Sleeping in Flame

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Can you help me, Mr. Venasque?"

  "I can teach you to fly. That's the first step."

  "What do you mean, fly? Really, like a bird?"

  I almost heard him smile. "Birds don't fly, Mr. Easterling. They live. Part of their way of living is to travel off the ground. But ask a bird how he does that and he'll look at you funny. The same when someone asks you how to walk. Put one foot in front of the other. Sure, that's the mechanics of it, but how do you walk? Or find the right balance to ride a two-wheeler bike? You do it. You find it. I can teach you where it is in you."

  "And you do this with anyone?"

  "Anyone who can pay."

  "How much is it?"

  "A thousand dollars."

  "That's not much to fly."

  "It's not such a hard thing to do. If you're not satisfied at the end, I'll give you your money back."

  "Why do I want you to live out in the desert, speak like a guru, and tell me it takes years to master the art?"

  "You read Siddhartha and Castaneda too many times. Come and see me and we'll talk some more. Listen, 'Miami Vice' is on in five minutes. A show I never miss. Come and see me."

  My first day on the set of Wonderful, I watched Gregston carefully. He was amiable but intense, short-tempered, balanced by a terrific sense of humor. When he wasn't working he sat alone and read a novel by Robertson Davies, or sketched in a leather notebook he kept constantly under his arm. The cameraman, George Lambert, said Weber's whole life was in that notebook, but didn't elaborate.

  Over coffee, the director told me about the character I was to play. What he said wasn't special, but spoken with such conviction, and in such picturesque detail, that I got the feeling there really was a Mr. Pencil out there in the world who was W.G.'s friend.

  The first of my two scenes was shot in the backyard of a gorgeous house in Brentwood. All I had to do was cook hamburgers over a barbecue and smile. The boy playing my son ate fire. He stood in front of the camera, stuck a great burning torch down his throat and belched back flame, while grinning Dad back at the grill and the rest of the adoring family looked on.

  On our fifth day of filming, Maris got permission to watch. Unsurprisingly, she and Weber hit it off instantly. He had her sit right next to him, where they talked and laughed like banshees between every take. Even Weber's people were surprised at this, judging by their looks and asides to each other. I was too busy barbecuing and smiling to have any real misgivings, but it was the first time I'd ever felt even vaguely uncomfortable about her with another man.

  At lunchtime, we snuck off to a corner of the big yard to eat alone, but hadn't been there five minutes before Weber came over and asked if he could join us.

  "Weber says I look like the only woman he's ever really loved. But she won't love him back."

  "How come?" I bit a little too hard into a chicken wing.

  He smiled. "Her name is Cullen James, and besides looking as great as Maris, she's also too goddamned loyal to her husband. She was the one who gave me the idea for this movie. I had the most extraordinary experience with her a couple of years ago that has kept me thinking ever since." He put his full plate down on the grass and lit up a cigarette instead. "Cullen had these dreams at night. Sequential – one following the other perfectly, night after night. Always in the same place: a fantasy land called Rondua, sort of like in Lord of the Rings, but wilder and far more frightening. Right after we met and I was trying to pry her away from her husband, I started having dreams in Rondua, too. Every night I traveled there. We even met up with each other there once. I couldn't begin to tell you what it was like. Take an old-time 'Purple Haze' acid trip, multiply it by about sixty, and you're at Rondua's front door. Giant dogs two stories high wearing bowler hats, a king named Sizzling Thumb, even the fucking Devil was around. His name was Jack Chili. It sounds nuts, but it happened. Believe me. Imagine sharing the same dreams with someone. Being able to talk about what you've both seen the next morning! It was really the only transcendental experience I've ever had, but it made me one hell of a believer."

  "What happened to her? Are you still in touch?"

  "Yes. She was attacked in New York by an escaped murderer. Killed him with a crowbar when he broke into her apartment."

  "Jesus!"

  "There's more. She swears she didn't do it. That her child from Rondua, 'Pepsi,' came over and did it for her."

  "She sounds mad."

