And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
It began with a documentary on Charles Manson I was watching more or less by accident (it was on a videotape a friend lent me after a couple of things I did want to watch): there was footage of Manson, back when he was first arrested, when people thought he was innocent and that it was the government picking on the hippies. And up on the screen was Manson—a charismatic, good-looking, messianic orator. Someone you’d crawl barefoot into Hell for. Someone you could kill for.
The trial started; and, a few weeks into it, the orator was gone, replaced by a shambling, apelike gibberer, with a cross carved into its forehead. Whatever the genius was was no longer there. It was gone. But it had been there.
The documentary continued: a hard-eyed ex-con who had been in prison with Manson, explaining, “Charlie Manson? Listen, Charlie was a joke. He was a nothing. We laughed at him. You know? He was a nothing!”
And I nodded. There was a time before Manson was the charisma king, then. I thought of a benediction, something given, that was taken away.
I watched the rest of the documentary obsessively. Then, over a black-and-white still, the narrator said something. I rewound, and he said it again.
I had an idea. I had a book that wrote itself.
The thing the narrator had said was this: that the infant children Manson had fathered on the women of The Family were sent to a variety of children’s homes for adoption, with court-given surnames that were certainly not Manson.
And I thought of a dozen twenty-five-year-old Mansons. Thought of the charisma-thing descending on all of them at the same time. Twelve young Mansons, in their glory, gradually being pulled toward L.A. from all over the world. And a Manson daughter trying desperately to stop them from coming together and, as the back cover blurb told us, “realizing their terrifying destiny.”
I wrote Sons of Man at white heat: it was finished in a month, and I sent it to my agent, who was surprised by it (“Well, it’s not like your other stuff, dear,” she said helpfully), and she sold it after an auction—my first—for more money than I had thought possible. (My other books, three collections of elegant, allusive and elusive ghost stories, had scarcely paid for the computer on which they were written.)
And then it was bought—prepublication—by Hollywood, again after an auction. There were three or four studios interested: I went with the studio who wanted me to write the script. I knew it would never happen, knew they’d never come through. But then the faxes began to spew out of my machine, late at night—most of them enthusiastically signed by one Dave Gambol; one morning I signed five copies of a contract thick as a brick; a few weeks later my agent reported the first check had cleared and tickets to Hollywood had arrived, for “preliminary talks.” It seemed like a dream.
The tickets were business class. It was the moment I saw the tickets were business class that I knew the dream was real.
I went to Hollywood in the bubble bit at the top of the jumbo jet, nibbling smoked salmon and holding a hot-off-the-presses hardback of Sons of Man.
So. Breakfast.
They told me how much they loved the book. I didn’t quite catch anybody’s name. The men had beards or baseball caps or both; the women were astoundingly attractive, in a sanitary sort of way.
Jacob ordered our breakfast, and paid for it. He explained that the meeting coming up was a formality.
“It’s your book we love,” he said. “Why would we have bought your book if we didn’t want to make it? Why would we have hired you to write it if we didn’t want the specialness you’d bring to the project. The you-ness.”
I nodded, very seriously, as if literary me-ness was something I had spent many hours pondering.
“An idea like this. A book like this. You’re pretty unique.”
“One of the uniquest,” said a woman named Dina or Tina or possibly Deanna.
I raised an eyebrow. “So what am I meant to do at the meeting?”
“Be receptive,” said Jacob. “Be positive.”
The drive to the studio took about half an hour in Jacob’s little red car. We drove up to the security gate, where Jacob had an argument with the guard. I gathered that he was new at the studio and had not yet been issued a permanent studio pass.
Nor, it appeared, once we got inside, did he have a permanent parking place. I still do not understand the ramifications of this: from what he said, parking places had as much to do with status at the studio as gifts from the emperor determined one’s status in the court of ancient China.
We drove through the streets of an oddly flat New York and parked in front of a huge old bank.
Ten minutes’ walk, and I was in a conference room, with Jacob and all the people from breakfast, waiting for someone to come in. In the flurry I’d rather missed who the someone was and what he or she did. I took out my copy of my book and put it in front of me, a talisman of sorts.
Someone came in. He was tall, with a pointy nose and a pointy chin, and his hair was too long—he looked like he’d kidnapped someone much younger and stolen their hair. He was an Australian, which surprised me.
He sat down.
He looked at me.
“Shoot,” he said.
I looked at the people from the breakfast, but none of them were looking at me—I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye. So I began to talk: about the book, about the plot, about the end, the showdown in the L.A. nightclub, where the good Manson girl blows the rest of them up. Or thinks she does. About my idea for having one actor play all the Manson boys.
“Do you believe this stuff?” It was the first question from the Someone. That one was easy. It was one I’d already answered for at least two dozen British journalists.
“Do I believe that a supernatural power possessed Charles Manson for a while and is even now possessing his many children? No. Do I believe that something strange was happening? I suppose I must. Perhaps it was simply that, for a brief while, his madness was in step with the madness of the world outside. I don’t know.”
