A Child across the Sky

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Pinsleepe can't do anything to help, not as long as that film sequence is around.

  "I can't tell you where it is, believe it or not, not even here. You find out some amazing things after you die, but just as amazing is what they won't tell you.

  "But here's a funny thing. You know how you're allowed one phone call from jail after they take you in? Well, here too – they give someone who's still living a chance to clear you. One chance to fix something important you messed up. It's an interesting test of love, when you think about it.

  "So I chose you, Weber. I asked if it would be all right if you searched for the film.

  "You've got to find it before everything goes down. The first thing they showed me when I got here was what is going to happen if you can't find and destroy it. It's vile and cruel. As bad as you could ever imagine."

  He stared straight into the camera.

  "All my life I wanted to be a big shot and make some real art. One time I did it. Exactly one time I really brought something to life.

  "Result? The worst thing a person could have done. I made some art, but it made so much noise being born that it woke up all the trolls in the cave. They're coming out now, and they're mad. Jesus, are they mad!"

  4

  I was staring at a lilac bush when Finky Linky drove up. Lilacs smell like they look. They could have no other scent or color. The flower simply smells mauve, that haunting naive purple, mysterious and sweet, just this side of decay. When you think about it, the combination of hue and scent is first correct, then perfect.

  Wyatt was driving Phil's XKE. Sasha had insisted we take it instead of renting a car to drive out to the valley to see Rainer Artus.

  We'd been in Los Angeles four days before I got through to Artus. He had a telephone answering machine that gave the "not here" message in Peter Lorre's voice. At first it was macabre, then annoying, to call a number fifteen times and hear that German weasel say, "Heh heh. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, but 933-5819 isn't in right now. . . ."

  I asked Wyatt to go along because he knew the whole story; Sasha didn't. Why didn't I tell her? Because she had enough problems at the moment, and I wanted to find out much more before saying anything to her. That made sense.

  Wyatt knew because he'd been the first to mention Pinsleepe to me. Besides, I knew from discussions in our theater group that he believed very deeply in the occult and "other worlds."

  Sasha didn't. To her, life and death were good and bad enough: anything more was either unproven theory, a crutch for the weak, or straight-out silliness. If I'd told her she was pregnant with an angel who, in turn, was pregnant with her (not to mention the rest of the story), Sasha would probably have put her head down and wept in despair. Maybe something worse. The first night I spent at her house she came into my room at – A.M. and crawled into bed with me. "I'm afraid. Please let me lie with you."

  Every day she looked worse. Since the funeral she'd been going regularly to UCLA hospital for tests. The people, the place, the tests scared her and made our being there even more important.

  Although she knew he'd planned to stay with a friend, Sasha asked Wyatt the second day if he would stay with her too. That did some good, because they quickly got down to talking about what it was like to be grievously, finitely ill. I told her about my experiences with people in our Cancer Theater Group; Wyatt said what it was like to wake up every morning and remember two seconds after consciousness raised its curtain that today could easily be it.

  Sometimes they wanted me with them, sometimes not. Sometimes from another room I'd listen hard to the murmurs and bursts of their voices and think they were telling secrets only they could know or fathom. Death, or imminent death, must have a language of its own, a specific grammar and vocabulary that's understood only on that side of the fence.

  Theater is a positive art. At the very least, it tries to add life to words. If the words are already alive and beautiful, good drama helps lift them off the earth. I have seen that happen in the theater, more than once even with our cancer group in New York. The actors I worked with there brought enthusiasm and fear and final energy to whatever we were doing. I could direct them, but whatever talent or inspiration they had was enhanced more by the enormous threat of their ticking clocks than anything I said. I saw myself as giving them only what could fit through a small hole in a glass window or chain-link fence. For me the experience was invaluable because their energy and efforts were instructive and elemental: Everything was motivated by the clearest, healthiest greed I'd ever seen – the greed that demands another day of life.

