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Rain showered the white tombstones.
I gave the ladder a gentle shake.
“My God!” I yelled.
For the old man, on top of the ladder, toppled.
I fell out of the way.
He landed like a ten-ton lead meteor, between gravestones. I got to my feet and stood over him, not able to hear for the thunder in my chest, and the rain whispering on the stones and drenching him.
I stared down into the dead man’s face.
He stared back at me with oyster eyes.
Why are you looking at me? he asked, silently.
Because, I thought, I know you!
His face was a white stone.
James Charles Arbuthnot, former head of Maximus Films, I thought.
Yes, he whispered.
But, but, I cried silently, the last time I saw you, I was thirteen years old on my roller skates in front of Maximus Films, the week you were killed, twenty years ago, and for days there were dozens of photos of two cars slammed against a telephone pole, the terrible wreckage, the bloody pavement, the crumpled bodies, and for another two days hundreds of photos of the thousand mourners at your funeral and the million flowers and, weeping real tears, the New York studio heads, and the wet eyes behind two hundred sets of dark glasses as the actors came out, with no smiles. You were really missed. And some final pictures of the wrecked cars on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it took weeks for the newspapers to forget, and for the radios to stop their praise and forgive the king for being forever dead. All that, James Charles Arbuthnot, was you.
Can’t be! Impossible, I almost yelled. You’re here tonight up on the wall? Who put you there? You can’t be killed all over again, can you?
Lightning struck. Thunder fell like the slam of a great door. Rain showered the dead man’s face to make tears in his eyes. Water filled his gaping mouth.
I spun, yelled, and fled.
When I reached the taxi I knew I had left my heart back with the body.
It ran after me now. It struck me like a rifle shot midriff, and knocked me against the cab.
The driver stared at the gravel drive beyond me, pounded by rain.
“Anyone there?!” I yelled.
“No!”
“Thank God. Get out of here!”
The engine died.
We both moaned with despair.
The engine started again, obedient to fright.
It is not easy to back up at sixty miles an hour.
We did.
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I sat up half the night looking around at my ordinary living room with ordinary furniture in a small safe bungalow house on a normal street in a quiet part of the city. I drank three cups of hot cocoa but stayed cold as I threw images on the walls, shivering.
People can’t die twice! I thought. That couldn’t have been James Charles Arbuthnot on that ladder, clawing the night wind. Bodies decay. Bodies vanish.
I remembered a day in 1934 when J. C. Arbuthnot had got out of his limousine in front of the studio as I skated up, tripped, and fell into his arms. Laughing, he had balanced me, signed my book, pinched my cheek, and gone inside.
And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass.
I heard voices and saw headlines:
J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED.
“No!” I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. “It wasn’t him. It’s a lie!”
Wait until dawn, a voice said.
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Dawn was no help.
The radio and TV news found no dead bodies.
The newspaper was full of car crashes and dope raids. But no J. C. Arbuthnot.
I wandered out of my house, back to my garage, full of toys, old science and invention magazines, no automobile, and my secondhand bike.
I biked halfway to the studio before I realized I could not recall any intersection I had blindly sailed through. Stunned, I fell off the bike, trembling.
A fiery red open-top roadster burned rubber and stopped parallel to me.
The man at the wheel, wearing a cap put backward, gunned the throttle. He stared through the windshield, one eye bright blue and uncovered, the other masked by a monocle that had been hammered in place and gave off bursts of sun fire.
“Hello, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch,” he cried, with a voice that lingered over German vowels.
My bike almost fell from my grip. I had seen that profile stamped on some old coins when I was twelve. The man was either a resurrected Caesar or the German high pontiff of the Holy Roman Empire. My heart banged all of the air out of my lungs.
“What?” shouted the driver. “Speak up!”
“Hello,” I heard myself say, “you stupid goddamn son of a bitch you. You’re Fritz Wong, aren’t you? Born in Shanghai of a Chinese father and an Austrian mother, raised in Hong Kong, Bombay, London, and a dozen towns in Germany. Errand boy, then cutter then writer then cinematographer at UFA then director across the world. Fritz Wong, the magnificent director who made the great silent film The Cavalcanti Incantation. The guy who ruled Hollywood films from 1925 to 1927 and got thrown out for a scene in a film where you directed yourself as a Prussian general inhaling Gerta Froelich’s underwear. The international director who ran back to and then got out of Berlin ahead of Hitler, the director of Mad Love, Delirium, To the Moon and Back—”
With each pronouncement, his head had turned a quarter of an inch, at the same time as his mouth had creased into a Punch-and-Judy smile. His monocle flashed a Morse code.
Behind the monocle was the faintest lurking of an Orient eye. I imagined the left eye was Peking, the right Berlin, but no. It was the monocle’s magnification that focused the Orient. His brow and cheeks were a fortress of Teutonic arrogance, built to last two thousand years or until his contract was canceled.
“What did you call me?” he asked, with immense politeness.
“What you called me,” I said, faintly. “A stupid,” I whispered, “goddamn son of a bitch.”
He nodded. He smiled. He banged the car door wide.
“Get in!”
