“But Zann wants nightmares made safe.”
Nightmares can never be made safe. They can only multiply. The teeth in his face shut, in strict tandem. But his last syllable lingered on the dark like a sigh.
And he was gone.
That morning I saw the entire movie in my head. The proscenium smashed, pushed past comfort, maybe even coherence, but vital, new, and because I was only the camera operator, completely useless.
What saved me and the project was not the spontaneous triumph of artistic righteousness or the Trout’s epiphanic bow to my night-born acumen. It was budget. With the signing at Versailles, the first spasms of Germany’s fiscal collapse were keenly felt. It was printed in every daily that the empire would be fined nearly 132 billion marks in reparations. Although the Great Inflation had yet to fully descend, the Prussian capacity to enable fear gave way to almost all productions losing nearly two-thirds of their budgets. We had originally been assigned a small crew of six to help with lighting, set moving, and camera operation. But after the treaty, we were pared down to just us three. It didn’t seem to matter to Zann, who was desperate to keep the chloroform from his own production deal, that our scenario called for four principal actors.
“You are actually in an enviable position,” Zann said when we were summoned into his office.
“How so?” asked the Trout wearily.
“As luck would have it you already have two of this studio’s most competent technicians in your cast.” He was referring of course to Mutter and myself. But the Trout was just winding up to toss out the money changers.
“You still think technicians can tell stories?” he said disgustedly. “I suppose you believe the pigment grinders are responsible for the Sistine Chapel? Or the dolt who thought up the chisel should take credit for the David?”
I could hear our project’s unborn cries, and I refused to see it cleaved from the womb.
“We can do it, Mr. Zann,” I blurted out. “Between Mutter and myself, we can move the lights and run the camera. I can teach Mutter the camera rhythm, and we’ll shoot practical so we can minimize lighting.”
“And who the hell is to play the pathetic little girl if you’re busy fiddling about with the furniture?” the Trout bellowed.
“I can do both. The part’s not that demanding.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What choice do we have? Isn’t that right, Mr. Zann?”
The Trout puffed.
“Just so,” Zann said finally, with reserved admiration.
“Judas,” hissed the Trout. “I suppose next you’ll be saying you can direct the damn thing as well.”
I didn’t have to say it. Without the buffer of extra crew, the Trout defaulted to his natural state of narcissism. He was always before the portable mirrors Mutter hauled to the location. And I would set up the camera, adjust for light and angle, leaving the Trout his great pliant face for the molding of his emotion. It went unspoken that I would make the actual film.
It was our third day. We had packed Mutter like a prospector’s mule, prepared for any contingency. He was hung with spades and picks and a shallow stack of wooden grave markers aged with dry-brushed oil paint. Cold pork sandwiches and kraut were stuffed into his pockets while what costumes we could muster were rolled like bedding at the nape of his neck. And on the cornice of his shoulder perched the camera, an idiot magpie primed to repeat the lies we would feed it.
There were still open spaces within the city then. Among these was a vacant field where the dregs of disbanded regiments still congregated. They would muster in the cool, still hearing the rude cries of bugles, and float the ghost of decorum among their crippled ranks. The privates huddled around one meager fire, the officers around another. Wild blackberries steamed on the briars they burned, exploding with tart floral scent. It was from among this crowd that I hoped to recruit our extras. We could offer them nothing but a few scraps of cold lunch and our attention, but they practically jumped at the chance. We found the man in charge, a lieutenant colonel who had somehow managed to keep the defeat off the sides of his still-shiny boots. We conveyed our needs, the mock grave we needed dug, the grave markers we needed placed. And then someone to play the priest. He sobered at this last request. A priest must be a man of peace, pliant and understanding, with all his limbs. And preferably free of scars. But here the men seemed to suffer from some congenital defect. Every one of them had the thin pink stigma of a saber duel on the meat of one cheek. And what scars that could have been obscured by whiskers or sideburns had been proudly razed for display.
