Shambling Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

  My makeup was itching, so I tugged at the latex appliance, pulling a huge swatch from my forehead along with my fright wig, then set the hairy puddle beside me on the bench. I removed my third eye and the dentures, resting them atop the napkin dispenser. My behavior attracted no attention. This was Hollywood. In the next booth over, the Abominable Snowman drank a vanilla milkshake through a straw. Napoleon sat at the counter, munching on a doughnut. Beside the swinging doors to the kitchen, Julius Caesar was propositioning our waitress.

  “Uncle Sam doesn’t want you in uniform, but he does want you in a suit,” Agent Jones told me.

  “A clown suit?” I said. “I’m supposed to tour the Pacific with the USO, cheering up the troops? I don’t do clowns, only monsters.”

  “That’s exactly the idea,” Agent Brown said. “Uncle Sam wants you in a monster suit. Nick and I have to decide if you’re a security risk. We’re also supposed to soften you up.”

  “With your fists?”

  “With the news that the assignment pays ten thousand dollars.”

  “Ten thousand? Jeez.”

  “Personally, I think you should do it out of sheer bare-assed patriotism,” Agent Jones said, “especially since you’re so assimilated and everything.”

  “To tell you the truth, we were thinking of recommending your co-star Dagover, but the Navy seems to think you’re the better actor,” Agent Brown said.

  “The Navy knows what they’re talking about,” I said.

  Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. There was no rivalry between Siggy Dagover and myself. There was, rather, an unimaginably vicious vendetta that stopped short of homicide only because in Hollywood there are more imaginative ways to settle scores. Think of Joan Crawford versus Bette Davis, and you’ll have some idea of the scale involved.

  The only thing I admired about Dagover was his ambition. Hired by Göttingen University as a linguistics professor way back in ‘34, he became the first Gentile intellectual on his block to flee Hitler. Landing in Manhattan as the Great Depression was reaching its nadir, he briefly supported himself by washing windows and scrubbing floors for the few remaining plutocrats in New York, then hopped a series of freight trains for the coast, determined to bluster his way into the movies.

  “Any Japs up your family tree?” Agent Jones asked me abruptly.

  “Only moneylenders, bagelmakers, and rabbis,” I said, not really expecting a laugh. Humor was never the strong suit of anti-Semites, except when T. S. Eliot wrote about cats.

  “That accords with our findings,” Agent Jones said.

  “What associations does the name Karl Marx bring to mind?” Agent Brown asked.

  “I believe he stayed in New York with Gummo when the others went out West,” I said.

  “Are you prepared to sign a loyalty oath?” Agent Brown asked.

  “To which country?” I asked.

  “I have infinite patience,” Agent Jones said. “I really do. My patience goes from here to the goddamn moon.”

  “This woman you’re living with, Darlene Wasserman, did you know her parents once belonged to the Communist League?” Agent Brown asked. “Your girlfriend was a red-diaper baby.”

  “I thought we were fighting Hirohito this week, not Stalin.”

  “Tell me about Miss Wasserman’s politics.” “She voted for Roosevelt, just like everybody else,” I said. “What about you?” Agent Jones said.

  “If I ever run for president, I’m sure Darlene will vote for me.”

  “Did you vote for Roosevelt?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “According to our investigations, you and Miss Wasserman are registered Democrats.”

  “That’s completely correct. Our diapers are as white as yours, Nick.”

  “One more crack, Jew-boy, and the job goes to Dagover,” Agent Jones said.

  “Why does Uncle Sam want me in a monster suit?” I asked.

  “We can’t tell you that,” Agent Brown said.

  “Because you aren’t allowed, because you don’t know, or because you despise me?” I asked.

  “We can’t tell you that either,” Agent Brown said.

  “Actually, I’d be happy to address your third question,” Agent Jones said.

  Agent Brown passed me a slip of paper bearing the words 4091 East Olympic Boulevard, Room 101, 0900 Hours. “Show up at this address tomorrow morning, nine o’clock sharp.”

  “With my monster makeup on, or without it?” I asked, removing the fake eye from the napkin dispenser. Dudley would be miserable about this latest hitch in the schedule, but that was the price you paid for trying to make horror movies during a global conflagration.