“But you don’t—”
“—know you? Do you think I run around giving lifts to just any dumb-ass bike rider? You think I haven’t seen you ducking around corners at the studio, pretending to be the White Rabbit at the commissary. You’re that”—he snapped his fingers—“bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Warlord of Mars—the illegitimate offspring of H. G. Wells, out of Jules Verne. Stow your bike. We’re late!”
I tossed my bike in the back and was in the car only in time as it revved up to fifty.
“Who can say?” shouted Fritz Wong, above the exhaust. “We are both insane, working where we work. But you are lucky, you still love it.”
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“Christ help me,” he muttered. “Yes!”
I could not take my eyes off Fritz Wong as he leaned over the steering wheel to let the wind plow his face.
“You are the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw!” he cried. “You want to get yourself killed? What’s wrong, you never learned to drive a car? What kind of bike is that? Is this your first screen job? How come you write that crap? Why not read Thomas Mann, Goethe!”
“Thomas Mann and Goethe,” I said, quietly, “couldn’t write a screenplay worth a damn. Death in Venice, sure. Faust? you betcha. But a good screenplay? or a short story like one of mine, landing on the Moon and making you believe it? Hell, no. How come you drive with that monocle?”
“None of your damn business! It’s better to be blind. If you look too closely at the driver ahead, you want to ram his ass! Let me see your face. You approve of me?”
“I think you’re funny!”
“Jesus! You are supposed to take everything that Wong the magnificent says as gospel. How come you don’t drive?”
We were both yelling against the wind that battered our eyes and mouths.
“Writers can’t afford cars! And I saw five people killed, torn apart, when I was fifteen. A car hit a telephone pole.”
Fritz glanced over at my pale look of remembrance.
“It was like a war, yes? You’re not so dumb. I hear you’ve been given a new project with Roy Holdstrom? Special effects? Brilliant. I hate to admit.”
“We’ve been friends since high school. I used to watch him build his miniature dinosaurs in his garage. We promised to grow old and make monsters together.”
“No,” shouted Fritz Wong against the wind, “you are working for monsters. Manny Leiber? The Gila monster’s dream of a spider. Watch out! There’s the menagerie!”
He nodded at the autograph collectors on the sidewalk across the street from the studio gates.
I glanced over. Instantly, my soul flashed out of my body and ran back. It was 1934 and I was mulched in among the ravening crowd, waving pads and pens, rushing about at première nights under the klieg lights or pursuing Marlene Dietrich into her hairdresser’s or running after Cary Grant at the Friday-night Legion Stadium boxing matches, waiting outside restaurants for Jean Harlow to have one more three-hour lunch or Claudette Colbert to come laughing out at midnight.
My eyes touched over the crazy mob there and I saw once again the bulldog, Pekingese, pale, myopic faces of nameless friends lost in the past, waiting outside the great Spanish Prado Museum facade of Maximus where the thirty-foot-high intricately scrolled iron gates opened and clanged shut on the impossibly famous. I saw myself lost in that nest of gape-mouthed hungry birds waiting to be fed on brief encounters, flash photographs, ink-signed pads. And as the sun vanished and the moon rose in memory, I saw myself roller-skating nine miles home on the empty sidewalks, dreaming I would someday be the world’s greatest author or a hack writer at Fly by Night Pictures.
“The menagerie?” I murmured. “Is that what you call them?”
“And here,” said Fritz Wong, “is their zoo!”
And we jounced in the studio entrance down alleys full of arriving people, extras and executives. Fritz Wong rammed his car into a NO PARKING zone.
I got out and said, “What’s the difference between a menagerie and a zoo?”
“In here, the zoo, we are kept behind bars by money. Out there, those menagerie goofs are locked in silly dreams.”
“I was one of them once, and dreamed of coming over the studio wall.”
“Stupid. Now you’ll never escape.”
“Yes, I will. I’ve finished another book of stories, and a play. My name will be remembered!”
Fritz’s monocle glinted. “You shouldn’t tell this to me. I might lose my contempt.”
“If I know Fritz Wong, it’ll be back in about thirty seconds.”
Fritz watched as I lifted my bike from the car.
“You are almost German, I think.”
I climbed on my bike. “I’m insulted.”
“Do you speak to all people this way?”
“No, only to Frederick the Great, whose manners I deplore but whose films I love.”
Fritz Wong unscrewed the monocle from his eye and dropped it in his shirt pocket. It was as if he had let a coin fall to start some inner machine.
“I’ve been watching you for some days,” he intoned. “In fits of insanity, I read your stories. You are not lacking talent, which I could polish. I am working, God help me, on a hopeless film about Christ, Herod Antipas, and all those knucklehead saints. The film started nine million dollars back with a dipso director who couldn’t handle kindergarten traffic. I have been elected to bury the corpse. What kind of Christian are you?”
“Fallen away.”
“Good! Don’t be surprised if I get you fired from your dumb dinosaur epic. If you could help me embalm this Christ horror film, it’s a step up for you. The Lazarus principle! If you work on a dead turkey and pry it out of the film vaults, you earn points. Let me watch and read you a few more days. Appear at the commissary at one sharp today. Eat what I eat, speak when spoken to, yes? you talented little bastard.”
“Yes, Unterseeboot Kapitän, you big bastard, sir.”
As I biked off, he gave me a shove. But it was not a shove to hurt, only the quietest old philosopher’s push, to help me go.
I did not look back.
I feared to see him looking back.
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