by Nick Cole
Full Retreat
The fire started in the highest room of the Astro Lodge. Within seconds it was racing through the aging pine structure, consuming materials constructed in an age when flame retardant had been a new and crazy concept. Minutes later the crew fled the flaming hulk, trailing cases of camera equipment, lighting stands, wardrobe racks, and in one instance, a bowl of Snickers candy bars. The sudden fiery apocalypse had forced all to decide what they valued most as they ran from underneath the consuming inferno, their choices clutched tightly or held aloft. For some fleeing soul, a life without easy access to candy bars in the immediate future was valued above all else.
It was bound to happen.
They fled directly onto the buses, Parker waving exaggeratedly in the glow of the shooting flames, urging them toward the rumbling sanctuaries.
***
Manny rode the gears all the way down the grade, mashing the accelerator as soon as the bus leveled out on the stretch of valley highway below the mountain. All his skill was required to keep the careening bus under control when the silver giant hit the long curve that would take them back to the interstate. The plan was to make LA by dawn and pretend the film crew had nothing to do with the fire. The fire that was now burning out of control, threatening a small alpine village located high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Manny had been offered double pay for the entire trip if he got the crew back to LA before the authorities could figure out who was responsible.
In another part of the caravan the Great Goreitsky drove his Winnebago—painted with the setting sun and the scripted words Beach Bum—in hot pursuit of the bus ahead. His children, or “the Kids,” as the rest of the crew referred to the film students, were crashed out on every available space throughout the cramped RV. His wife, ever-faithful co-pilot to the mad artist, unscrewed the plaid thermos cup, filled it with coffee, and delicately handed it across the void separating them.
Goreitsky’s thoughts raced and bent, seeking any way out of the trap into which he, the innocent Goreitsky, had fallen. He would lose it all, again, that much was clear.
The lawyers. There were always the lawyers, he silently cursed. They would come for him, seeking to blame someone for this terrible thing that had been done to nature and the hopeful Space Hotel. He’d been too prideful, too arrogant.
“More light!” he’d commanded.
Somewhere in that hopeful building, something had gotten too much light. Too much heat. After all those dry years high in the mountains, something had reached the thirsty state known as combustible. One of the crew, he hoped not his children, had been careless. Then the fire had waited. Biding its time. Then building and building beneath some thin paper lamp. Goreitsky saw it all with certainty as he hurled the RV after the fleeing buses in the night.
Never had humanity constructed a hotel so symbolically aspiring as the Astro Lodge. Now it was gone. Burned to the ground most likely. This doddering old man, this washed-up relic from a forgotten Hollywood, had burnt down humanity’s dream of the Space Age.
Goreitsky pounded the steering wheel with rage and clenched his jaw in frustration.
When his children had joined the crew, they didn’t need to be introduced to Goreitsky. They’d known who he was. He’d made the movies they’d always dreamt of making. His style was authentic. True. Relevant, now more than ever in the age of phony pop cinema. They’d allowed him into their village. It was they, the chosen few, who had been allowed to serve under his direct tutelage around the camera.
One of his children must have burnt down the Astro Lodge. One of his children answering his reckless demand for “More light!”
Goreitsky, stunned at first that these children, these babies, had ever heard of so ancient a lizard as himself, had accepted them. Bathed in them. Was for a moment transformed by their innocent adulation. In turn he had imparted simple sermons on the art of the capture of light and life.
Now there would be one last lesson for these children who had given the old man a new life in their village. A new respect for himself and his art he’d lost along the way. The last lesson would not be a lesson of technical prowess, but of Greek tragedy. He glanced back at his sleeping children, each of them worked to the point of exhaustion.
If a village could take care of his father, one man, then could one man take care of a village?
He was ours, thought Goreitsky, remembering the villager with all his belongings on the streets of New York.
He would not let these, his children, have their futures marred by those seeking defenseless scapegoats on which to blame everything. He would accept the accusation, and make it his own. He would take the blame for everything.
“They are mine,” he said to the night and the road.
He urged the recreational vehicle on. The red eyes made by the taillights of the bus ahead danced and dipped. Looking into his soul. Finding him guilty.
***
The buses lunged into the night and no one knew where the Great Director was. Most assumed he’d also escaped the fire. Narrowly, as many of them had. They assumed he was somewhere on one of the buses. Glad to be among the living. Counting his blessings. Not yet angry enough to be mad, just scared. Dialing home hoping to hear the voice of a loved one.
“I was almost killed in a fire tonight. I’m coming home.”
They were wrong.
The Great Director was not on any of the buses.
For that matter, where was Kip?
***
Now back in the dark of the fleeing buses, watching the twin headlight beams on the highway ahead, Kurt Dalton pulled up the blanket that had drifted off the shoulders of the sleeping Terri McCall. His co-star. Her pale hand rested in his lap, the other grasping his belly. She was still out. Kurt looked down at her red hair.
Why would anyone so perfect, so beautiful, want to immolate themselves?
