“Rot in hell,” he heard a woman mutter in the back, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
His bible already opened before him, the chaplain stood atop the platform, as did the executioner, whose only function was to throw the lever that would release the two bolts holding the trapdoor in place. The rope would be fitted over the prisoner’s neck by a man File had referred to as a Certified Hanging Technician. The prison’s executioner, Theodore Rasp, stood ready by the lever, jutting up as conspicuously as an erect phallus. Rasp was sixty-five, his white hair neatly parted, his suit that of a businessman. He smelled of pipe tobacco. No black hood, no crossed muscular axe man’s arms. An executioner of the modern age. He looked like a judge or a doctor.
Now that Zipper was centered on the trapdoor, his ankles bound together by a restraining strap that gave an awful creak as it was tightened, the Certified Hanging Technician poised a black denim hood above the prisoner’s head, causing Mrs. Zipper to sob, “I love you, Charlie!” while he could still see her.
Board glanced at his camera. He could tell by the extra-excited rippling of its many legs that it was filming. Drinking it all in with the expectation of a tiger flicking its tail in the underbrush, tensed up to spring. Board had a perverse urge to cheat it, just as the executioner threw his lever…to cover that lidless cyclopean eye with his palm.
The chaplain began to softly read aloud. Warden File asked, “Do you have any last words, Mr. Zipper?”
“I’m sorry,” Zipper simply blurted. Either to his wife, or the families of his victims. Or to the chaplain, and his God?
Board fought another urge; to look away. Why should he watch, so long as his camera watched? He knew this man had done wrong. And he doubted seriously than any one incident like a father slapping his face for kissing him had made him the deviant that he was. Still, Board’s guts squirmed at the man’s helplessness…squirmed with empathy for a fear so great that even the survival instinct to flee was blotted out. He couldn’t really blame the families of the raped children for wanting to see, with their own eyes, as this man was punished. So why did he hate them at this moment?
The elderly CHT lowered the hood into place over Zipper’s head, and followed that by slipping a heavy noose of paraffin-lubricated hemp over the shrouded lump. Board almost expected the technician to hum to himself as if puttering in a garden, as he positioned the knot behind Zipper’s left ear, then tightened the noose snugly.
Board imagined that Zipper’s heart was pumping extra fast, trying to fit a cheated future of beats into a single minute. But could the prisoner’s heart be beating any faster than his own did? Could Zipper’s dread be any greater? Board felt as though it was his own life that was seconds away from being snipped free of its single, flimsy marionette’s string.
Theodore Rasp put his hand around his lever, and while the chaplain droned on—and with no special fanfare or final decisive proclamation from any of the assembled—calmly pulled it toward him…
Earlier that day, Charles Zipper had been measured from his chin to the floor, in order for the CHT to gauge the length of rope needed. He had been weighed. All moving parts of the scaffold had been oiled. Things were very advanced here at Maxillae Penitentiary. As a result, everything went smoothly when the trapdoor dropped out from beneath Zipper’s feet, and his body fell.
He did not kick bare feet; his feet were shod. If his tongue was thrust out of his mouth, it wasn’t seen behind that mask. He was like a neat cocoon in his restraints and hood. A chrysalis from which nothing would emerge, unless the chaplain’s words proved true…which Board held little hope for.
When his sudden drop was halted by the rope, several bones of Zipper’s neck were broken, his spinal cord severed. Had the drop been too little, he would have remained conscious as he choked. Had the drop been too great, his head might have been torn from his body. As it was, Zipper immediately lost consciousness. He did not squirm, did not writhe like Harry Houdini in his bonds, as Board had feared he would. Almost more horribly—he just dangled. Hung there, an unmoving pendulum that had stopped measuring time.
Board threw a look over at Zipper’s wife, who was sobbing outright and—thank God—covering her eyes with her palms. Couldn’t some relative, a sister, a mother, even a friend, have accompanied her? Beside her she had only the warden, who watched the proceedings with a fixed expression, as if enraptured. Whether involuntarily or not, the legs of the tick fused to the back of his skull was stroking the sides of his neck, as though playing the strings of a harp.
Looking back to his fellow prisoner, Board saw that the front of Zipper’s uniform had darkened with urine. He smelled shit. He glanced at the clock high on the brick wall like a shining impassive eye. Though unconscious and in medical shock, though unmoving, Zipper was strangling even as Board and the others watched.
Board would witness much more grisly executions—most of them electrocutions, death by technology seeming more appropriate for the times—in the months and years ahead. During one electrocution, an improperly affixed head electrode would result in foot-long blue flames shooting out both sides of one man’s skull. Smoke would pour from the heads of other men. If they were too sweaty, sometimes they caught fire. Eyes might burst from their sockets. Often, in the case of a botched electrocution, the physician would find that the man’s heart was still beating. Sometimes Board would hear a soft moan or a wheeze. The man might live on for several, to nearly fifteen, minutes. Sometimes a second round of electrocution was called for.
