Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  Believe it, won’t you?

  On Summit Drive that night, Mars trembled in the southwestern sky, glowering red at the world. Space aliens, I said, still very drunk as we walked to the car. They might already be on their way. You rolled your eyes at me, but I meant it. I would welcome them, America’s update on avenging angels, warriors of the faith transformed into invaders from a red planet, proxies for the more prosaic fear of invasion, also from the air, and of devastation by bombs whose genesis we must blame on the greatest minds of the age. I read somewhere that America’s idea of Mars owes more to Ares, Grecian bringer of chaos, than to the Roman god whose warmongering was always in the service of peace. If the hawks and Red-baiters had any sense they would have adopted Mars as their own. H.G. Wells was responsible for that shift, and Orson Welles as well, marshaling Martians to cook up a national panic of interplanetary war in 1938. In the history of cinema up to 1950, Martians had usually looked like us, if a little more sinister, elegant, and – typical of the racism and xenophobia endemic in Hollywood at the time – they were often implicitly Chinese. Over fifteen episodes in 1938, Universal Studios sent Flash Gordon to Mars to fight Ming the Merciless and his Martian queen who had designs on Earth. It would only be a matter of time before another studio decided Mars should take a hostile interest in its blue neighbor, so transmitting a message into theaters across the nation about the many varieties of red menace. Though I had only heard about it from a Russian cameraman working at the studio, even the Soviets, back in 1924, in Protazanov’s silent film Aelita, had seen the symbolic potential of Mars as ‘Red’ planet, dispatching a Soviet scientist in a rocket to lead the enslaved Martian workers in revolution against their bourgeois alien masters. When the revolution triumphed, the scientist returned to Earth, and Mars remained red in the most beautiful Soviet sense, which made it, of course, anathema to America. Mars could only be the enemy because it was red and warlike and just close enough to our wet blue rock to constitute a convincing threat.

  I don’t follow, you said, stopping at the car.

  All I mean is they should cast you as Flash Gordon. You’re much more beautiful than Buster Crabbe.

  You’re drunk, Desmond. Get in the car.

  What do you see when you look in the mirror? You don’t see yourself as we do, do you? Who was that boy on the tennis court?

  Just another actor.

  People across the street were watching us but I no longer cared. I pressed myself against you. Who, Myles?

  His name was Roy.

  My heart plunged at the sound of that name.

  First or last?

  First of course, you said, helping me into the passenger seat. After the door thumped closed it was quiet and then you opened the driver’s side and I could hear music from the party bawling away behind us.

  Close it quick, Myles. Beneath the leather upholstery and vapors of gasoline I could smell champagne and tobacco, your cologne, but also other scents I could not place. What’s his last name?

  I don’t remember. Leave it alone.

  You had never spoken to me with such sharpness. We sat in silence for a moment as a man and woman ran laughing past the car. The man tripped, falling against the hood, and the woman lunged to catch him. When he noticed us watching it made him so angry he pulled away from the woman, aggressively shaking her off before disappearing around the corner.

  Where’s Helen?

  Remember, she’s taking our car. I’m waiting for her to come down the hill and then she’ll follow.

  Who is this Roy?

  Goddammit, let it go, Desmond. You’re drunk. He’s just a bit player at Universal. He had one line in a Raoul Walsh picture a couple years ago. That’s all I know.

  They won’t let you keep him. He’s only a child.

  He’s my age as a matter of fact.

  Like hell he is. You think because I’m leaving you can take up with someone else before I’m gone?

  You’re not leaving. Stop talking like that. There’s Helen.

  You turned over the engine and pulled away from the curb as lights swept across the dashboard. Friend or foe? I mumbled, squirming around to look into the blinding face of the car behind us. How can you tell if it’s friend or foe?

  I know my own car. I can see the license plate. You’re paranoid.

  But behind Helen I saw another car, a dark sedan, and then another still, a police cruiser. On the nights we were occasionally apart, I wondered if you had ever gone cruising, heading to that notorious gas station on Hollywood Boulevard or hanging out in the shadows at Pershing Square, meeting men who might not recognize you in the dark, or in returning to some Skid Row flophouse and discovering in the light of a naked bulb who you actually were believe they were hallucinating an angelic visitation. That was what you always seemed to me, descending from above, not entirely human, weightless and sheathed in golden skin. Where did you come from? I asked you the first time we went to bed. You’re not human at all. Forgive me for ever saying that. I was young enough to think it was a compliment, then saw how it nearly frightened you away, you who wanted to believe in your ordinariness even when most exceptional. Come on, I’m just a farm boy, you told me, I’m shy. Such a quality of the American west, willful modesty even in the throes of sex.

  When we slowed to the intersection with Sunset I looked behind us again. Helen waved while the two other cars, the sedan and police cruiser, hung farther back, as if out for a stately midnight parade. So long as I stayed in America, this is how it would be, an over-the-shoulder life, always wondering whether or not I would make it home a free man.

