Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered harshly. The memory of tears flooded back, but only dust would gather in the corners of my eyes. “You left me alone. You left me terrified, you heartless bitch. Why didn’t you wait for me? Why did you leave me?”

  “Crawling out of coffins can be quite profitable.” She smirked.

  “I didn’t know where I was. What I was.”

  She only seemed amused by my anger and hurt.

  “Well, you obviously found your way.”

  “Was that your plan?”

  “What are you braying about? After all, I left you in capable hands.”

  “What hands?”

  “Why, your father’s hands, you silly little tart.”

  And I looked to Volker, who held up a single hand in a helpless gesture, and I knew it was true.

  “You don’t think I’d leave you with just any well-shod monster.”

  “It’s true. I’ve always had a weakness for fine shoes,” Volker purred, and I wondered how long they had planned this little reveal. Hadn’t she murdered the son of a bitch to protect my dignity? Or was that bullshit too? Of course it was. A witch of her cunning could have stilled his heart with a single glance. How many midnights had he left the echo of my skull to scheme with her? So this was her plan, let me learn from the miserable ground up. Let me struggle and thrash my way to cinematic competence, then renown. And all so she could highjack the train for her own aggrandizement.

  “If you think for one second I’ll put that blackhearted whore in my movie you’re—”

  “You’ll do as you’re told, child,” Volker growled. “You just remember who pulls the strings.”

  And he stole into me with that icy blade of his invasive presence and made me stand. I could hear his laughter in the hollow of my skull as he insinuated into the joints of my knees and I began a jerky step toward the dance floor.

  “Stop it,” I shouted. “I’ll do it. Just not like that.”

  “As you wish,” he whispered, and I felt the door of me shut behind him.

  “Just remember, my girl, Poppa is only ever a wish away.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I suppose in many ways the story of Zipper was ahead of its time. It predated the body horror of Bava and Franju by several decades and its frank dealing with the conditions of a postwar populace was considered by some to be more sensitive than De Sica. But there is little savor in accomplishments that are not completely one’s own. The scenario was a grim one, made worse, if that were possible, by the relish with which I was forced to tell it. And so the frigid tide of Volker’s prompting rose once again, the cold, dull knives of each syllable shattering upon Zann’s open ears.

  It was the story of a whore, a nameless streetwalker known only by her profession, an anonymous pigeon jerking in a park (establishing shot). We see her beheld in the low beams of desire. The sour salt of some thumb pries apart her lips to assay her teeth. The ripeness of one breast is tested like winter fruit. We see her chosen, used, discarded. But in her eyes, over the rhythmic admiration of some dandy, a spark, a fearful hope. And for what does she hope? To dance. To sparkle, perhaps. To be more than the gentle ruin she is. And so she defies her station, her class. She elevates herself to a stage, a mere two feet above the fingers that once possessed her. And she dances, if it could be called that, flecked with cheap glitter and bangles, grinding her cartilage to the shearing beat of a Tingeltangel bar. She dances for brutes, for degenerates still wet from fitful sleeps, for old, old men who remember when waltzes were revolutionary. Her life hardly improves. The abuse she endured on the street merely follows her backstage. But her dream is still somehow served and she is nothing if not indentured.

  Then one night a poor student sees her perform and is helplessly smitten with her. He sends flowers, flirts, keeps his hands in his pockets, and the possibility of a prosaic life casts its weird light on her. She goes with him. But she has transgressed against an intractable law of economics. When she is finally missed from the stable of her cruel and very blond pimp, his retribution is swift. One evening during her number, he pulls her from the chorus line and in a very public demonstration of wrath and in what was to be our only moving crane shot, guts her, slicing her from belly to clavicle. He miraculously flees the scene unhindered, leaving her bleeding upon the stage that once offered much solace. But death does not claim her. She wakes to the adoring face of the student, weak and bandaged, grateful as he nurses her back to some semblance of health.