“Mm. This Manson kid. He could be Keanu Reaves?”
God, no, I thought. Jacob caught my eye and nodded desperately. “I don’t see why not,” I said. It was all imagination anyway. None of it was real.
“We’re cutting a deal with his people,” said the Someone, nodding thoughtfully.
They sent me off to do a treatment for them to approve. And by them, I understood they meant the Australian Someone, although I was not entirely sure.
Before I left, someone gave me $700 and made me sign for it: two weeks per diem.
I spent two days doing the treatment. I kept trying to forget the book, and structure the story as a film. The work went well. I sat in the little room and typed on a notebook computer the studio had sent down for me, and printed out pages on the bubble-jet printer the studio sent down with it. I ate in my room.
Each afternoon I would go for a short walk down Sunset Boulevard. I would walk as far as the “almost all-nite” bookstore, where I would buy a newspaper. Then I would sit outside in the hotel courtyard for half an hour, reading a newspaper. And then, having had my ration of sun and air, I would go back into the dark, and turn my book back into something else.
There was a very old black man, a hotel employee, who would walk across the courtyard each day with almost painful slowness and water the plants and inspect the fish. He’d grin at me as he went past, and I’d nod at him.
On the third day I got up and walked over to him as he stood by the fish pool, picking out bits of rubbish by hand: a couple of coins and a cigarette packet.
“Hello,” I said.
“Suh,” said the old man.
I thought about asking him not to call me sir, but I couldn’t think of a way to put it that might not cause offense. “Nice fish.”
He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”
We watched them swim around the little poo
l.
“I wonder if they get bored.”
He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”
“Studies fishes.”
“Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’”
“Will you ask your grandson something for me?” The old man nodded. “I read once that carp don’t have set life spans. They don’t age like we do. They die if they’re killed by people or predators or disease, but they don’t just get old and die. Theoretically they could live forever.”
He nodded. “I’ll ask him. It sure sounds good. These three—now, this one, I call him Ghost, he’s only four, five years old. But the other two, they came here from China back when I was first here.”
“And when was that?”
“That would have been, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four. How old do I look to you?”
I couldn’t tell. He might have been carved from old wood. Over fifty and younger than Methuselah. I told him so.
“I was born in 1906. God’s truth.”
“Were you born here, in L.A.?”
He shook his head. “When I was born, Los Angeles wasn’t nothin’ but an orange grove, a long way from New York.” He sprinkled fish food on the surface of the water. The three fish bobbed up, pale-white silvered ghost carp, staring at us, or seeming to, the O’s of their mouths continually opening and closing, as if they were talking to us in some silent, secret language of their own.
I pointed to the one he had indicated. “So he’s Ghost, yes?”
“He’s Ghost. That’s right. That one under the lily—you can see his tail, there, see?—he’s called Buster, after Buster Keaton. Keaton was staying here when we got the older two. And this one’s our Princess.”
Princess was the most recognizable of the white carp. She was a pale cream color, with a blotch of vivid crimson along her back, setting her apart from the other two.
“She’s lovely.”
“She surely is. She surely is all of that.”
He took a deep breath then and began to cough, a wheezing cough that shook his thin frame. I was able then, for the first time, to see him as a man of ninety.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Fine, fine, fine. Old bones,” he said. “Old bones.”
We shook hands, and I returned to my treatment and the gloom.
I printed out the completed treatment, faxed it off to Jacob at the studio.
The next day he came over to the chalet. He looked upset.
“Everything okay? Is there a problem with the treatment?”
“Just shit going down. We made this movie with…” and he named a well-known actress who had been in a few successful films a couple of years before. “Can’t lose, huh? Only she is not as young as she was, and she insists on doing her own nude scenes, and that’s not a body anybody wants to see, believe me.
“So the plot is, there’s this photographer who is persuading women to take their clothes off for him. Then he shtups them. Only no one believes he’s doing it. So the chief of police—played by Ms. Lemme Show the World My Naked Butt—realizes that the only way she can arrest him is if she pretends to be one of the women. So she sleeps with him. Now, there’s a twist…”
“She falls in love with him?”
“Oh. Yeah. And then she realizes that women will always be imprisoned by male images of women, and to prove her love for him, when the police come to arrest the two of them she sets fire to all the photographs and dies in the fire. Her clothes burn off first. How does that sound to you?”
“Dumb.”
“That was what we thought when we saw it. So we fired the director and recut it and did an extra day’s shoot. Now she’s wearing a wire when they make out. And when she starts to fall in love with him, she finds out that he killed her brother. She has a dream in which her clothes burn off, then she goes out with the SWAT team to try to bring him in. But he gets shot by her little sister, who he’s also been shtupping.”
“Is it any better?”
He shakes his head. “It’s junk. If she’d let us use a stand-in for the nude sequences, maybe we’d be in better shape.