There was but one field officer who might do. He was an artillery sergeant whose battle prize was a cranial cut that barely crested his hairline. To properly display this he had shaved his head, but we had a wig in tow. The problem was his lack of legs, blown off before the final offensive. I was thinking of the best way to skirt this when the Trout strode toward me, his lavender face and vermillion eyebrows blazing with impatience.
“Why the hell aren’t we shooting?”
“The priest has no legs,” I said.
“Good Christ, then prop him up!” he bellowed. “This inspiration I’m nursing won’t last all goddamn day, you know.”
I changed into my wardrobe while a petty officer blew cadence to synchronize the gravediggers. My getup was ridiculous, a frilly empire-waisted thing seventy years out of date with wads of petticoats and bloomers. The Trout had wanted a bonnet as well. But this I refused under the pretext of lighting difficulties. He did succeed in getting me to rouge just the pout of my lips, however. I looked like a demented china doll. Which may have been what he was after.
The grave was dug. German engineering, precisely six feet deep with no vertical incongruity, the dirt neatly piled and graded beside it. I had fires set at the peripheries so the smoke would imitate fog. The legless sergeant waddled forward on his stubs when I called for places. I looked at his attentive face, the bits of reheated bean clinging to his chin. He was transparently relieved to be of use once more. He was the height of a child.
“Get two of his buddies under him,” I shouted. “And tell them to be still. Put him in the frock coat. We’ll never see below his waist from the angle I’m using. But we need the height for the background. Do you have the bounce, Mutter?”
Mutter unfurled a heavy white sheet with a hole through the middle.
“Get the camera in the pit and stake the bounce six inches below the dirt line, lens through the hole. We need to see the rim of the grave.”
Mutter grunted.
“The sun will be where we need it in about a minute. Give a nice backlight. The bounce will let us see your lovely faces,” I explained to the men.
“What the hell are you doing?” the Trout whispered harshly.
“Shooting from inside the grave.”
“What about the frame? What about the proscenium? How will we see the action?”
“The grave is the proscenium. Where the hell is the requiem bell?”
“This is ridiculous. You can’t shoot up our noses.”
“What is this scene about, Herr Trout?” I asked.
“Not about our goddamn septums, I can tell you.”
“It’s about fear,” I said, facing him.
“What?”
“Fear of death. Fear of the grave. We put the audience in it from the beginning, they’ll think your tears are for them. Now, please, the sun is almost perfect.”
It felt strange hearing Volker’s words rasp past my lips. But in truth, I was doing far more than quoting him.
The Trout was silent. Then he turned on an intake of breath and patted the bottom of his chin.
“Just keep the shadows nice and thick under here,” he said, walking away. “I tend to get jowly from that angle.”
I moved a few stray embers from the fire near the mouth of the grave and had one of the men feed it wet brush. Another wafted the smoke over the stuttering aperture, waiting for it to pool. I then instructed him to gently fan it, c
reating a spectral effect and eliminating the need for a standard iris out. Mutter crouched in the bathtub-size hole, and the Trout shouted, “Begin,” and I, as his daughter, collapsed onto his quivering shoulder with my ridiculous porcelain-looking head. The artillery sergeant looked panicked. I called, “Cut.” The Trout raised an eyebrow but seemed curious as to what I might say.
“I’m sorry, fräulein,” the artillery sergeant stammered. “We are Lutherans. I don’t know the Catholic requiem.”
“It won’t matter,” I said. “Just say what you know.”
“Now hold on,” the Trout said, pulling away from me. “He can’t just blabber on. He’s a bloody priest. He must show some bloody decorum.”
“The film is silent, my dear Trout. People will only see his lips moving. Just think like a priest, sergeant.”
I called, “Begin,” and the sergeant began quoting ordnance calibers and load procedures, his fingers cutting the air in the sign of the cross. The Trout began his speech, projecting needlessly, biting the back of his wrist in mute anguish. I shouted, “Cut!”