  We iris out from her staring eyes, pulling back to see her standing before a full-length mirror. She regards her torso wrapped in a curious tangle of interlocking gauze, wrapped tightly like a gift we doubt she will appreciate. Curious, she peels. She beholds her scar, a double highway of puckered skin. And between the puckers a stretch of something foreign, something metallic. A zipper. She has been fitted with a zipper. Like a human purse. A woman-shaped frock. And now the student enters, his arms full of their meager evening. He sees that she sees, but he is not shocked. He is not repelled. He is happy to see her up and about. He inspects the wound officiously and is pleased it is healing so well. And here the horror begins to seep. For it is shortly revealed that the student himself, the bumbling, lovesick schmuck, is indeed the party responsible for her freakishness. (“A medical student who dabbles in the occult,” that is as much detail as I am allowed to impart to Zann, and his wide, stunned stare tells me that is enough.)

  A slow pan down the length of her zipper, her new mark of servitude. Her old life is now lost to her. She is fit for nothing more than to be his hausfrau, his toy, his creature. And slowly the weight of this answered prayer descends on her. When she balks, he threatens her with the zipper. Smiling calmly, his fingers edge toward the pull that if opened will reveal what? Her still-beating heart? A dusty cupboard of shriveled organ and bone? The place that once harbored her dream? Close-up of her single unblinking eye as a tear of dreadful despair glistens down her cheek. It is a nightmare beyond reckoning.

  Then one day while slogging home the nightly kraut she spies a flyer for a traveling carnival. Rides, clowns, and curiosities (close-up on her face, a rising dread and determination).

  She gets the student drunk. He sleeps. She sneaks out to the tent show. And there is her old familiar world somehow made more horrible and more dear in its desire to grovel and entertain.

  She is spied by a hideous old mountebank. Taken with her beauty, he concocts a use for her. He shows her to the tent of exotic wonders, where common girls dress as Persian slaves. It is rank and cheap and horrible, but there is music and dancing and the old dreams have their sway and she is compelled to join them.

  We see her onstage, dressed in the silks of a concubine. Taken in ecstasy, she is magnificent. The audience is captive until she reveals her wound. Horror resounds. But the mountebank won’t be gypped. He begins a chant, clapping and pounding and prodding. Zip-per! Zip-per! Zip-per! And she makes the turn, I suppose, chooses the love of the audience over what dry horror might lie beneath that sphinxy enclosure. She toys with the silver pull as we slowly pan behind her. Her dance slows to her final dance. Her hand begins its descent, and the zipper loses its bite. Backlit. A nova. A precursor of how the world might finally end. She lowers the zipper’s pull to its base, opening herself for the last time to the rabid approbation of strangers. Her face is a placid pool of release. Blow to white. Fin.

  “It’s marvelous,” says Zann. “Terrible. Of course we’ll need more dance numbers for Miss Fluke.”

  Volker took no chances with even an overture toward collaboration. He perfumed his influence, pumping it full of heady pheromones, thinning, insinuating, polluting every dry estuary of my being. And if I tried to shunt his presence, deafen myself to his rampaging will, I was met not with some racking punishment but with withdrawal. Like any good pusher, he knew what I needed, what I craved. His drug was an unshakable feeling of confidence. So if I tried to purge myself, retreat into my own devices, I couldn’t. I wouldn�
�t. Even the imagined emptiness of him was more than I could bear. He ruled through the tyranny of addiction until my need became completely indistinguishable from his desire.

  Mutter was the only one to notice the change. He would stare at me from beneath the hot metal drum of his arc light, the sweat running into his eyes the only thing making him blink, and say, “Maddy? Maddy?” and I would stare back from some great depth of exhilaration and ride the rest of the scene.

  The picture had been cast even before the pitch. The part of the blond pimp went to the one actor who auditioned for it, the tattooed pimp who had introduced me to my mother. Our chance meeting on the street that night had been another of Volker’s clever setups. His was a convincing performance, I must admit. I was later to learn he’d done a brief stint with Reinhardt’s company before trying his luck with the flickers. For the mountebank I might have mentioned the Trout, who by this time had kept steady pace with Jannings, at least as far as his corpulence was concerned, and was so bloated and blurred by drink and continued disappointment as to be all but unrecognizable. I seem to remember him stopping me in the commissary one day before we began shooting. His mustache was wet from watery beer and the moisture ran into the deep folds of his chin. He was miles from feigned indifference, desperate, blubbering about old times. But Volker made me sneer and sealed my mouth and made me turn away without a sound.