He didn’t know. He was just glad he’d been there to pull her out of the room.
The room where she’d set the fire.
The bus bounced roughly. Terri shifted, murmuring in her sleep. Kurt wondered if anyone knew it was she who’d set the fire. The fire that by now had probably destroyed an entire town. He was sure Roger would be able to put two and two together. This precious porcelain doll of an actress was in truth a firebug. What did they call them? Pyromaniacs.
She’s not well, that’s all, he thought.
He pulled her closer to himself in more ways than just arms about her body. He pulled her closer, inside his heart. And he decided, right then and right there, as the bus shot through the night, with the memories of her anguished grief rising up to join the horrible flames she’d brought to life, he decided to heal her pain. To take care of her.
To take responsibility for what he had caused long ago.
He closed his eyes and saw the room again. The topmost room of the sprawling hotel. The production had rented the rooms to shoot interior scenes for the weekend Kurt’s and Terri’s characters would spend as they evaded the law, a psychotic ex-boyfriend, and their own messed-up lives. Langley’s character was absent, having been seduced by the local schoolteacher of the small town. Those scenes would be shot later, on a soundstage with veteran actors and real-life celebrity husband and wife Marsha Connors and Ted Langston playing the parts of the adulterous schoolmarm and her cuckolded husband-cum-circus enthusiast.
The production hadn’t used this topmost room, “The Command Module” suite. The room had proved too cramped to get the entire crew into, so they’d opted for the more spacious Futura Lounge and Cosmic Port rooms below for the love and heavy drama scenes. It had been five days of solid round-the-clock shooting. Between setups, Kurt had kept his hand in a running game of friendly poker while Terri had retreated to the Command Module to listen to her music and prepare for the emotional work she had ahead of her.
And then, time and time again, she would come down from the loft, wait
for speed and sound, and, on command, break down into tears, destroying herself a little bit more each time. After each take it was agreed by all that she had shown more than was expected of her, more than anyone thought an actor could be capable of. Except the Great Director. Each time he would ask her if she might go just a little further. If she could go a little farther down the road of grief and pain? And each time she would retreat to the loft, dig down into her personal tragedies, and find something not shown to the public before. The cast and crew were amazed and stunned by each subsequent performance. Each new bloodletting.
Then something happened. A line was crossed. When the Great Director asked her for yet another take, people, mainly everyone, began to wonder. And after they finished wondering, they began to suspect. Then they began to believe.
The Great Director was cruel.
He was seeing how far she would go. Could he break her? Could he push her past the ultimate performance? Hour after hour and into the night and again the next day, they shot and re-shot the same scene, asking Terri to die a little more each time.
Even Scott the AD approached the Great Director to find out what was going on. Student to master, the oldest of Hollywood games. But the Great Director waved him away with a steely-eyed gaze, and from then on… he was unapproachable.
The crew knew it would be up to Terri to save them all from her unbearable humiliation. To throw an actress temper tantrum. To scream and shout as she stormed off the set.
But she didn’t.
How could she?
No one knew the terrible truth she’d brought with her. She couldn’t give up now. After all, there was the doll.
No one knew.
Except Kurt. Now Kurt knew.
He clutched the blanket-wrapped shell of her firmly.
What had driven her to that? He knew that now, for her, there was no turning back. She had only to die and then everything would be better. Or at least, not the way it had been until now. And Kurt now knew also that he, in some way, was responsible for all this.
He held her tighter and tried not to think about her face. If the Great Director had been there with his camera in that lofty prison and seen what Kurt had watched with horror, the howling mad animal crying out in anguish, he would have been satisfied as he called, “Cut and print!”
But the Great Director was not there. Just Terri, surrounded by candles, kneeling before a rag doll that had burst into flames. Sad weeping eyes and a down-turned mouth. In one brief second, as Kurt watched flames consume the face of the doll, he experienced a sense of lost familiarity with the burning thing on the floor.
I know that doll, he thought.
And even if he had been able to place it—to recognize it and shout, “Eureka, I’ve got it!”—he would not have been able to ease the pain that had been growing deep down inside Terri McCall for fifteen years. She turned to him in that flaming doll moment and cried out, “Our baby, Kurt. Our baby’s gone.”
And indeed their baby was gone.
He took two long strides toward her. He pulled her away from the flaming bundle that had already fallen apart, the fire now spreading across the thin, aged, aquamarine carpet. Searching greedily for the rayon silver bedspread and universal blue starburst-shaped pillows. By the time he jerked her up to eye level, half the room was in flames.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. But she struggled, flailing, trying to throw herself onto the burning bundle.
She screamed wildly, “Our baby, our baby!”
“It’s not our baby! It’s a doll. What’s wrong with you?” His eyes were almost as wild as hers.
She stopped struggling and turned to face him, eyes wide and distant. “You said it was our baby. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember the pier? You said you would. You said you would remember me forever, always.”
And then he did, as the room burned down around them both. He remembered everything. The pier. The doll he’d purchased for the young, red-haired girl he would sleep with later that evening, years ago. She was young and new to Hollywood.