  He shook his head vigorously. "No, she's full of magic. After she described what happened, I believed her."

  Maris and I looked at each other. She spoke first. "Do you believe in magic, Weber?"

  "Yes. Look at you, Maris. How is it possible in one lifetime to meet two women with almost the same face? Don't say coincidence. That's the easy way out."

  Maris looked at me and mouthed the name "Moritz Benedikt."

  Weber look at the ground. "I've given up trying to understand God. How He works. That sounds obnoxious, but when I saw Maris today, I could only shake my head. It doesn't disturb me anymore, although it used to. In college I majored in philosophy and religion. I was sure that was the way to get to the bottom of things. That, and some thinking on your own." He waved the thought away. "Silly little student. Do you ever read Emerson? He said it best. I like him very much. 'Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you and tomorrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them.' That's it. That's how it is."

  The second shot took place in Malibu. Mr. Pencil sets up a tripod on the patio of someone's beach house. Opening a briefcase, he takes out a sniper rifle, assembles it, and attaches it to the tripod. I didn't like it because the act was too close to what had happened with Nicholas. I told Weber that, but he only said "Use it! Show how Mr. Pencil dislikes what he does for a living, make him even more repellent."

  Intercut with this would be shots of a bunch of nudists on a cruising boat. Accompanying them is a Dalmatian that roams the deck sniffing people and things. They talk and laugh and have a lazy, sexy day at sea. Suddenly one of them rears up with a big bullet hole in the middle of his chest, like a bright red carnation. Then the dog is hit too and knocked overboard.

  Cut back to Pencil pulling the trigger again as he shoots everyone on the boat. Perfectly cool about it, he stops once to wipe sweat from his eyes before returning to the job. When he's finished, he takes the rifle and tripod apart, repacks them, and leaves.

  The part with the people on the boat would be done later. Today was just me and my gun at the beach.

  A firearms expert showed me how to put the pieces together without fumbling or looking confused. Luckily I had done something similar in an earlier film, so it wasn't hard after a couple of tries.

  Everything went fine until I saw the dragon. I saw it through the telescopic sight of the rifle while looking out to sea, supposedly at my target. The creature was far away in the water, but the scope's magnification put it right on the end of my nose. It was black and long and essed up and down in the water, as if on a frolic.

  What does a sea serpent look like? Here's the surprise: All that was going through my mind was how beautiful its eyes were. Totally feminine and sexy. Giant and deep, purple, and flecked with coppery yellow. I think there were even long lashes, too. It slowly turned its head toward shore and looked at us.

  Someone off to my left screamed.

  Another shouted, "Holy fucking shit! Look at that!"

  "It's the Loch Ness monster!"

  "Godzilla!"

  I kept watching through the scope. Someone tugged at my sleeve.

  "Walker, what does it look like?" Weber's excited voice.

  "Beautiful eyes. You can't believe the eyes." I stepped away to let him see. He only looked a moment, then told his cameraman to try and catch it on film.

  Some of the crew ran down to the water for a better look. The dragon/serpent seemed unbothered and uninterested. It looped and coiled and swirled in the water, once showi
ng a spiked tail that seemed a mile behind its head.

  I'd seen blue whales off the coast of South America with heads as big as open parachutes. I'd seen a Super Galaxy transport plane block the view of the entire sky as it left the ground. Colossal things, but this creature lazing in a green sea half a mile away was the biggest of all.

  The only reactions I had were awe and a kind of bewildered love. No fear and no real amazement. Somewhere inside, we know wonders like that exist: they have to in a world as varied and individual as ours. What's more, we want them to be there, but science and rationality hold tight rein on our reality – if we haven't seen it, it isn't there.

  Fine, but twenty people stood on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and the twentieth century watching something they'd been told all their lives didn't exist.

  A police helicopter spluttered overhead and flew straight out toward the thing. Raising its monumental head, the serpent looked sedately at the whirring bug. The purple eyes blinked. Like a tall building that's just been dynamited, the sea all around it flew up as the monster dove and disappeared.