  When I heard Wyatt and Sasha talking, I thought of that fence and how unclimbable it was until you found yourself suddenly, horribly, on the other side at some unexpected time in your life.

  In his best Finky Linky voice, Wyatt called out from the car, "Are we going, or are you scanning the lilacs?"

  I broke off a spray and brought it with me. "When is Sasha supposed to be back?"

  "Depends on whether they could do her test quickly. Probably a few hours."

  Opening the door, I dropped the flowers on the dashboard. "Tell me about these tests."

  He gunned the car and started away from the curb. "They take things out of you and shoot things in. They look at your guts like they're a video game but never tell you who's winning when they're finished. You drink things so your guts light up like Las Vegas, and then they say you can go to the bathroom now and flush Vegas down the toilet. It's humiliating and frightening and the worst part is, when they actually do show you pictures or graphs or whatever, they don't look like anything. You feel like a big fucking fool because it's your body in that readout, but you can't understand it. You've got to rely on all these patronizing technicians to tell you what's actually happening inside your own poor fucked-up body. You want to understand so badly that when they start to talk, you concentrate as hard as possible, but it still doesn't make sense. They say 'hemoglobins' and 'white cell counts' and so much more that your brain closes down and you can't understand any of it.

  "But they even know that'll happen, so they stop using medical terms and start talking to you like you're retarded. One doctor I consulted had this glitzy computer game where you had to fight off the cancer cells entering your body. If you did it successfully, you won – lived. The thing made little blips: bleep, bleep, bleep. I played that damned game and won once. It felt so good. Here I was playing this absurd computer game, pretending the little blips were the good guys in my body."

  He pulled up to a stop sign and looked at me.

  "The tests are shit, Weber. The kind they're probably giving Sasha today are the second-line ones. They give you those when they know you've got it bad but want to find out just how bad before they start recommending any kind of therapy."

  "What did you do the first time you heard you had it?"

  "Went out and bought a pastrami sandwich. Nothing ever tasted so good in my whole life. Bought a pastrami sandwich and a pack of Marlboros. Hadn't smoked in – years, but what the hell, huh?"

  On the long drive to Artus's place, we spoke about all the "something wrongs" of the last days.

  "You know what else is wrong? His killing Flea. There's no way in the world Strayhorn would've killed that dog."

  "Even if he was crazy?"

  "Even so. I lived with him too long. He wasn't that kind of man. He used to catch mosquitoes and free them outside the window. That dog was pure love for him. He liked everything about it. Why kill it?"

  "Because he'd gone mad."

  We talked on and on. One of us would throw out an idea or a theory and it would be dissected or replaced or banked off the walls of possibility like a billiard ball.

  Wyatt dropped his big one shortly before we arrived. "I bet . . ."

  "What?"

  "I was going to say something weird, but it makes complete sense. Everything that's happened, and everything we've been talking about . . . it's all Dr. Faustus." He continued looking at the road with an expression
less driver's face. In my deepest heart, perhaps my deepest fear, I had thought about this possibility too.

  "Tell me."

  "What you're asking, Weber, is to tell you I believe that still happens. But you know I do."

  "Tell me how you came up with it."

  He rolled his head around on his neck as if he'd suddenly gotten a bad driver's cramp. "We all read Dr. Faustus in college. A smart guy's unhappy with his life. Nothing's worked out the way he wanted. What can he do about it? Talk to God. But God's not answering, so the guy goes downstairs.

  "Lucifer says sure, I'll help. I'll make things better, but your soul's mine after you die.

  "Faustus agrees and signs on the dotted line. We know what happens next – he gets the power he wants, but he uses it for all the wrong reasons. Has all the power in the natural world but uses it to make Helen of Troy appear so he can screw her.

  "Is this starting to sound familiar?"

  "Phil. He was so depressed back then, he would've done anything."

  "He did – he wrote Midnight! But he was also smart, Weber. Don't forget that. Here's why he made his deal. It's only my theory. He signed something important over, sure, but only because he thought he could do without it. He was wrong."