“What did you think of the treatment?”
“What?”
“My treatment? The one I sent you?”
“Sure. That treatment. We loved it. We all loved it. It was great. Really terrific. We’re all really excited.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, as soon as everyone’s had a chance to look it over, we’ll get together and talk about it.”
He patted me on the back and went away, leaving me with nothing to do in Hollywood.
I decided to write a short story. There was an idea I’d had in England before I’d left. Something about a small theatre at the end of a pier. Stage magic as the rain came down. An audience who couldn’t tell the difference between magic and illusion, and to whom it would make no difference if every illusion was real.
That afternoon, on my walk, I bought a couple of books on Stage Magic and Victorian Illusions in the “almost all-nite” bookshop. A story, or the seed of it anyway, was there in my head, and I wanted to explore it. I sat on the bench in the courtyard and browsed through the books. There was, I decided, a specific atmosphere that I was after.
I was reading about the Pockets Men, who had pockets filled with every small object you could imagine and would produce whatever you asked on request. No illusion—just remarkable feats of organization and memory. A shadow fell across the page. I looked up.
“Hullo again,” I said to the old black man.
“Suh,” he said.
“Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like I ought to be wearing a suit or something.” I told him my name.
He told me his: “Pious Dundas.”
“Pious?” I wasn’t sure that I’d heard him correctly. He nodded proudly. “Sometimes I am, and sometimes I ain’t. It’s what my mamma called me, and it’s a good name.”
“Yes.”
“So what are you doing here, suh?”
“I’m not sure. I’m meant to be writing a film, I think. Or at least, I’m waiting for them to tell me to start writing a film.”
He scratched his nose. “All the film people stayed here, if I started to tell you them all now, I could talk till a week next Wednesday and I wouldn’t have told you the half of them.”
“Who were your favorites?”
“Harry Langdon. He was a gentleman. George Sanders. He was English, like you. He’d say, ‘Ah, Pious. You must pray for my soul.’ And I’d say, ‘Your soul’s your own affair, Mister Sanders,’ but I prayed for him just the same. And June Lincoln.”
“June Lincoln?”
His eyes sparkled, and he smiled. “She was the queen of the silver screen. She was finer than any of them: Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish or Theda Bara or Louise Brooks…. She was the finest. She had ‘it.’ You know what ‘it’ was?”
“Sex appeal.”
“More than that. She was everything you ever dreamed of. You’d see a June Lincoln picture, you wanted to…” he broke off, waved one hand in small circles, as if he were trying to catch the missing words. “I don’t know. Go down on one knee, maybe, like a knight in shinin’ armor to the queen. June Lincoln, she was the best of them. I told my grandson about her, he tried to find something for the VCR, but no go. Nothing out there anymore. She only lives in the heads of old men like me.” He tapped his forehead.
“She must have been quite something.”
He nodded.
“What happened to her?”
“She hung herself. Some folks said it was because she wouldn’t have been able to cut the mustard in the talkies, but that ain’t true: she had a voice you’d remember if you heard it just once. Smooth
and dark, her voice was, like an Irish coffee. Some say she got her heart broken by a man, or by a woman, or that it was gambling, or gangsters, or booze. Who knows? They were wild days.”
“I take it that you must have heard her talk.”
He grinned. “She said, ‘Boy, can you find what they did with my wrap?’ and when I come back with it, then she said, ‘You’re a fine one, boy.’ And the man who was with her, he said, ‘June, don’t tease the help’ and she smiled at me and gave me five dollars and said ‘He don’t mind, do you, boy?’ and I just shook my head. Then she made the thing with her lips, you know?”
“A moue?”
“Something like that. I felt it here.” He tapped his chest. “Those lips. They could take a man apart.”
He bit his lower lip for a moment, and focused on forever. I wondered where he was, and when. Then he looked at me once more.
“You want to see her lips?”
“How do you mean?”
“You come over here. Follow me.”
“What are we…?” I had visions of a lip print in cement, like the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
He shook his head, and raised an old finger to his mouth. Silence.
I closed the books. We walked across the courtyard. When he reached the little fish-pool, he stopped.
“Look at the Princess,” he told me.
“The one with the red splotch, yes?”
He nodded. The fish reminded me of a Chinese dragon: wise and pale. A ghost fish, white as old bone, save for the blotch of scarlet on its back—an inch-long double-bow shape. It hung in the pool, drifting, thinking.
“That’s it,” he said. “On her back. See?”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
He paused and stared at the fish.
“Would you like to sit down?” I found myself very conscious of Mr. Dundas’s age.
“They don’t pay me to sit down,” he said, very seriously. Then he said, as if he were explaining something to a small child, “It was like there were gods in those days. Today, it’s all television: small heroes. Little people in the boxes. I see some of them here. Little people.
“The stars of the old times: They was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses…and when you met them, they were still huge. People believed in them.
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