  The whop-whop of the helicopter circling the empty roiling sea, the long crash on shore of high backwash waves; for those of us who'd witnessed it, life had for once broken its silence (or one of its rules) and told us a secret.

  Yet it was no use trying to tell others, as we quickly found out. George Lambert offered the film he'd taken of the dragon to the television stations. They dutifully showed it, but also covered themselves by filling their studios with "experts" who unanimously denounced the sighting as either absurd or hilarious.

  The only places that took it seriously were the creepy/wacko newspapers like The Truth or The National Voice. They ran pictures of the monster next to articles on children who sold their mothers to the Ayatollah, or men who moved cream cheese with their minds.

  The common belief was that Weber Gregston staged the whole thing to get publicity for his new film. He was unbothered either by the accusation or the days of craziness that followed.

  "Who cares what they think, Walker? We know what we saw! That puts us one up on all of them. They want to think I'm pushing my movie? Fine. Or George's film is a fake? Fuck 'em. We saw it! We got a taste of what the world is really like under its skin. It's my friend Cullen's crazy dreamland, Rondua. That's the real truth. It's what we thought life was like when we were kids. Lying in bed at night, scared and excited about every sound and shadow out there. Remember those days?"

  We were having drinks next to the swimming pool of his rented house in Laurel Canyon. Maris was doing slow laps alone while both of us watched her and took some sun. She wore a black swimsuit and, with her hair slicked back and gleaming, against the swimming pool blue she looked like a moving exclamation point.

  "There are coyotes up here still. My neighbor told me when there was a fire in the canyon that he saw a whole family of them running away from the flames. Coyotes and maybe even wolves.

  "That's like our sea monster. Who the fuck would ever think on a sunny day at Malibu you'd look over the rim of your Ray-Ban sunglasses, Coca-Cola in hand, and see the 'real thing' out there in the surf. Godzilla at the beach! Sounds like a title for a Roger Corman film."

  Maris held on to the edge of the pool, listening. Her legs waved slowly back and forth in the water. The silence of the middle of the afternoon. The air smelled of chlorine, mimosa, and lemons. The extension phone nearby rang. With a groan, Weber got up to answer it. I looked at Maris and she blew me a little kiss.

  "Philip! How are you? When'd you get back? Sure, I'm home. Sure, come over now. There are some people here you'll like. Come over when you like. Good. See you in a while. I'm glad you're back, you bastard!"

  Grinning, he hung up. "You ever heard of Philip Strayhorn?"

  "No."

  "No one has, but everyone knows who he is. 'Bloodstone.'"

  "Bloodstone! You mean in Midnight? That's the most hideous horror film I ever saw. Midnight. Midnight Too. Midnight Always Comes . . . How many of them have they made so far?"

  "Three. He's made a good chunk of change playing Bloodstone in every one. We were roommates at Harvard and started in films together."

  "You made Breathing You and he made Midnight? That's some difference."

  Half an hour later, a nondescript balding man with an open, sweet smile walked out onto the patio and grabbed Weber from behind. The two of them danced around in each other's arms, oblivious to us.

  When they separated, Strayhorn came over to us with an extended hand and that good smile.

  "You're Walker Easterling. I've seen your films."

  "You're kidding."

  He immediately named four obscure clunkers I had made long ago, and said they were "terrific."

  He used that word a lot, but the way he said it made me believe him. Philip Strayhorn was one of those people who seem to know something about everything (and everyone) and love to talk about it. A polymath for sure, but no show-off. He talked in such an excited, compelling, way that you were quickly caught up in both his enthusiasm and information, no matter what the subject.

  How he'd gotten to be one of Hollywood's most famous on-screen villains was interesting in itself. Broke and out of work as an actor, he wrote the screenplay for the first Midnight and sold it on the guarantee they'd let him play the heavy if the film was ever done. It was made for $400,000 and grossed $17 million. The day we met, he'd just returned from Yugoslavia where they'd recently finished shooting the fourth sequel.