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted. “We have half the scene left.”
“I’m moving closer,” I said, lifting my head from his shoulder, “for a tighter frame.”
“But what about my performance?”
“We don’t need it for that angle.”
I looked to Mutter. He checked the footage meter and gave me a thumbs-up.
“This is an impossible way to work!” the Trout said, ripping at the tails of his waxed mustache.
“I’m only shooting what we can use.”
He snorted, a frustrated bull at odds with the shade of red flashing before him, and stormed off primly. I shot two more angles and then did a series of extreme close-ups. Brimming eyes and worried brows. Hands gripping or too tired to grasp. I wasn’t sure how I would incorporate this footage into the assembly. But there was Volker at the edge of my periphery, his grinning dirt-filled eyes prodding me forward.
When I had all the coverage I needed, I instructed the Trout to take a break. He anxiously agreed. I led Mutter into the pit with me. I explained that I needed two pieces of wood to simulate the interior walls of a casket, which I was going to use in an insert of the dead mother as seen from inside her coffin. He grunted and went searching the vacant lot for materials while I wiped off my lipstick and matted my hair. I had decided I would wear a veil over my face to mask my obvious similarity to the daughter but also to evoke a spectral quality to the corpse.
Not enough, I heard Volker whisper in my mind. They have to believe you’re dead, my girl. Have to know it. You must show them.
“But I can lie perfectly still.”
Not enough. The dead are hosts to living things.
And here his pale manicured hands burst out of the earth near my face. I jumped back, surprised I could still be startled. The webs of his fingers teemed with tiny spiders.
The dead are playgrounds, he said, grabbing the back of my head and thrusting the fistful of scrambling creatures into my mouth.
I lurched with revulsion. I could feel them fluttering in there like frenzied chocolates, the tentative tips of their dry-bristle feet teasing the insides of my cheeks.
There is no reason for your fear, my girl, Volker purred. Remember what you are and it will fade.
The revulsion slowed. The fear began to ebb. I felt a creeping coolness, an almost drowsy chill. I lay back into the earth, composed, as if in a tepid bath. In that state, Mutter must have found me. I suppose he set up the pieces of wood he had found. For when I came closer to my senses, I could feel them there behind my head. I gave a turning motion with my hand and half heard, from the distance of the grave, the whirring of the camera as Mutter turned the crank. My eyes glazed in a death stare. My lips fell open and the spiders spilled out in one frenzied black stream. I whispered, “Cut,” and sat up. Mutter stared hard at me. A thin whiff of rot issued from the gulch where his flesh met his metal plate. He placed a hand hard on my chest and furrowed his brow.
“Dead again?” he said.
I realized then, the giant only spoke when he had something to say. His ice-blue eyes were wet.
“Only sometimes, Mutter,” I said, gripping his callused finger. “Only when I need to be.”
I ended the scene, still in the grave, shooting through the windshield of an ancient Aachener, while two privates shoveled earth over me to total obscurity.
That should make them soil their linen. Volker snickered in the dark.
CHAPTER 13
For the creation sequence, I adhered to Volker’s directive. Push their faces into the shit. Make them feel it. I shot through gauze, through gobs of axel grease to simulate a breach of tears. I began with a slow overhead pan of the assembled clockworks. It was a fairly pitiful effort, given the slimness of our budget. We made do with what looked like the wreckage of a windup railroad arranged in vaguely human form, but this was only the establishing shot. The actual transformation was something new. Our crew of enlisted men were deft thieves and managed to procure two complete pig carcasses. From these I had intended to “build” the muscle of the creature through the accumulation of stop frames, but we were at a loss as to what muscle to put where. I had found a knife and sharpening stone in one of the prop closets. But where to cut? If we had wanted to kill the pig, I had several suggestions from the enlisted men. But we needed shoulders. Thighs. A chest. The pigs seemed like indifferent clay.
