hour before Sasha woke up and came looking for me. Most of that time I listened to Pinsleepe and then, after she left, to the rest of this newest segment of my Strayhorn tape. I also spent a good while staring at the black screen trying to sort the many tangles out in my head. It wasn't easy. It was impossible.
An angel, she came to earth to warn him to stop making Midnight Kills. It had gone too far; he'd gone sniffing around in corners of the human and cosmic psyche that weren't his to know. Bloodstone was too close to some important truth. Strayhorn was too close to him.
It is simpler to combine and distill their separate monologues into a kind of split-screen dialogue. Listen.
"I don't know where or when it turned, Weber: where I tapped into some unconscious mother lode and started mining the real stuff. She wouldn't tell what was just good gore and what was the devil's lands."
"He kept making them worse and worse! They said, 'Go and tell him to stop. People are scared and killing each other."
"But all the Midnight films were like that. What was I doing different with this one? Why didn't Pinsleepe come before?"
"They let you do what you want till it gets dangerous."
"'Dangerous for who?' I asked her twice: no answer. She only said, Stop making this film. Just like that. Can you imagine? – and a half million dollars budgeted, forty people working busily away at their jobs, and I'm supposed to stop?
"I had this interesting plot, but I didn't think it was art or particularly . . . transcendent. So why should I stop? Horror films don't shake the world. If they're good, they scare you. You walk out of the theater feeling a little better about your own unthreatened life. That's it."
"He didn't stop! He didn't listen to me. You know how bad that is? You know what kind of trouble that gets you?"
"Remember when Moses had to prove to Pharaoh he was there on God's business? The miracles he performed for the Egyptians? Changing water into blood, his staff into a snake?
"I asked Pin to show me a miracle. I assume you did it too. No doubt she's the real thing, is there? You know what she did for me? Turned me into you for an afternoon.
"Remember the time you were getting out of the taxi in New York and the girl from across the street who walks around naked wanted it? You said, 'Do you want this breast?' A wonderful line. I used it in the film. Hope you don't mind.
"I was even aware of what day it was, Weber. The day you heard Phil Strayhorn shot himself."
"But he still didn't stop! He knew he was going to kill himself and knew everything but he didn't stop!"
"I didn't stop because it was too intriguing. What had I done? What was I so near that it even scared them?
"Prometheus, man! Maybe I'd stolen some of the big fire! Maybe I was close to figuring out their fucking Rubik's Cube!
"Would you stop if you were there? Uh-uh, too exciting. Even the fear is golden adrenaline, believe me. The more Pinsleepe said to cut it out, the more alluring it became."
The film was finished, despite the death of Matthew Portland (and ten other people) on one of the last days of shooting. Part of the crew went to the opening of a new shopping center in the San Fernando Valley to film the festivities for one minor scene in M.K.
The architects had designed the building so that all parking was up on the roof. Halfway through the local mayor's speech, one of the giant support beams twisted and gave. The roof collapsed. Six automobiles dropped instantly through the ceiling: dropped like bomb
s through the ceiling into the middle of everything. I saw it on the news in New York and remembered thinking, If you showed that in a film no one would believe it. There was an especially memorable picture of a green station wagon lying on its back in a large, still-flowing fountain.
The day of Matthew's funeral, the last rushes of his film came back from the lab. When Phil was able to look at them, he realized two things: Midnight Kills was utterly mediocre, and the most important scene was missing.
The lab said they'd returned everything but would check anyway. Sasha went down to oversee their checking but came back empty-handed.
"I closed the set for that shot. It was just Matthew, me, and the camera and sound men. Bloodstone spoke for the first and last time in any of the films. Probably the only piece of inspired writing I'd ever done. The whole series spun on that soliloquy.
"Wanna guess what happened next? Matthew and Alex Karsandi, the cameraman, were up at that shopping center when the roof fell in. That left only the sound man, Rainer Artus, and me alive to know what'd gone on in the scene.
"Pinsleepe didn't steal it. I believe that because when I told her about its disappearance, she got hysterical. Said that's why Matthew and the others died: The scene, once it was shot and came to life, was as fast and virulent as nerve gas.
"It was okay when it was only on paper, but once it was filmed, something bad in it was born and started spreading the bad all over. The only way to stop it was destroy the scene or, I later thought, the person who created it. So I very gallantly and guiltily killed myself. Ha-ha on me. It did no good.
"However hyperbolic and melodramatic it sounds, it's all true. That's why Pinsleepe came – to stop me from bringing that one scene to life. Seeing I wouldn't, she stayed around, hoping to convince me to dump it later.
"You've seen what's happened to Sasha and Pinsleepe. Neither of them had control over that, either. Sasha and I hadn't even slept together for a long time. But she's still pregnant. It happened the day after we shot the scene. And she's got cancer.
A Child across the Sky Page 10
