Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  At ten, the workmen would arrive. They and Méliès would finish the sets, painting scenery in shades of gray, black, and white, each scene of which bore, at some place, the Star Films trademark to discourage film footage piracy. The mechanics would rig the stage machinery, which was Méliès’ forte.

  At eleven the actors would appear, usually from the Folies Bergére, and Méliès would discuss with them the film to be made, block out the movements, and with them improvise the stage business. Then there would be a jolly lunch, and a free time while Méliès and his technicians prepared the huge camera.

  It was fixed on a track perpendicular to the stage, and could be moved from a position, at its nearest point, which would show the actors full-length upon the screen, back into the T-shaped section of the greenhouse to give a view encompassing the entire acting area. Today, the camera was to be moved and then locked down for use twice during the filming.

  At two, filming began after the actors were costumed. The film was a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The first scene, of the girl’s house, was rolled in, accessory wings and flies dropped, and the establishing scene filmed. The actresses playing the girl and her mother were exceptionally fine. Then the next scene, of the forest path, was dropped down; the camera moved back and locked in place.

  The scene opened with fairies and forest animals dancing; then the Wolf (a tumbler from the Folies) came on in a very hideous costume, and hid behind a painted tree.

  The forest creatures try to warn the approaching girl, who walks on the path toward the camera, then leave. She and the Wolf converse. The Wolf leaves.

  The second scene requires eleven takes, minor annoyances growing into larger ones as filming progresses. A trap door needed for a later scene comes open at one point while the animals romp, causing a painted stump to fall into it.

  The camera is moved once more, and the scenery for the grandmother’s house is put in place, the house interior with an open window at the back. The Wolf comes in, chases the grandmother away, in continuous action, goes to the wardrobe, dresses, climbs in bed. Only then is the action stopped.

  When filming begins again, with the same camera location, Red Riding Hood enters. The action is filmed continuously from this point to when the Wolf jumps from the bed. Then the Wolf chases the girl around the room, a passing hunter appears at the window, watches the action a second, runs in the door, shoots the Wolf (there is a flash powder explosion and the Wolf-actor drops through the trap door).

  The grandmother appears at the window, comes in; she, the hunter, and Red Riding Hood embrace. Fin.

  Méliès thanks the actors and pays them. The last of the film is unloaded from the camera (for such a bulky object it only holds sixteen meters of film per magazine) and taken to the laboratory building to be developed, then viewed and assembled by Méliès tomorrow morning.

  Now 5:00 p.m., Méliès returns to the house, has early supper with his wife and children. Then he reads to them, and at 7:00 p.m. performs for them the magic tricks he is trying out, shows new magic lantern transition-transfigurations to be incorporated into his stage act, gives them a puppet show or some other entertainment. He bids goodnight to his children, then returns to the parlor where he and his wife talk for an hour, perhaps while they talk he sketches her, or doodles scene designs for his films. He tells her amusing stories of the day’s filming, perhaps jokes or anecdotes from the Folies the actors have told him at lunch.

  He accompanies his wife upstairs, undresses her, opens the coverlet, inviting her in. She climbs into bed.

  He kisses her sweetly goodnight.

  Then he goes downstairs, puts on his hat, and goes to the home of his mistress.

  V. We Grow Bored

  The banquet was in honor of Lugné-Poe, the manager of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.

  Jarry, in his red canvas suit and paper shirt with a fish painted on it for a tie, was late. The soup was already being served.

  There were three hundred people, all male, attending. Alfred went to his seat; a bowl of soup, swimming with fish eyes, was placed before him. He finished it at once, as he had forgotten to eat for the last two days.

  He looked left and right; to the right was a man known vaguely to him as a pederast and a frotteur, but whose social station was such that he would rather have swallowed the national tricolor, base, standard, and spike, than to have spoken to Jarry. To the left was a shabby man, with large spade beard and mustache, wearing an artist’s beret and workman’s clothes. He slowly spooned his soup while deftly putting all the bread and condiments within reach into the pockets of his worn jacket.

  Then Jarry looked across the table and found himself staring into the eyes of a journalist for one of the right-wing nationalist Catholic cycling weeklies.

  “Are you not Jarry?” asked the man, with narrowed eyes.

  “We are,” said Alfred. “Unfortunately, our royal personage does not converse with those who have forsaken the One True Means of Transportation.”

  “Ha. A recidivist!” said the reporter. “It is we who are of the future, while you remain behind in the lost past.”

  “Our conversation is finished,” said Jarry. “You and Monsieur Norpois have lost our true salvation of the Wheel.”

  “Bi-cycle means two wheels,” said the journalist. “When you and your kind realize that true speed, true meaning, and true patriotism depend on equal size and mighty gearing, this degenerate country will become strong once more.”

  The man to Jarry’s left was looking back and forth from one to the other; he had stopped eating, but his left hand brought another roll to his pocket.