  I wanted to know why he thought the films were so successful. He smiled and said one word, "Bosch."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When I wrote that first one, I had a book of Bosch's paintings in front of me and just kept looking at them as I wrote. You won't find any better monsters anywhere. Bloodstone is a combination of several of his figures. The only hard part was trying to imagine what those monsters would be like if they came to life. People go to the movies to be entertained. The best entertainment in the world is great art. You want to be scared? Look at Garden of Earthly Delights under a magnifying glass; it'll give you nightmares. Just don't tell that to the guy who goes to the movies at the shopping mall Saturday night. If he heard where Bloodstone came from, he'd walk out or want his money back. All the Midnight movies are Bosch, plus a lot of screaming and stabbing. They're not art, but they come from art.

  "Tell me about your sea serpent. That's what I came over to hear."

  Weber brought him a glass of ginger ale (he didn't drink alcohol), and between the two of us, we gave him as complete a description as possible. Then we went into the house and watched a video of George Lambert's film. Philip took a piece of paper and pencil off the desk and began drawing. After a while he stopped looking at the film.

  He held up the drawing. Even in the flickering gray television light, the figure he'd sketched looked too familiar.

  "This is an Elasmosaurus. It lived about a hundred and fifty million years ago, in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Fifty feet long, with a neck on it that stretched about as far as the Golden Gate Bridge does. If your creature were real, that's what it'd be."

  "What do you mean?"

  Philip pointed at the television. "That thing is not classifiable, all told. That's what's scaring the experts. If they had a name for it, even a dinosaur a hundred and thirty-five million years old, they'd be more confident and willing to accept the possibility it's there. But it ain't a dinosaur. Scientists don't like things they don't know the names for. See the spikes on the tail? No Elasmosaurus had spikes, as far as they know. Its ears were also supposed to be very small. But this one's ears are big. Stop the film, Weber. Look at the size of those ears.

  "The Leucrocotta, Catoblepas, Nasnas, sea serpents. All creatures talked about in legend, but no one's seen any of them since man decided they don't exist anymore. Why? Because man's got to be the biggest and smartest. One of modern man's inventions: If I can't photograph it with my super-duper camera, or get a reading on it wit
h my monster meter, or catch it in my helicopter, then it isn't there.

  "Okay, but this thing of yours is there because too many goddamned people saw it. The experts don't want to admit that, so they're scrambling around. Trying to sound convincingly arrogant and dismissive about things like actual sightings, or even your film there. It's all a big trick! You guys did it with hidden wires. Steven Spielberg did it a hundred times better in his last film. Convenient ways of getting out of it, no?

  "You know what I was reading about today? Abtu and Anet. Have you heard of them? In Egyptian legend, they were two life-sized fish, identical-looking, that swam in front of the Sun God's ship and protected it from danger. They swam day and night, always on the alert. Isn't that a beautiful image? No Abtu and Anet these days. Only sonar.

  "Let's send out for a pizza. I haven't had a good disgusting one since I got back."

  While Weber called The Pizza Clinic, Philip turned to me and said in a quiet voice, "I really came over to talk to you. Venasque told me he thought it'd be good if we met and talked a little, if you have any questions or anything."

  "Venasque knew I was here?"

  Philip smiled and shrugged. "If he can teach you to fly, he can know where you are."

  "That makes me nervous."

  "It shouldn't. You'll like him. He's an old Jew who watches too much television and eats Doritos. It just happens he's a shaman, too. The best I've ever met."

  I leaned toward Strayhorn, already embarrassed about what I was going to ask. "What exactly is a shaman? A teacher or a holy man?"

  "Both. More someone who shows you how to read your own map. No matter what you learn, you'll come out the other side of it knowing more about yourself."

  "Did he teach you how to fly?" I looked around cautiously after asking, in case someone might hear and think I was nuts.

  "No. He taught me how to swim."

  "To swim?" I said, too loudly.

  He spread both hands and gently breast-stroked the air a few times. "I never learned how. Never cared about it. So Venasque taught me how to swim. I needed it."