The Trout stepped forward. Puffing, he took the knife and whetstone from Mutter and, in a flurry of scrapes and flashes, honed the blade like a true professional. “Once the son of a butcher . . .” He sighed.
“But I thought your father was a rag picker from Kraków,” I said.
“Who said anything about my father?”
He tested the edge with the meat of his thumb.
“Perhaps one day the door will finally be closed on poor Darwin,” he said with concise rasps upon the stone. “One day the world will realize we are all just sons of pork.”
And with two silent swipes of his knife he had the chest of the creature spread wide.
“Same pectoral configuration.”
A deft flurry of cuts.
“The shoulder and biceps insertions, indistinguishable from our own.”
Then he slammed the knife into the beast’s neck, severing the head with a surprisingly vicious stroke. He lifted the head and, pulling hard on the jaw, dislocated it with a crack.
“Even the teeth and those triangular jaws. How many men have I met with jaws like that? And with similar appetites?”
Then he went to work. He had the major muscle groups in pink gelatinous mounds in no time.
It took the entire day. We would place a mound of muscle, roll sixteen frames. Cut. Then place more. Repeat. Until what greatly resembled a flayed human lay warming on the table under the arc lights. For skin we used the pig’s own, cutting it into strips and shaving the bristles from the spine with a straight razor. I stitched the cold waxy sheets into squares that could be molded around the recognizable appendages. The head was a cabbage or some other orb-shaped roughage, covered with a tea towel upon which I would project Mutter’s face in what is now known as a poor man’s process. We had no idea this hideous doll stuffed with decomposing meat, puckered by tracks of black suture, would become so imitated, so iconic. (Caveat: Much has been made, among those who bother with such things, of the similarities between our creation sequence and the one in Edison’s 1910 single-reeler of Frankenstein. All I can say in response to such suppositions, apart from being understandably insulted, is that I never saw it. Nor any other imported film at that time. The war, by imperial decree, had necessitated a ban on all enemy products. And this included not just Virginia tobacco and peppermint chewing gum but all foreign melodramas as well. To a defeated people, horror was serious business.)
The climax was supposed to be the strangling of the child. We shot the sequence but ultimately decided it to be too
tame. We had been contracted, after all, to reproduce the fall that capped our live show. And so I set up the camera in a long-wide on a cobblestone street across from a half-timbered wurst restaurant that would look sufficiently Bavarian to the international eye. We had established a game between the girl and creature, a flying game where the creature would toss the child higher and ever higher. It was easily a fifty-foot drop to the stones below. And in the one editless longshot I had planned, the fall would be impossible to fake. I had never taken a fall this unforgiving, but a rehearsal was out of the question. We were already running the risk of uncomfortable inquiry shooting on a public thoroughfare. We had one chance. On the roof of the restaurant, Mutter held me tight in the high wind. He was nervous.
“You need to toss me,” I said to him. “Up and down, like we did down there.”
A thin whimper bucked from his throat.
“Mutter, like we did down there,” I repeated, trying to soothe him.
“Too far,” he said. “Breakable.” And he gently flexed the cervical joints of my neck.
“But I’m not breakable. I’ll be fine.”
His face set hard against my request.
“We have to roll, Mutter, please. Just toss me. Toss me up and catch me.”
He made a tentative throw and caught me clumsily.
“Higher.”
He growled.
“Higher, Mutter.”
He tossed. The wind caught me for a second in a crosscurrent before he snatched me back into his arms.
“He needs to do it higher,” the Trout shouted from below.
“Come on, Mutter. Real high. Like heaven. You remember the heaven game?”
I counted to three and felt his arms cock like giant springs. His smile was dull as he let me fly. He scrambled to catch me but I planted a foot on his chest and kicked out of the orbit of his grasp. But something was wrong. I was falling headfirst and the comet could not be corrected. I remembered fear. I fell for what felt like an eternity.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 8