  “Does not the First Citizen of our Royal Lands and Possessions to the East, the Lord Amida Buddha himself, speak of the Greater and Lesser Wheels?” asked Jarry. “Put that in your ghost-benighted, superstition-ridden censer and try to smoke it. Our Royal Patience becomes stretched. We have nothing against those grown weary, old, effete who go to three, four wheels or more; they have given up. Those, however, with equal wheels, riders of crocodiles and spiders, with false mechanical aids, we deem repugnant, unworthy; one would almost say, but would never, ever, that they have given in to . . . German ideas.”

  The conversation at the long table stopped dead. The man to Jarry’s left put down his spoon and eased his chair back from the table ever so slightly.

  The face of the reporter across the table went through so many color changes that Jarry’s chameleon, at the height of mating season, would be shamed. The journalist reached under the table, lifted his heavy-headed cane, pushed it up through the fingers of his right hand with his left, caught it by the tip.

  “Prepare yourself for a caning,” said the turnip-faced man. No challenge to the field of honor, no further exchange of unpleasantries. He lifted his cane back, pushing back his sleeve.

  “Monsieur,” said Jarry, turning to the man on his left, “do us the honor of standing us upon our throne, here.” He indicated his chair.

  The man scooted back, picked up the one-and-a-quarter-meter-high Jarry and stood him on the seat of his chair in a very smooth motion. Then the man grabbed his soup bowl and stood away.

  “I will hammer you down much farther before I am done,” said the reporter, looking Jarry up and down. People from the banquet committee rushed toward them; Lugné-Poe was yelling who was the asshole who made the seating arrangements?

  “By your red suit I take you for an anarchist. Very well, no rules,” said the reporter. The cane whistled.

  “By our Red Suit you should take us for a man whose Magenta Suit is being cleaned,” said Jarry. “This grows tedious. We grow bored.” He pulled his Navy Colt Model .41 from his waistband, cocked it and fired a great roaring blank which caught the reporter’s pomaded hair on fire. The man went down yelling and rolling while others helpfully poured pitchers of water on him.

&
nbsp; The committee members had stopped at the gun’s report. Jarry held up his finger to the nearest waiter. “Check, please!” he said.

  He left the hall out the front door as the reporter, swearing great oaths of vengeance and destruction, was carried back into the kitchen for butter to be applied to his burns.

  Jarry felt a hand on his shoulder, swung his arm up, came around with the Colt out again. It was the man who had stood him on the chair.

  “You talk with the accent of Laval,” said the man.

  “Bred, born, raised, and bored merdeless there,” said Jarry.

  “I, too,” said the man.

  “We find Laval an excellent place to be from, if you get our royal meaning,” said Jarry.

  “Mr. Henri-Jules Rousseau,” said the man.

  “Mr. Alfred-Henri Jarry.” They shook hands.

  “I paint,” said Rousseau.

  “We set people’s hair afire,” said Jarry.

  “You must look me up; my studio is on the Boulevard du Port-Royal.”

  “We will be happy if a fellow Lavalese accompanies us immediately to drink, do drugs, visit the brothels, and become fast friends for life.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Rousseau. “They’re getting ready to serve the cabbage back in there. Do look me up, though,” he said, heading back in toward the banquet hall and putting his napkin back under his chin.

  “We shall,” said Jarry, and mounted his high-wheeler and was gone into the darkness.

  VI. News from All Over

  January 14, 1895 Le Cycliste Français

  TRAITOR ON THE GENERAL STAFF!

  ARREST AND TRIAL OF THE JEW CAPTAIN DREYFUS

  DEGRADATION AND STRIPPING OF RANK

  DEPORTATION TO GUIANA FOR LIFE

  “Secrets vital to the Nation,” says a General, “from which our Enemy will profit and France never recover. It is only the new lenient Jew-inspired law which kept the Tribunal from sentencing the human rat to Death!”

  VII. Like the Spokes of a Luminous Wheel

  The reporter Norpois rode a crocodile velocipede of singular aspect. Its frame was low and elongated. The seat was at the absolute center of the bicycle’s length, making it appear as if its rider were disincorporated.

  Though extremely modern in that respect, its wheels were anachronisms, heavily spoked and rimmed to the uncaring eye. On a close examination it was revealed the spokes were ironwork, eight to each wheel, and over them were wrought two overlapping semicircles, one of a happy, the other of a sad, aspect of the human face.

  In unison, front and back, the wheels first smiled, then frowned at the world around them as they whirled their rider along the newly macadamized roads and streets.

  In his sporty cap and black knickers, Norpois seemed almost to lean between the wheels of strife and fortune. Other bicyclists paused to watch him go spoking silently by, with an almost inaudible whisper of iron rim on asphalt. The crocodile frame seemed far too graceful and quiet for the heavy wheels on which it rode.

  Norpois worked for Le Cycliste Français. His assignments took him to many arrondissements and the outlying parts of the city.

  He was returning from interviewing a retired general before sunset one evening, when, preparatory to stopping to light his carbide handlebar-lamp, he felt a tickle of heat at his face, then a dull throbbing at his right temple. To his left, the coming sunset seemed preternaturally bright, and he turned his head to look at it.