  The zipper effect held some fascination, as tactile things do for the junkie. I remember watching my hand hold a honed knife over my mother’s abdomen while Nick LaRocca’s orchestra bleated through “Bluin’ the Blues” on the phonograph. This wasn’t going to be some cheap effect. As she shared my condition, we were going to do it “practical.” The tip of the knife sliced her torso as if through tallow, bloodlessly. My mother looked more bored than amused. I placed the long upholstery zipper into the cut that wafted pink dust and threaded the thick needle. I was looking from some promontory of myself, a small observer crowded by Volker’s cruelty and desire. I remember the stiff satisfying sutures that held it there, the dip and tug and pull, over and over, in neat puckered rows. And then a rise in heat as Volker and I gazed down on her white pubis. I felt the chill of power men must feel, the ever-forward that compels any engagement, be it war or business or fucking. And my hand was between her legs, tucked into that cold hollow like some vegetable yet to emerge from its husk. And I was upon her with my cold lips on her cold neck and breasts. The sound of Volker’s murmurs and cries was as crows cry before carrion as he fired my fingers and hips. He made a habit of this, between shots, during shots, whenever the mood struck. And I was the guiltiest of all. For it was during these ravenous interludes that the narcotic of him was the sweetest.

  A movie must have been shot, some sort of assembly made. For in those rare moments when Volker would ebb and I was left to myself alone, depleted and nervous, I could see Zann’s eyes. That penetrating glance of his, delivered askew, the glance reserved for the endowed, the truly imbued. But I was beyond praise.

  There is no survival instinct among the dead. Only the clean, organic directive to merge. Volker may have been an exception, but I was not. I had entered the house of the host and was resigned to my plight as a tool for eternity. I was such a tool for what could have been years. Time means nothing to the dead. Once my mother and Volker realized I could effectually function as a corporeal bridge to their lust, I was exhaustively exploited to this purpose. Years of Berlin nights were but a single night to me. Hot jazz bleated from the same sweating horns with only a slight variation in the tunes. I recognized a change in venue only from slight differences in lighting. Sheets were either satin, silk, or Egyptian cotton, but their surfaces were all witness to the same predictable rhythms. Only one night do I remember. I was roused from my self-inflicted stupor by a stutter of orange flames that leapt up black velvet curtains. The room was full of smoke and through the vapor, stacked at the foot of the brass bed, like prop ice blocks, were hundreds of empty gin bottles. Next to me was a sour redhead, flat on her narrow back, breasts lolling into her downy armpits, deep in a drunken sleep. It was the firemen themselves who had to tell me my bedmate had been none other than the notorious Anita Berber.

  The nights were the tithe I paid to the glory of my days. For it was during the days that I worked on my craft. I spent years perfecting the edit on Zipper while doubling as camera operator and editor on several other pictures. I had no portrait like dear Dorian Gray to map the trajectory of my debaucheries. My face and body remained a blank canvass so Zann never showed concern. But Mutter was far more discerning. He watched me for nearly six years without saying a word. Then one day that all changed.

  I was dragging myself from editing one afternoon, having just put the finishing touches on Zipper, the vapors of the images I had just seen dispersing between blinks, when Mutter stood before me, blocking my path. I veered to avoid him, but his arm came down like a gentle wrath and he held me by the shoulder and looked deeply.

  “Darkness,” he said. “Darkness too long inside Maddy.”

  “Mutter, get out of my way. I’m needed on Stage Five.”

  “Movie finished?” he asked, referring to Zipper.

  “Yes. Just now.”

  “Happy? Picture happy?”

  “Yes, I’m quite happy with it, I suppose,” I said testily. “Don’t ask me that. You’ll get me thinking about it again. Let me pass. I’m late.”

