Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  No.

  Why not?

  Gottlieb worked only on closed sets. Behind sheets of muslin. To watch him at work required an invitation.

  And how do I receive one?

  For that, you do this. Bloom’s gargantuan guardian walked him up to the second floor, where, under the enormous skylight of Stage 3, he was introduced to the principal set builder, Percy Evans, a thick man with a thin, tight mouth. And as Gus had done the day he delivered him to the studio to meet the girl with the long braid, he pushed him off, and sent him on his way. Together Bloom and Mr. Evans started construction of what would become a laboratory in which the mad scientist, Professor Kronos, would invent a formula for The Primal Pill. They cut and finished long planks of wood, painted them black, lacquered them into a glossy sheen, assembled them into countertops. On their surface, he and the property master, Hershel Verbinsky, whose oily head secreted a camphor-like odor, labored into the night, arranging a complex puzzle of connecting test tubes, beakers, and Bunsen burners. Bloom rejoined Mr. Evans the following morning and helped him raise gray walls against which Professor Kronos’s lab coat would stand in contrast. On the walls, they hung cabinets, a periodic table, a piece of slate, arranged bookshelves he and the pungent Mr. Verbinsky would fill with dummy tomes—The Occult; Black Magic; Witchcraft; Curses of the Underworld. They displayed strange totems and otherworldly wood carvings of mythical therianthropes, a taxidermy lemur’s head topped with a pince-nez, staffs and trinkets, an assortment of tribal masks.

  He and the rather mannish scenic artist, Hannah Edelstein, mapped onto the piece of slate an elaborate chemical formula for elements unknown to science: permiam, therbium, delirium; under her direction, they went on to paint pastoral backdrops to be inset into the laboratory windows, which would reveal in the distance the God-fearing town of Integrity. When they had finished the lab, Bloom moved on to the plateau, and there joined a loud and gregarious gaggle of carpenters who assembled on either side of the road’s paving stones the town façades.

  Before the end of the third week, a Main Street on which townspeople would fall victim to Kronos’s diabolical plot had risen. A town hall was constructed, a church with a white steeple, a dress shop, a general store, a telegraph office, a schoolhouse, and stretched across the end of the cul-de-sac was a blank matte on which Bloom would assist Miss Edelstein in painting the reverse perspective of the lab windows—the extension of Main Street; beyond it, rolling hills; at the top, a cluster of columned buildings comprising the professor’s bucolic campus home.

  With all this in place, Simon, who continued to conduct the lot’s activity from his porch to the syncopation of Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake, sent Bloom to Leonard Hertz, the lighting technician, a heavy smoker of a sweet-smelling herb Gus called drago, about which, he said, Should he offer you any, you politely decline. Bloom would help Mr. Hertz suspend arc lights from battens running under a scrim stretched below the studio’s skylight. They angled the parabolas in such a way that the mad professor’s figure would cast long shadows in every direction he turned. They likewise wheeled one of the cranes onto the road outside and equipped it with a reflector. Under it, Bloom stood in for the innocent passersby who, when they saw the lunatic Kronos approach, were meant to look up and appeal to God for help, at which point their faces would brighten. They were meant to bask in the glow for a moment, and then Hertz, in his enervated manner, which was often punctuated with a random and involuntary Heh, explained he would slowly pull the reflector away, and with it remove whatever hope the subject had for an act of divine intervention.