  His next conscious thought was of picking himself and his velocipede up from the side of the road where he had evidently fallen. He noticed he was several dozen meters down the road from where he had turned to look at the sunset. His heart hammered in his chest. The knees of his knickers were dusty, his left hand was scraped, with two small pieces of gravel embedded in the skin, and he had bitten his lip, which was beginning to swell. He absently dug the gravel from his hand. He had no time for small aches and pains. He had to talk to someone.

  “Jules,” he said to the reporter who shared the three-room apartment with him. As he spoke he filled a large glass with half a bottle of cognac and began sipping at it between his sentences. “I must tell you what life will be like in twenty years.”

  “You, Robida, and every other frustrated engineer,” said Jules, putting down his evening paper.

  “Tonight I have had an authentic vision of the next century. It came to me not at first as a visual illusion, a pattern on my eyes, some ecstatic vision. It came to me first through my nose, Jules. An overpowering, oppressive odor. Do you know what the coming years smell like, Jules? They smell of burning flesh. It was the first thing to come to me, and the last to leave. Think of the worst fire you ever covered. Remember the charred bodies, the popped bones? Multiply it by a city, a nation, a hemisphere! It was like that.

  “The smell came; then I saw in the reddened clouds a line of ditches, miles, kilometers upon thousands of kilometers of ditches in churned earth, men like troglodytes killing each other as far as the eye could see, smoke everywhere, the sky raining death, the sky filled with aerial machines dropping explosives; detonations coming and going like giant brown trees which sprout, leaf, and die in an instant. Death everywhere, from the air, from guns, shells falling on all beneath them, the aerial machines pausing in their rain of death below only to shoot each other down. Patterns above the ditches, like vines, curling vines covered with thorns—over all a pattern formed on my retina—always the incessant chatter of machinery, screams, fire, death-agonies, men stomping each other in mud and earth. I could see it all, hear it all, above all else, smell it all, Jules, and . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Jules, it was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.” He stared at his roommate.

  “There’s some cold mutton on the table,” said Jules. “And half a bottle of beer.” He looked back down at his paper. After a few minutes he looked up. Norpois stood, looking out the window at the last glow of twilight, still smiling.

  VIII. One Ordinary Day, with Anarchists

  Alfred Jarry sailed along the boulevard, passing people and other cyclists right and left. Two and a half meters up, he bent over his handlebars, his cap at a rakish angle, his hair a black flame behind his head. He was the very essence of speed and grace, no longer a dwarfish man of slight build. A novice rider on a safety bicycle took a spill ahead of him. Jarry used his spoon-brake to stop a few centimeters short of the wide-eyed man who feared broken ribs, death, a mangled vehicle.

  Then Jarry jumped up and down on his seat, his feet on the locked pedals, jerking the ordinary in small jumps a meter to the left until his path was clear; then he was gone down the road as if nothing had happened.

  Riders who drew even with him dropped back—Jarry had a carbine slung across his back, carried bandoliers of cartridges for it on his chest, had two Colt pistols sticking from the waistband of his pants, the legs of which were tucked into his socks, knicker-fashion. Jarry was fond of saying firearms, openly displayed, were signs of peaceableness and good intentions, and wholly legal. He turned down a side street and did not hear the noise from the Chamber of Deputies.

  A man named Vaillant, out of work, with a wife and children, at the end of his tether, had gone to the Chamber carrying with him a huge sandwich made from a whole loaf of bread. He sat quietly watching a debate on taxes, opened the sandwich to reveal a device made of five sticks of the new dynamite, a fuse and blasting cap, covered with one and a half kilos of #4 nails. He lit it in one smooth motion, jumped to the edge of the gallery balcony and tossed it high into the air.

  It arced, stopped, and fell directly toward the center of the Chamber. Some heard the commotion, some saw it; Dreyfussards sensed it and ducked.

  It exploded six meters in the air.

  Three people were killed, forty-seven injured badly, more than seve
nty less so. Desks were demolished; the speaker’s rostrum was turned to wood lace.

  Vaillant was grabbed by alert security guards.

  The first thing that happened, while people moaned and crawled out from under their splintered desks, was that the eight elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Anarchist ticket, some of them having to pull nails from their hands and cheeks to do so, stood and began to applaud loudly. “Bravo!” they yelled, “Bravo! Encore!”

  IX. The Kid from Spain

  His name was Pablo, and he was a big-nosed, big-eyed Spanish kid who had first come to Paris with his mother two years before at the age of thirteen; now he was back on his own as an art student.

  On this trip, the first thing he learned to do was fuck; the second was to learn to paint.

  One day a neighbor pointed out to him the figure of Jarry tearing down the street. Pablo thought the tiny man on the huge bicycle, covered with guns and bullets, was the most romantic thing he had ever seen in his life. Pablo immediately went out and bought a pistol, a .22 single-shot, and took to wearing it in his belt.

  He was sketching the River one morning when the shadow of a huge wheel fell on the ground beside him. Pablo looked up. It was Jarry, studying the sketch over his shoulder.

  Pablo didn’t know what to do or say, so he took out his gun and showed it to Jarry.

  Jarry looked embarrassed. “We are touched,” he said, laying his hand on Pablo’s shoulder. “Take one of ours,” he said, handing him a .38 Webley. Then he was up on his ordinary and gone.