  Black trees swept past the car and I rolled down the window to listen to the night, the world whispering that the hour was late, I had to tell you I was leaving tomorrow and would not be coming back. Do you understand that I never wanted to leave? Do you understand how tormented I was because it meant leaving not just you and Helen but everything I loved about our country, everything that remained good about it, with no guarantee I would see any of it again? Perhaps if it had been my luck and choice to return to America once it became possible, I might have been able to recapture that sense of complete belonging and familiarity, although I suspect I would have remained always at least half European, unable to see the country of my birth entirely from the inside again. I was resisting telling you because to confess the imminence of my departure was to render myself exile in every sense. I knew, staring out the car window, listening to the words on the wind, inhaling Los Angeles in its early days of night, that the men in Washington would take pleasure at my escape because it would appear to them an admission of guilt. In public they would bluster over my flight from so-called justice, never mind that for someone who loved his country as much as I, who adored America despite the hatred it had shown him for his politics and the valence of his desire, notwithstanding the ignorance and fear that has flourished so often in its borders, there could be no punishment worse than exile.

  I say that and yet I claim I could not bear to stay because of what might have happened to me. These feelings cannot be resolved. The punishment of leaving was worse than anything, and yet the punishment I might have suffered had I stayed would have been worse still. In the impossible space between those feelings I have spent the rest of my life.

  I laughed, although none of it was funny, and you glared at me.

  What is it, Desmond?

  I’m going tonight.

  Yes, we’re going home.

  No, I’m taking a taxi to the airport. I’ll wait for the next flight to New York. There’s one tomorrow morning. I have a ticket already. Pan American. A stewardess was nearly sucked out the window of a Pan-Am plane earlier this year, but it’s a risk I’ll have to take—

  Desmond—

  —the window blew out over the Carolinas while the flight was en route from New York to Miami. If that happens to me I’ll have to flap my arms and just hope I stay aloft. The poor thing was asleep when she nearly went out the window. They had to pull her back in
side.

  But what are you going to do in New York? you asked, and I could hear your voice breaking as if you were beginning to understand what I was trying to tell you.

  I’ll get another plane.

  Another? But where to?

  Paris. Rome maybe. Whatever’s leaving first. It’s Holy Year and I could claim to be doing research about a man who’s strayed but comes back to the fold. The Italians would love that.

  But how long will you be gone?

  The passing blur of black trees had started to nauseate, or maybe it was the conversation. I closed my eyes.

  Myles, I’ve told you.

  I don’t know what you mean.

  I’m not coming back.

  You accelerated, gripping the wheel. You’re talking stupid.

  I want you to listen, Myles.

  No, you’re drunk.

  I’m quite sober now. I need you to hear me—

  You can’t leave! you shouted, whacking your palms against the wheel so the car swerved. An oncoming truck honked its horn and you steered us back into our lane.

  In the dark your cheeks reflected every passing headlight. Outside of a script it was the only time I had made you cry. I told you earlier, Myles, I have to leave. You can follow me once you have a passport. You and Helen and Barbara, all three of you. We have enough money between us to last a long time doing nothing at all.

  But what would we do for the rest of our lives?

  You needed a convincing plan for our future, and the truth is I did not have one. I tried to extemporize, like you or Helen might. They love you already in France, I stammered. Imagine, this beautiful American boy who cares about European cinema. There’s no one else like you! We’ll start our own company, make our own movies. Please, say you’ll come.

  You were shaking your head, fingers clenching and unclenching the wheel. I sensed the car moving faster, your foot pushing against the accelerator and then one hand abandoned the wheel, flying to your face to rub tears from your eyes, elbow propped against your torso, black sleeve disappearing into the drape of the tuxedo jacket.

  Pull over, I said, but you drove faster, your eyes closing because they were overflowing, and then you swerved to the right, veering in and out of the other lane, following the curve of Sunset around the university, accelerating again into the sharp left as we approached the intersection with Bellagio Drive and Bel Air’s West Gate. There were lights from a car turning across our lane, and then your hand cranked the wheel hard to the right, the right hand crossed over the left, and your foot pounded the floor but I could not see which lever you hit. With a sudden lurch I was thrown forward and fell back into night.

  When I opened my eyes there was light all around, the front end of the car buckled against the shattered windshield, and ahead of us, bleached by headlights, the column of the Bel Air gate with a crack rising through it. Stupidly, I worried about the crack. It would have to be repaired, maybe the whole gate rebuilt, and what would that cost, and how would the press cover it, what would they say about us, how drunk we both were. In my lap I felt a wet heaviness and when I looked down I saw through the gathering smoke that it was you – your head, your neck, the line of your shoulder, buckled like the front end of the car. You had not been wearing your seatbelt, you must have nearly gone through the windshield, which had shattered into a million bright prisms.

  I screamed because I could not find your face.

  At first you did not respond and then the blood in my lap parted and I saw your lips.

  Help! I shouted through the open window.

  You closed your mouth and I screamed again as the door opened and Helen’s hands reached in. She was shouting too and then your weight lifted from my lap and Helen was pulling you by the shoulders out of the car. I tumbled onto the street and tried to follow, watching in wonder as she lifted your slender body and carried you in her arms, put you down in the grass, and propped your head against her fur stole. Kneeling over, your head between her hands, she screamed for an ambulance.