  The director, Murray Abrams, an intelligent-looking figure who wore a pencil mustache and a powder-blue linen suit whose material billowed over his oxfords like a sail taking the wind, described to Bloom during a rehearsal in what manner Kronos would scatter his primal pills at the townspeople’s feet, how when the tablets made contact with the ground they—with flashes of gunpowder—would vaporize upon contact, and in an instant, men, women, and children would become possessed with the primal spirit. To capture this transmutation, Claude Strauss, the makeup artist, showed Bloom how he would shed the constraints of Integrity’s prim character: the women’s hair, once pulled back, would miraculously unravel by way of a slipknot. He would arrange their locks to hang over the shoulder and brush against the breast, darken the orbits of their eyes with pitch. To the men, he would do the same—tease their hair into demonic tufts, and go so far as to strip them down to their bare chests. The choreographer, Levi Sexton, demonstrated for him the frenzied dance he’d scored to a tribal drumbeat: the women would spin cartwheels and snake along the ground. The men would whirl like dervishes, throw one another up into feats of aerial acrobatics, and drag the women across the road by the hair. When their primitive energy was spent, when they regained control of themselves, when their sense of propriety returned, the cameraman, Stephan Harlow, would wheel up on a dolly, to close in on several of the actors’ faces, one at a time, so the audience could see in their expressions the shame they felt for what they had done while under the influence of Kronos’s drug, and without consulting one another with words, they would reflect on their undoing. At that moment the town’s reverend would lift his head and look up at one of his parishioners, Abrams said, and one by one, they would stand as a congregation and turn to the hills, gather into a mob, and march off in the direction of the professor’s lab. Once there, they would pull out the professor by his beard, bind him in ropes, and drag him back to town; in the middle of Integrity’s Main Street they would push him atop a mountain of wood and bind him to a stake, at which time a woman shaking a Bible in one hand and a torch in the other would set the heaping pyre, and Dr. Kronos, ablaze. The men would then comb back their hair and button up their shirts. The women would twist their manes into tight buns and right their skirts. And off they would walk, turning their backs on the black smoke lifting into Integrity’s clear sky.

  They took fifteen days to film The Primal Pill and a day to break down the sets they had spent five weeks building. Simon sent Bloom next into the lab, where he sat in the dark with the technician, Max Heinrich, and listened to the reels wind through the chemical baths; he watched Max work through the toilsome process of making contact prints—the positives cast from the negatives, which, when complete, they walked to the editor, Constance Grey, and Bloom, along with six young women, catalogued scenes and hung them by their perforations in orderly rows so the senior Miss Grey could glue together the sequence provided to her by Mr. Abrams. When all was done, and after further prints were made, Bloom walked the final cut to his brother’s home, where they sat in his offices on the ground floor, in a black velvet room reserved for screenings, and there, in the dark, they watched, and there, as he judged the first professional picture in which he had a hand in making, he reflected on the extraordinary effort, the time and resources put into each and every frame of film. And he had to wonder … He had come to occupy his time so completely with the disciplines of the studio’s work, he no longer experienced the passing hours of the days and weeks as vacuous and endless in their movement; he no longer dwelled on the sun’s position in the sky, on the smallest barometric changes in the weather, in the reflection of Roya’s eyes staring back at him from the still water of the courtyard’s pool. He exerted himself so thoroughly, he rarely, if ever, had a reserve of energy to utilize his imagination in the manner to which he was once accustomed. This didn’t bother him. Not really. He had come to enjoy the novelty of living in service to others. He took satisfaction knowing his hands and his mind had become an extension of the kind and patient men and women undertaking the task of training him. But for what? For this picture? If each frame were a painting or a drawing, the content was sound—the images of the town, the actors who inhabited it, the painted backdrops—but there was something about the transitions from scene to scene, from cut to cut, that bothered him. The movements from one location to the next, from one actor to the other, appeared to him clumsily executed
, lacking a fundamental logic, as if done with no awareness of how one form followed the next. Too little attention was paid to something as obvious as to how the direction a character’s eyes looked at an opposing character with whom he or she was speaking. When one addressed the other, his eyes moved one way, the other’s moved in the opposite direction, and it caused nothing short of a sensation of vertigo. He didn’t understand why the props and paintings he, Miss Edelstein, and Mr. Verbinsky created and placed in Kronos’s laboratory, with such tedious care, hadn’t been adequately observed by the camera. Why had they built an elaborate set and dressed it so fastidiously, if they weren’t going to use its full affect to establish the professor’s character? The camera’s positioning, its location relative to its subjects, made for an inadequate frame through which to observe their movements. Nor was the camerawork nimble enough in its mobility, particularly when the ensemble of actors filled the screen. It would have been beneficial to have a second or third camera rolling at alternate positions to capture the strongest performances, to give Miss Grey the opportunity to cut between the crowd and the individual dancers. In the few instances Mr. Harlow did trail the movements of the actors, the lens was pulled too far back when it should have been close, close and tight when it should have been withdrawn. The quality of the light, the contrasts of dark to light were often inharmonious with respect to the tone of the story; too light when it should have been dark, too dark when it should have been light. It wasn’t at all what Bloom had envisioned when he was quietly tending to his tasks. It wasn’t at all what Murray Abrams described—nothing of what the gentlemanly figure claimed to live in his mind had been realized. Bloom couldn’t help but think it a grave disappointment. Was it possible none of them really knew what they were doing? Were they merely making it up as they went along? While Bloom possessed the language to express to his brother precisely how Murray Abrams and the others had failed The Primal Pill, he wasn’t yet confident enough to prescribe the techniques he would engineer to remedy it. He had an inkling, however, that he could do better. A great deal better. When he had this very thought, the lights in the viewing room turned on, and he saw that Simon had already turned to face him. Seeing what expression was on Bloom’s face, he said with a laugh, I warned you. I did warn you. And now you see for yourself. You and I, dear brother, are young parents to a precocious infant no one quite knows how to handle. Patience, he advised. Have patience. Believe it or not, you have a thing or two more to learn before you embark on your own enterprise. And you certainly have more than a few things to learn before you embark on an adventure with Gottlieb.