  “Tell them you’re the actor, come to see Commander Quimby,” Agent Jones said.

  “Bombs over Tokyo,” I said, nonchalantly dropping my glass orb into the G-Man’s gazpacho. “Look, Nick, there’s an eye in your soup. If you don’t make a big deal about it, I’m sure they’ll bring you a fresh bowl.”

  That night I made a pot of spaghetti for Darlene and myself, then read her the first draft of Lycanthropus, insisting that she should feel perfectly free to give me her frank professional opinion leavened with unqualified adulation. Three or four lines went clunk, and for budget purposes I’d probably have to cut the prologue set in ancient Rome, but basically I had to agree with her when she said the thing was a whiz-bang, gosh-wow masterpiece.

  “It’s too good for Katzman,” she elaborated, puffing on a postprandial Chesterfield. She was the sort of creature a down-market writer might describe as “a mere slip of a girl,” though I found her ethereality wholly sensual and paradoxically carnal. “You’ve got to peddle it to Warners or Universal.”

  “Universal would let me keep ancient Rome,” I said.

  “You know what you’ve got here, Syms? A goddamn series, that’s what. Curse of Lycanthropus, Chutzpah of Lycanthropus, Boston Blackie Meets Lycanthropus — it’s all sewn up.”

  I thought she was being too optimistic, but I would say one thing for my script: whatever its flaws, I doubted that anybody had treated werewolfery in quite this way before. Unlike Henry Hull’s neurotic Dr. Glendon or Lon Chaney, Jr.’s self-pitying Larry Talbot, my aristocratic scientist Baron Basil Ordlust actually wanted to be a shapeshifter. Convinced that lycanthropy offers the ultimate thrill, promising the one perversion that could sate his rarefied appetites, Ordlust travels the world seeking carriers of the supreme lupine curse — might he find the quintessential beast in Rumania? Russia? Cambodia? Tibet? Brazil? — soliciting these princely werewolves to plant their teeth judiciously in his flesh. Although most of the infections take hold, the subsequent transformations always fall short of Ordlust’s expectations, so he blithely cures himself and hits the road once again, still seeking the ultimate in mephistophelean saliva. And to top it off, Ordlust is a sympathetic character.

  A word about the culture of Hollywood horror actors, circa 1945. You might be surprised to learn that our proud little fraternity had no particular affection for hideous makeup, even though deformity was the sine qua non of the genre. Sure, I suppose the elder Lon Chaney reveled in his masochistic man-of-a-thousand-faces mystique, but the rest of us had other agendas. Fanged dentures, itinerant eyeballs, gaping nostrils, rubber humps on your back, stitches the size of football laces on your forehead — not only were such appliances painful, they tended to cramp your performance. If you couldn’t arrange to get cast as a vampire or a psychopath, you at least wanted a character who oscillated between a mute monster and a loquacious man. That’s why the werewolf was such a coveted role within my profession. The fuzzy discomfort would be over in three or four shooting days, and then you’d get to deliver lots of dialogue, usually the best lines in the script. Mummies were a dicier proposition. Karloff famously had it both ways when he played Im-Ho-Tep back in ‘32. He’s trussed up in those damn bandages for only about three minutes of screen time, first in the great resurrection scene, then briefly during the lavish flashb
acks set in ancient Egypt. For most of the picture he’s Ardeth Bey, unraveled mummy, a bit dry to the touch but smoothly lisping his way through one tasty line after another. I enjoyed no such luck with the Kha-Ton-Ra cycle. The scripts had me embalmed in every shot, though I got to do some pretty adept pantomime in Bride of Kha-Ton-Ra and Ghost of Kha-Ton-Ra. So Lycanthropus was a dream project for me, seventy-two discrete speeches ranging from pseudo-Shakespearean bombast to Oscar Wildean epigrams.

  At first Darlene wanted to accompany me to Commander Quimby’s lair, but then I explained how touchy my prospective employers were about national security, and why showing up with the spawn of Trotskyites on my arm might throw the Navy for a loop.

  “My red diapers are behind me,” she said, deadpan. In those days, even when Darlene’s jokes weren’t funny, I laughed.

  “How’s this for a deal?” I said. “Stay home today, but if Uncle Sam needs a rewrite on this mysterious script of his, I’ll try to get you the job.”