  "What'd he give up?"

  Wyatt turned and gave me a cold look. "His moral balance. Phil made the best horror films in the world, the greatest horror films ever. But they're too great – too horrible.

  "His fame came from making contemptible, ugly nightmares. At first it was kind of a cynical lark, but then it had him by the balls and wouldn't let go. Look at how he was always trying to get involved in other projects. But somehow, every time, he was pulled back down into that Midnight shit.

  "Only once did it look like he was really going to get out of it. But then – things happened: An angel appeared, and let's assume for a minute it really was an angel and not just some strange little girl. She told him not to shoot the scene. But he did. Result? Two of his best friends were killed in an accident so bizarre no one can believe it.

  "You don't think there're links there? You don't see cause and effect? In the end, the Other Guy won everything: brilliant movies that made Bloodstone a cult figure. Evil is okay so long as it's original. That's good publicity. Then Strayhorn's so eaten up with guilt he shoots himself. Finally, as a little extra perk, Crazy Phil not only kills himself but one of the few things he really loved – a completely innocent and loving dog."

  "Don't forget what happened to Sasha."

  "That too."

  "Say you're right, Wyatt. What about the videotapes to Sasha and me? What's their point? How come he gets to send messages from hell?"

  "I haven't figured that out yet. Maybe he's telling the truth; maybe he has been given one last shot at redemption through someone he loved.

  "But I wouldn't trust anything now. The part of Dr. Faustus I liked most was watching how cleverly the Devil lured the man. He didn't grab him by the foot and drag him away. They had these fascinating conversations where he told Faustus not to sell his soul because Hell's a terrible place. Faustus almost had to convince him to take it. You think that wasn't planned? You think evil comes looking for us? Just the opposite. We run after evil until it catches us. There's no question of that."

  Before I tell you what happened when we got to his house, I must tell you about Rainer Artus.

  Although he had the reputation for being one of the best sound men in Hollywood, he had great difficulty getting work because he was so exacting and persnickety. He didn't check things twice, he checked them five times. He didn't want the best equipment, he wanted two of the best in case something wasn't just so with the original. He liked to tell the story of the pianist Keith Jarrett, who apparently demands two special pianos be made available when he's doing concerts – just in case.

  Hollywood will put up all day with the bullshit demands of star actors, but it has little patience for the whims of technicians. When a Rainer Artus demands two Nagra tape recorders – just in case – you can be sure several important people are going to yell. So the man worked, but not as often as he should have.

  But Phil used him for all the Midnight films, because he knew how good Artus was and because sound is one of the most important elements in a horror film. The two of them were comfortable with each other.

  I'd worked with Rainer on one film but found him too aloof, too authoritarian, and always secretly wondered if he had been a Nazi in his time. Phil said no, but I wasn't so sure. I did know that Artus had had a very difficult childhood in Germany with a mother straight out of some Freudian study. She was so anal retentive she put two kinds of towels in the family bathroom – one to dry the "up" side of the body, one to dry the "down." If the kids were ever caught using one towel for both areas, she gave them a beating. It wasn't hard to see where her son got his finicky neatness. Rainer's world was all order and no dust. His car was one long shine and nothing in the ashtrays, although he smoked heavily. His house was the same. Phil said the man meditated by vacuuming the living room. That was one of the things I remembered about visiting him years before: In a closet was one of the most remarkable vacuum cleaners I'd ever seen. Yes, I peeked. The machine was immense, so enchased with buttons and switches that if someone had told me it was a Russian space probe I'd have believed it.

  He lived on a sleepy dead-end street in one of those semi-"Mission"-style houses that were built by the blockful at one time in California. When Wyatt pulled up in front, the Doors' "Light My Fire" was blaring out of the house onto the street.

  "Is that coming from his house?"

  "I think so. But Rainer hates rock and roll music."

  Wyatt gestured at the noise. "Guess he changed his mind."

  "Rainer never changed his mind about anything. Let's go."