  “No,” he said calmly, not moving. “Must fix it. Fix darkness now movie finished.”

  I waved my hand to swat him away, but Volker’s strength could not be greater than my own. And Mutter caught my tiny fist in his hot yawning grip.

  He growled, looking down at me. “Must fix it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The church steeples of Berlin were little more than negative space defining a changing sky.

  Mutter entered the first church he recognized as one, carried me in his arms like dry sticks ready for the fire. It was the fall of what must have been 1924. And he brought the cold with him on his clothes, brought the smell of exhaust and dirty concrete and the small shouting voices of the street, before the heavy wooden doors swallowed us both. Mutter stood there in the silence, stood there whimpering among the empty pews and souring frankincense. An old priest appeared through the gloom of the sacristy brushing crumbs from the shoulders of his worn vestment. As soon as I sensed him I went limp, my eyes glazed, arms slack though my senses stayed sharp. I had been taught to be wary of priests.

  “What is it, my son?” the priest asked. His accent was foreign. “I am Father Verhoeven. How can I ease your suffering?”

  Verhoeven. A Belgian name. I had to stop a rousing Volker from curling my pink lips into a grin. Here was how Christ leeched the metal from a man. Volker chuckled distantly. Made him choke down the confessions of murders. I imagined him with two fingers held stiffly to the cardinal points of the cross, dispelling the guilt of a German sergeant who might have plundered the priest’s own home. For the rape of his sister, ten Hail Marys. For the burning of his father’s crops and bayonetting of his mother, seven more. Another sheep sheared by the hand of the Lord. This was Christ’s plan. Forgiveness more steady and overwhelming than any blitzkrieg. And this must have been his weary summation of the lumbering monster full of limp child that came stalking toward the altar: some poor blasted soul who had murdered an innocent, another mortal sin to be expunged by a mere wave of the hand. Father Verhoeven sucked in the air that would neutralize the guilt and also deliver the last rites. But the monster shook his horrible metal head.

  “But this child is dead, my son,” said the priest.

  “Not dead,” Mutter rasped. “Sick. Sick inside.”

  The priest laid a single finger to my throat.

  “But she’s as cold as the grave,” he said.

  “Demon inside,” said Mutter under his filling eyes. “Fix her.”

  The priest bent his head to my chest. He smelled of cheese and sweat. His ear was prickly on my skin.<
br />
  “She has no pulse, my son. Please. Come unburden yourself.”

  And all might have been well with Volker if he could have contained his rising excitement. A priest, after all, might be fun. He made me cough and blink and sit up and grin at the priest’s falling jaw.

  “Holy Father, protect us,” he whispered.

  “I’m afraid you caught me napping, Father,” I said as innocently as Volker’s stink would allow. “You must forgive my friend. He’s frightfully prone to hysterics. The war, you know,” and I motioned to Mutter’s metal plate as if no other explanation were needed.

  “But you had no heartbeat.” The priest fingered the cross that dangled from his neck.

  “Now how could I be conversing with you,” I said, “if that were true? Unless it’s a miracle. Do you believe in miracles, Father?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “God help me, I don’t. But I know men’s hearts. And I know the sound of lies.”

  And here Volker could not resist a bit of small-time theatricality. My eyes turned a fierce black and my lips twisted into a vicious sneer. The priest’s eyes were unmoved as he stared back at me, shadowed in the candlelight.

  “Bolt the door, my friend,” he shot to Mutter. “Then come and hold her feet.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to believe this metal-headed idiot!”

  Mutter put me down on the hard carpet of the aisle. There was a rodent panic somewhere at the base of my skull, a frantic cleaving as Volker tried to will me larger, stronger, more violent. I heard the door bolt slam. I leaped to my feet and, shrieking, ran toward the exit. But Volker’s fear soured the drug of him, and I came to what senses I had left.

  “Mutter,” I whimpered. Volker collapsed my body hard to the floor.

  “Hold her, my son!” bellowed the priest. “Hold that writhing serpent hosted in this innocent house!”