  Appeased, Darlene promised to spend the morning ornamenting Lycanthropus with constructive criticism, then sent me off with a hug and a kiss.

  4091 East Olympic Boulevard proved to be a nondescript one-storey sandstone building of the sort you drive blithely by every day, knowing it’s full of paper-pushers and clock-watchers, and nobody’s in there writing a symphony or taming a lion or having an orgasm. I parked around the corner, availed myself of the side entrance, and strolled into Room 101, its door framing a pane of frosted glass stenciled with the words New Amsterdam Project, Los Angeles Office, No Admittance. A buxom brunette in a WAVES uniform stepped out from behind the counter, a little plaque reading Lt. Percy pinned on her left ja-lookie. Learning that I was the expected movie star, she guided me down a stairwell, through a door marked Interrogation Room, and into the august presence of Commander Quimby, a gaunt officer in dress blues and a frothy auburn toupee that surmounted his cranium like a thatched roof.

  I saluted. Quimby frowned, evidently wondering if I might be mocking him. I was wondering the same thing.

  “I’ll put my cards on the table, Thorley,” he said as Lieutenant Percy slipped away. “The FBI thinks you’re a smart-aleck, and they told us that Karloff, Dagover, or even Lorre might work out better.”

  “Peter could never get a security clearance,” I said. “He’s a double risk — born a Kraut, and before the war he played Mr. Moto.”

  “I just got off the phone with the State Department. Jimmy Byrnes’s people are satisfied you’re true blue, plus you have the necessary stamina, or so your doctor told Jones and Brown.”

  “I heard I’m getting ten thousand dollars.”

  “Correct, but you’d be obliged to sign the contract even if the job paid fifty cents. Next week you’ve got a briefing at a secret military installation. The rehearsal comes nine or ten days later. We’ve decided to let you keep on working at Monogram, so your colleagues won’t get suspicious, but every time we snap our fingers, you’ll have to drop what you’re doing and get on the Navy’s clock.”

  “Mr. Katzman won’t like that.”

  “Mr. Katzman can kiss my ass. The curtain goes up at 1500 hours on the first Sunday in June, one performance only, after which you can go back to Corpuscula Humps the Wolf Man without any more interruptions.”

  “Why just one show?”

  “You don’t need to know that yet.”

  “Who’s the audience?”

  “You don’t need to know that yet either.”

  “Do I have any lines?”

  “Ten thousand dollars for three days’ work, and you’re worried about your goddamn lines?”

  “I’m always worried about my goddamn lines.”

  Quimby issued a polysyllabic grunt, opened his desk drawer, and took out a neatly folded American flag along with a dossier labeled Syms Thorley. “I’ve got your contract right here, three copies, plus a loyalty oath, a level three security clearance, and an ID badge that will get you admitted to certain sectors of the project.”

  “I can’t sign anything today. Not before my agent reads it over.”

  “Fuck your agent. This is your contribution to the war effort, Thorley, not a goddamn career move.” Quimby plucked the fountain pen from his desk set, flipped open the dossier, and retrieved the specified documents, sliding them toward me with the revulsion of a gourmet chef serving a cheeseburger. “Put your right hand on Old Glory,” he said, indicating the folded flag, “and repeat after me, ‘I, Isaac Margolis, swear my undying allegiance to the Constitution of the United States …’“

  I froze, mulling over the word undying. Three years earlier, a quirky little werewolf picture called The Undying Monster had turned a tidy profit for Fox, a circumstance that I thought boded well for Lycanthropus.

  “Say it, Thorley,” Quimby insisted, “or we open negotiations with Dagover.”

  I gave the flag a patriotic caress. “‘I, Isaac Margolis, swear my undying allegiance to the Constitution of the United States …’“

  “‘And I shall spare myself no hazard or hardship in defending the republic against its enemies.’“

  “That, too.” I grabbed the fountain pen and scrawled my name on every dotted line in sight.

  Quimby heaved a sigh of relief, then got on the intercom and told somebody named “Ensign Fuentes” I was ready to have my measurements taken. The commander jammed two contracts back into my dossier, along with the loyalty oath and the security clearance, then presented me with the remaining contract plus an ID badge announcing that Syms Thorley was a civilian attaché to the New Amsterdam Project of the United States Navy, Group F, Classification C, Serial Number 873091.