  * * *

  Except for the occasional evening meal they ate together and the brief moments they stole from their busy schedules, he and Simon remained in close proximity to each other, but largely lived parallel lives. If he seems distant, Gus told Bloom, don’t take it personally. He rarely sleeps, and when he does, it’s never restful. As you’ve seen for yourself, when he’s at the studio, he never stops, and when he’s finished on the lot, his attention is on the waterway, and when his attention is on the waterway, he never stops. Making it so he never stops.

  In many regards Bloom and Simon’s relationship began to resemble the one the young Rosenbloom maintained with Jacob, an arrangement, Bloom, at the outset, felt as disappointed in as he felt about the outcome of The Primal Pill, but he eventually came to find it strangely comforting, satisfying even; although their time together was limited, Bloom began to observe in their private moments—when Simon appeared to him the truest and most mild version of himself—something most unexpected: the familial qualities he had been searching for in those weeks they spent together before the others arrived. Perhaps because he was exhausted and at ease in Bloom’s company, his brother began to unknowingly exhibit their father’s manner, embody his idiosyncrasies, approximate the qualities with which Jacob exercised his ruling passions, and there was something about recognizing these traits within Simon that not only created a sense of continuity for Bloom, but also, to some extent, demystified the competing impulses of his brother’s persona. Of course, Bloom told Gus, knowing how Simon felt about Jacob, he wouldn’t presume Simon would want him to point out their commonalities.

  No, said Gus, I wouldn’t recommend it.

  Bloom secretly took pleasure when these unmistakable similarities revealed themselves, when, for instance, not very long after Mr. Dershowitz departed the courtyard and the state of affairs on Mount Terminus had normalized, they met in Simon’s parlor, in his white room where the furniture and the furnishings resembled his brother’s attire—white settees and armchairs, white walls trimmed with white wainscoting, adorned with white filigree, white bookshelves, a white Pleyel grand—and Bloom asked Simon if the farmers’ revolt had caused him any further problems, and in a demeanor that was nearly exact to Jacob’s, in a display of gestures almost homologous to their father’s, Simon contained within him whatever burdensome news he didn’t wish to reach his brother’s ears; in a pantomime Bloom knew well, Simon drew his hands together, stared at the young Rosenbloom as if he were making an apology, and finishing with a half-formed smile said, You needn’t concern yourself with such things. That weight is mine to carry, and mine alone. The accuracy with which Simon reflected the departed Rosenbloom’s bearing and diction to deflect Bloom’s inquiry gave rise to a prickling of gooseflesh, as Bloom was convinced that Jacob Rosenbloom, however fleetingly, had been raised from the dead for the purpose of inhabiting his son’s body.