  I looked up to see a police officer running, and behind him two men in suits, which meant we had been followed, just as I suspected, and for an instant I was so furious I forgot about you and thought only of the cop and the circumstances and wanted to blame the accident on that, as if being followed had caused the crash, which in a sense it had, of course, and the rage I felt was so great that I screamed when the cop reached down to hustle me away from the heat of the car. Sirens were shredding the night as he sat me down on the other side of the gate. I crawled towards the sound of Helen’s voice and knelt on the grass next to you. Ruby gloves, I thought when I saw Helen’s hands, she’s wearing ruby gloves.

  We should get further away from the car, I said.

  We can’t move him, she shrieked, her face turning as red as her hands, and I saw that she was fighting to hold your head together because it was coming apart like a cracked ceramic bowl. I reached out and took one of your limp hands in my own, clutching it, but you did not respond. Smoke hissed under a blast of water and the flickering became more mechanical. You seemed half underwater, your head submerged beneath Helen’s hands, and I could no longer bear to look at those red gloves or the broken skull they held together so I focussed on the fury of Helen’s face. She did not look away from you, not for a second.

  Hands reached down to lift me again, pulling me away from you as men in white slid your body onto a board, floating you through the mist and the smoke. Hands pushed me to follow your hovering bier, propelling me into the white open mouth of an ambulance. Inside I watched fingers go to work on your head, pressing, applying gauze, trying to staunch the bleeding. Helen was next to me, both of us sitting upright though the paramedics said I should lie down. No, I said, I will not lie down. I needed to keep watch over you even though I struggled to focus with the siren ringing in my ears, the sound circling and spinning as the wheels circled and spun beneath the vehicle, propelling us west along Santa Monica Boulevard. The hands of the medics held together a head that kept straining to come apart. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, I thought. But you were no egg, you could be healed, you were capable of breaking apart and patching yourself together again. You did it every day.

  I reached to touch your hand and you screamed, then fell silent when they put a needle in your arm. The white bandages on your head turned red and then brown. Surely it was makeup, special effects cooked up by a group of talented technicians, nothing more, just an illusion, all would be fine. It had to be. Your eyelids fluttered open so I could see the clear whites beneath, blue irises focussed on me, and then they closed once more.

  That was the last time we ever looked into each other’s eyes.

  At the hospital, in the waiting room, under the blue-white wash of ceiling lights, Helen and I sat. The doctor who examined me said I was bruised but nothing worse and recommended a neck brace in case of whiplash. I told him I’d take my chances, but what about Myles? The doctor told us you were still in surgery. Helen’s hand trembled in mine and I stared into the nearest light, unblinking, the image of your eyes fixed in my vision. After thirty seconds or a minute or even half an hour – I can’t say because time split and slowed and sped up again so that I had no sense of duration or chronology – it felt as if I was gazing down on the earth from outer space, watching a schoolroom globe bobbing in a frothy white sea and wondering about the fate of its inhabitants, as if I were no longer one of them. Perhaps I was trapped on Mars, in a waiting room in the palace of the war god. Perhaps this is no longer life, I thought, and I can count myself free.

  The lights flickered and Helen dropped her head against my shoulder, circling her arms around my waist. You can’t leave, Desmond.

  Across the waiting room three nurses were chattering about boyfriends and movie stars and the minor dramas of their lives. I wanted to shout at them to keep quiet but then the doctor returned. He was standing in front of us and I realized he had been talking for a while.

  —confident his
vision will return.

  Can we see him now? Helen asked.

  He’s under sedation.

  We won’t disturb him.

  The doctor glanced at me as if I posed a problem, then nodded and led us out of the waiting room, past the gossiping nurses, and down a long blue corridor at the end of which he paused before a door.

  From the threshold we stared at you. Your face was blackened from bruising. White bandages made a turban around your head. Your chest rose and fell in a steady movement and a drip was stuck in your arm. There was a heart monitor and a nurse sitting on a chair in a corner reading an issue of Modern Screen with Elizabeth Taylor on the cover. The nurse looked up at Helen and opened her mouth as if she might ask for an autograph. I wanted to tear the bandages from your head to see what they had done to you. There were stitches across your face where the skin was exposed, and again I had the ridiculous thought that it was makeup and we were not actually living through this, but stuck on a soundstage and the scene had gone on too long and if someone would just call cut I would fly across the room and rub the makeup from your skin and rip off those fake stitches and we could go home and get on with our lives. Helen’s hands trembled and a whimpering sound came from her throat. I knew then, perhaps for the first time, that whatever you and she had, it was more than I had appreciated, not as simple as a convenient relationship for the sake of the press, and realizing this made me so hot with anger I wanted to remind her that she had no claim on you, that you were mine and not hers. But she was the one who had carried you to safety, not me. She was the one who found the strength and clarity in that moment to make sure you survived. I took her hand and she clasped it so hard I thought my fingers would break. All this happened in less than a minute, and then the doctor with his lean grimace, his godly smugness and odor of Brylcreem, urged us back into the hall.