  “I have about six hundred questions for you,” I said.

  “And I’ve got exactly six answers for you.”

  “I’ll take them.”

  “Nothing I’m about to say leaves this room. Don’t even tell your girlfriend.”

  “You bet.” I couldn’t wait to regale Darlene with a complete account of this bizarre interrogation.

  “First answer. The New Amsterdam Project is actually the code name for the Knickerbocker Project. If your friends at Monogram insist on hearing any details, tell them you’ve been hired by the New Amsterdam Project. Mention the words ‘Knickerbocker Project,’ and the Navy will shoot you on sight.”

  “I see,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “Second answer. The Japs are licked. The President knows it, the Army knows it, the Navy knows it, and even His Divine Goddamn Majesty Hirohito knows it. Third answer. Those little yellow bastards would rather arm their grandmothers with bamboo spears than hand their flag to an Allied invasion force, so the Joint Chiefs have been casting around for a way to shock them into unconditional surrender. Even as we speak, General Groves is riding herd on some goddamn Astounding Science Fiction superbomb that Leo Szilard and his nutcase physics friends started building after FDR gave them the green light. Meanwhile, Admiral Strickland is supervising a program aimed at developing the ultimate biological weapon, just like the Nazis were working on before Hitler killed himself. It’s funny, Szilard is an anagram for lizards, but the Navy’s the ones with the lizards, not the Army.” “Did you say lizards?”

  I was hoping Ensign Fuentes would turn out to be a WAVE, just like Lieutenant Percy, but the officer who came barreling into the room was a hulking Wallace Beery lookalike with no neck, a wooden pencil lodged behind his cauliflower ear and a Masonite clipboard tucked under his arm. A yellow cloth tape measure hung from his shoulders like a tallith. He set to work immediately, assessing my height, determining my circumference, establishing the distance from my left shoulder to my right.

  “No, Thorley, I did not say lizards,” Quimby explained as Fuentes wrote down his findings. “You merely thought I said lizards. Fourth answer. The instant we relay your measurements to the costumers, they can finish constructing your PRR.”

  “Pennsylvania Railroad?”

  “Personal Reptile Rig.”

  Fuentes syst
ematically ascertained and recorded the dimensions of my head, neck, chest, and hips.

  “Fifth answer,” Quimby said. “Once we process the paperwork, you’ll be seconded to the staff of Dr. Ivan Groelish, Nobel laureate, herpetologist, and all-around odd duck. Expect a phone call from him, possibly his daughter, on Monday.”

  “A herpetologist,” I said. “A lizard man.”

  “Sixth and final answer. Don’t be fooled by Dr. Groelish’s civilian status. You’re working for the United States Navy, not the goddamn private sector. If it were up to me, I’d draft you into the Pacific Fleet tomorrow.”

  Fuentes carefully calculated the lengths of my arms, legs, and stride.

  “Let’s be honest, Commander,” I said. “For reasons not remotely clear to me, and perhaps not to you either, these Knickerbocker people are planning to put me in a lizard suit.”

  Quimby rifled through my dossier, then yanked out a one-page letter. “You want to know why we’re having this conversation? Dr. Groelish’s plea arrived on my desk yesterday. Quote, ‘The USO finally managed to dig up those 16mm prints, so last night we had a private Syms Thorley festival, attended by most of the Group F personnel and also Admiral Yordan. Please do whatever it takes to get Mr. Thorley on the team. The man is a consummate shambler. Screen Return of Kha-Ton-Ra, and you’ll see what we mean. His lumbering is second to none. If you doubt this evaluation, take a look at Evil of Corpuscula.’ Unquote.”

  “In my opinion, everything Dr. Groelish says is true,” piped up Fuentes. “I was only nine when I saw Return of Kha-Ton-Ra, and I still get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. May I shake your hand, Mr. Thorley?”

  “Of course,” I said, granting my admirer’s wish. “They want me to be a lizard, right?”

  “I’m not at liberty,” the ensign said. “Now may I ask you a question?”

  “You bet.”

  “Did you play both parts in Corpuscula Meets the Doppelgänger?”