  We walked across a browning lawn full of bald patches and healthy weeds. Rainer liked to garden. The last time I'd been to the house, this lawn had looked like a prizewinner. Now it looked like a skin disease.

  On the porch the screen door was wide open and a number of black flies buzzed lazily in and out of the house.

  "Reminds me of Flakey Foont's house in Zap Comix."

  "Or Tobacco Road." I rang the bell. Over the crashing music inside, someone yelled for us to come in.

  "Rainer?" I went in slowly.

  "Yeah?"

  "Rainer, it's Weber Gregston. Where are you?"

  "Back here. Just keep coming."

  We walked through a house that was not just dirty, it was . . . unclean. Smelling thickly fetid and disturbing, it gave you the feeling something might be dead here. Moving slowly, I felt Finky Linky take hold of one of the belt loops on the back of my jeans. He whispered, "You don't mind, do you?" I smiled and shook my head. "Good, because I wasn't going to let go anyway."

  "Rainer, where the hell are you?"

  "Back here. Keep coming."

  We came upon what I suppose was his bedroom. At least there was a mattress on the floor with Rainer on it.

  "Weber, how are you? And Finky Linky!" He was propped against the wall wearing nothing more than a pair of underpants and black socks. His hair was long and stringy, dirty. It was almost like seeing another person, because part of Rainer's Hessian image had always been steel-gray hair cut almost to the skull.

  "What're you two doing here?"

  "We came to talk about Phil."

  "Phil?"

  "Phil Strayhorn."

  He squinted, trying to remember the name of the man he'd made four films with. "Phil Strayhorn? Oh, yeah, sure. Phil. He's dead. You know that? Phil's dead."

  "Yes, we know that. What's the matter, Rainer? You look like hell."

  He smiled. "I do? I feel good. Don't know why I look like hell 'cause I feel good."

  "Are you high?"

  "High? No, Finky, you know I don't do drugs. Don't even drink. Just feel good." He got up slowly, helping himself with a hand hard against the wall behind him. "I'm on vacation for a while. Takin' it ea
sy and listening to some music." His head dropped back and closing his eyes, he began swaying slowly to the Doors' next song.

  "Can I turn it down a little while we talk?" Without waiting for an answer, Wyatt walked over to the large stereo unit in a corner and turned it off. "That's better. You want something to eat, Rainer? Or something to drink?"

  "No, I'm fine. Sit down, guys. Ask me whatever you want."

  The next half hour was a strange experience. The man looked like Rainer, talked like him most of the time, and knew things only he could know, but neither Wyatt nor I could say for sure if it was him. The man we knew wasn't completely there – only parts. Recognizable parts, certainly, but not one hundred percent Rainer Artus. Wyatt agreed when I said later it was like those flies buzzing around the front door – they kept coming and going from the house. Only here, our man kept coming and going from the strange person we were talking with.

  I asked him questions about the film we'd made together – small questions, unimportant ones, that only a person who'd been on the set would have remembered. He knew everything and laughed at some of the memories. It was Rainer. No. No, it wasn't.

  "Listen, please. This is an important question. Remember when you shot that sequence in Midnight Kills when Bloodstone did his monologue? I guess it was the only time he ever said anything."

  "Sure. What do you want to know about it?"

  "Do you know where the film is? It seems that section has kind of disappeared."

  "You check with the studio?"

  "We checked with the studio, the lab, Sasha Makrianes, everyone. The whole piece is gone."

  "That's mysterious." He said the word, but his tone of voice said he wasn't interested in this mystery at all.

  "You don't know where it is?"

  "No."

  "Do you remember the scene? What he said?"

  "It was a closed set, and when we were through with the shot Phil took my tapes and Alex Karsandi's film and said he would take care of the processing and the lab himself. He'd never done that before but he's the boss, so we gave it to him." It was the most Artus had said at one time since we'd been there and appeared to tire him out. It was plain he didn't have much more in him, and we'd have to get whatever other information we needed fast.