Just one week.
An extra on his first TV show. A TV show about a private detective and a grandmother who solved crimes together. He remembered seducing the young girl.
One of the extras.
He’d done that a lot back then. Picked up girls who worked on set as extras. Girls with big dreams. Girls who knew the score. Girls looking to get ahead.
And occasionally, girls looking for a fairy tale romance with a knight in shining armor.
And she’d had red hair.
He won her a doll at a shooting gallery one windy day long ago on the Santa Monica Pier. He told her it was their baby. He laughed. He was funny.
She believed in fairy tale romances.
He looked at her now in the gloom of the bus, safe from the flames. He’d pulled her down the stairs, and somewhere along the way she’d passed out. Out the back door he’d carried her, through the dark, to the waiting buses. In the attic, the flames danced and whirled, snapping and taunting. He hustled her onto the bus and said nothing, not even to Roger, who saw everything.
The bus shifted gears, straining up a grade, approaching the interstate heading south.
Sleepers slept. The worried shifted and turned. The rest waited for dawn and their own beds, their own food, their own loved ones.
“Did you know I was once almost killed in a fire?”
“That’s horrible. Were you scared?”
“Not at the moment. But later, when I thought about it, yes. I was very scared.”
“I’m so glad you made it. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
What now, Kurt? he thought. Tell everyone what happened. Her career is over anyhow. She’s thirty-five years old and probably couldn’t get another job as a Lead Actress if she had a diamond-studded bag… full of diamonds. Let her take the fall, after all… it’s her fault.
“Will you love me forever?” said that young, faraway, red-headed girl, on that long-ago, too sunny, windy day at the Santa Monica Pier, when the future seemed to fling itself away toward the far horizon somewhere out beyond the Pacific—and was a thing that could almost be touched, and held.
Forever?
Forever, said the Kurt of then, and didn’t mean it.
In the bus. In the dark. Fleeing wrath and destruction, he said it again.
And this time he meant it.
Kurt kissed her forehead and closed his eyes.
Forever.
***
Now the bus edged onto the interstate. Behind them, the fire licked at the skeletal remains of the Astro Lodge and the Great Director’s beginning, his dream of freedom.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Great Director Goes Straight to Hell
The fire raced down from the loft above, consuming everything in minutes. The Great Director watched the crew flee in terror, and sat stunned as his dream of escape burned to the ground.
Instead of fleeing with the others, he grabbed a pot of coffee and threw it uselessly on a growing line of flame that had begun to race up one wall. Undaunted by the coffee’s ineffectual performance, the Great Director began to beat at the flames with a nearby shooting script until that too caught fire.
Now the entire set was engulfed. The Great Director alone, practically surrounded by flames, knew this was a catastrophe beyond his meager firefighting skills. He backed toward an open doorway as black smoke began to pour through the ceiling.
Across the set he saw Kurt Dalton carrying Terri McCall through the smoke. He watched them quickly exit the way the rest of the crew had gone. The Great Director turned to flee into what he now realized was unfamiliar territory. He raced into the next room only to find waves of heat, walls of fire, and sheets of black smoke.
Light stands popped and shattered as the Great Director reeled from the hea
t. His vision began to blur and the sulfuric chemicals being released by the fire made it difficult to breathe.
Seeing a small stairway leading into the bowels of his hotel, he charged down it and threw open the door at the bottom. The power generator hummed away in the cool dark of the basement and the Great Director knew he was trapped. Still, he had to look for an exit; it was his only hope.
He found a large ventilation pipe that led from the room.
He pulled off the grille and squeezed inside, feeling the cold night air of the mountain wash against his face. A great weight collapsed onto the floor above him with a groan. Soon black smoke began to creep through the floorboards. The Great Director forced himself farther into the dark tunnel, and crawled into a nightmare.
***
“In the dark. Nothing in the dark. Isn’t this just one grand lark?”
The Great Director, who had been crawling for some time, knew he was losing his mind when he repeated that phrase to himself for the sixth time. He didn’t know why he kept repeating it. To keep the rats away. To make a children’s rhyme of the dark and the trash and the smell.
It was a phrase from a children’s book. A therapist had once made him purchase a copy and read it before bed in hopes of curing the Great Director’s fear of dying in his sleep.
“This tunnel has to end somewhere,” muttered the Great Director and heard his own voice echo in the silent hollowness. It was the loneliest sound he’d ever heard.
But what if it doesn’t? What if it doesn’t end anywhere? What if you die here? What if you can’t breathe? You can’t breathe, can you?
And once the Great Director thought he indeed could not breathe, he hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness.
In the dark, before you pass from this world, you hear things.
“We found another director in the dark; in the dark, death’s a lark. We’ll call him… Orson.”
1ST CASTING DIRECTOR
Okay, so who do you want to play Death?
2ND CASTING DIRECTOR
Death, Death, Death... what’d this guy do for a living?