  In the months following, after the studio had gone into production, when the white walls of Simon’s parlor had grown cluttered with colorful theatrical posters, productions in which Simon had played roles high and low—Henry IV; Henry V; Hamlet; Trigorin; Gregor, the Straight Man; Hollis, the Holy Dunce; Favish, the Singing Philologist; Calamitous, the Acrobat; The Wunderkind, Harvey Plum, Whistler Extraordinaire—Bloom recognized other reflexive behaviors his brother shared with their father—the way the two rested their chin on the heel of their palm when sitting in an armchair; the habit they both had of rubbing their thumb against their fingers when pausing in the middle of a sentence to search for a lost word or thought; forming the same slight pucker of the lips—as if awaiting a kiss—when they drew a glass above their chin, and Bloom, again and again, would be revisited by the uncanny sensation of déjà vu. It seemed at times, he told Gus, as if Simon had somehow studied his father in the way Bloom imagined an actor would mirror a subject he was to portray on stage.

  And Gus said to Bloom, That would be impossible. They spent no more than a few minutes in each other’s company. And that was that.

  The similitude was never more apparent than the times Bloom watched Simon meticulously attend to the shrine he dedicated to the dead mother he had never known. In a room with thick white lintels framing the canyon road, the basin, the haze hanging at the edge of the sea, Leah, the identical image of Bloom’s mother, hung on the walls as the ingénue Eloise, as Medea and Lady Macbeth and Scheherazade, as the subject of paintings and drawings and illustrated songs, blue renditions of The Little Lost Child and After the Ball, as buxom caricatures captured on cocktail napkins, as a distant figure on a stage enveloped in cigar smoke. Beneath the window’s ledge, organized by composer, were shelves neatly stacked with sheet music, some of which, Simon told him, were tunes written for his mother by Joey Haden and Theo Metz, “A Hot Time in the Old Town” his favorite. Then there were the sheets from her childhood, her Bach and Brahms, Chopin and Mozart, her numerous versions of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which, Simon had learned, she devotedly read in silence, claiming to hear in the measures the strings of Berlioz’s aching heart. In this same room, at its center, stood an enormous table on which rambled the topography of a raised relief map, Mount Terminus and the valley, the lake, the basin, the reservoir, the aqueduct, an expansion of the studio at the bottom of the switchback road. Like the elder Rosenbloom in his gardens, like the elder Rosenbloom with his shears in hand, Simon often l
ingered over the rise and fall of the mountains, in the depressions of the valley and the basin, circled it when he talked to Bloom, and, as a small child might, toyed with pins in the shapes of houses and trees, railcars and motorcars, and he would articulate what Bloom was thinking; he would joke about the great tyrants and master builders, about whom he said, All children of one sort or another. Children playing childish games with the lives of men. On the rare occasion Simon visited the estate for dinner, Bloom came to further appreciate the intimacy and continuity he experienced in his brother’s company. On these nights, he always visited alone. After Bloom, Simon, and Gus completed their meal, they would sit in the parlor until their conversation lulled, when his brother’s gaze would retreat inward as if drawn there by the forces of an interior gravity. On these nights, Bloom would observe the patterns of lines prematurely etching themselves onto the edges of Simon’s mouth, across his brow, around the corners of his eyes, onto the otherwise smooth surface of his skin. This sight transported Bloom through time, to the past and the future simultaneously, through whose open doors he could see in what way the ridges and grooves on his elder brother’s face would come to resemble the configuration forged on their father’s. He easily imagined the direction in which the lines would lengthen their reach and grow more compressed. During these instances of attenuated temporalities, he envisioned his brother aged before his time, becoming the man for whom he felt nothing but bitterness and disappointment, the man whom he had been at odds with in his mind his entire life, and when bearing witness to the ways in which time inscribed its marks into his brother’s skin and prematurely salted the roots of his hair, Bloom was often tempted, for the sake of his brother’s amelioration, to take Simon by the hand and walk him up to the top of the tower, where, in the company of his birds, they could look out onto the simple wonders of the sky and the sea.