Board did not always feel great sympathy for these men. Some of them had murdered honest fathers and mothers with multiple children. Some had raped and sadistically murdered women. They were not good men. But it didn’t make Board feel like a good man watching their skin turn vividly red as thousands of volts coursed through them, seeing them vomit blood onto their chests. Watching them struggle, just as their victims had struggled. And just as bad as watching their contortions was watching the fluttering of his camera’s legs, as if it fought to swim closer to them.
Board was grateful that Mrs. Zipper kept her eyes covered. But as the minutes began to tick by (despite that stilled pendulum), and no one spoke or moved, she inevitably lowered her own improvised blindfold. Her sobbing rose to a higher pitch. Had she expected to see her husband gone, the scaffold again empty when she looked at it?
The minutes ticked by.
Though Charles Zipper’s neck and spine had given way in less than a second, it took six minutes for him to go into brain death. It took eight minutes for his heart to give its last, faint throb.
The attending physician had ascended the stairs. The steps creaked as the rope had creaked when the trapdoor had swung wide, as the ankle strap had creaked. He was elderly like the executioner, like the technician, like generals who sent young soldiers to war, and his very body seemed to creak. He bent beside the chrysalis and pressed his stethoscope to it.
A minute ticked by. Straightening, the physician wheezed, “The prisoner has expired.”
Board heard one gasping sob, so loud that it startled him. But it wasn’t so much its loudness as its origin that had startled him…because the sound had issued from his own mouth. As tears, inexplicably, issued from his own eyes.
Part Three: A Social Celebrity
-1-
Los Huesos, California, 1926
Some cinematographers nicknamed their cameras to distinguish one from the other. Hal Rosson, whom John Board had replaced on the set of The Street of Forgotten Men when Rosson became ill halfway through shooting, had called his three cameras Krazy, Ignatz and Pupp, after the primary characters in the popular Krazy Kat comic strip by George Herriman. Board simply referred to his cameras as 1, 2 and 3. To him, they differed sufficiently in appearance and function to preclude any need for pet names. 1 was for long shots, 2 for medium, 3 for close-ups. He often had all three cameras set up and running, so that the footage could be edited together for visual variety and impact. 1 was the smallest, black and glossy a
s obsidian. 2 was somewhat larger and gray in color. 3 was a bit larger still and was bone white, reminding him of his cameras back in his crime photographer days, when all the instruments of the Bugs had been that color for whatever unknown reasons.
The cameras were stored in another room right now, the door closed against their stink. 2 was getting a bit older, so Board had purchased a replacement larva from a dealer in Guest biotechnology and this immature creature currently resided in a chemical bath. Also on the workbench in Board’s “lab” was a new computer, with iridescent wing covers like a small TV’s so that he could view his dailies in them, and a posterior orifice like his cameras so that the rolls of motion picture film he produced could be inserted and transmitted directly to the computer in the particular Paramount editing lab that was being used to assemble the picture he was just wrapping up, The American Venus.
One of the lesser players in The American Venus sneaked up behind Board as he sat at a window in his apartment, gazing out at a city street bleached with the glare of California sunlight off all that white stucco. She was dressed only in his white pajama top, and he wore the pajama bottoms. “Mm,” she purred against his neck, her hands sliding around him, a finger teasing along the scar that looped his belly like a railroad track, where a knife had nearly gutted him eight years earlier. She had traced it with her tongue, last night.
Board took her hand off his scar self-consciously, raised it to his lips instead and kissed it, eyes still fixed on the street. He was watching workmen string telephones lines, wound on great spools on their truck. These rubbery white cables were organic, being a kind of blind, mindless worm that could be grown to great lengths, one end pretty much indistinguishable from the other. Impulses sent along their nervous systems conveyed telephone messages better than inorganic lines did, the public had been told, and these lines could also better connect computers for clearer, more distant transmissions to one another. There was talk that TVs, too, would soon be hooked up to such lines, again to benefit from sharper signals broadcast over a wider range. Like radios, a gift to the humans for accommodating the Guests. But Board thought of these gifts of technology as more of a careful diversion. Pretty distractions. Plus, the Guests themselves benefited from telephone lines and radio signals. They, too, used these things so that their own intercommunication was made easier; for the sake of their instruments, in which they were fractionally embodied, and for the sake of their Mediums, spread across this wide country…
“I didn’t even hear you get up, Jaby,” the woman behind him said, kissing his shoulder. She had started out calling him J.B. but the nickname had mutated slightly to sound like “baby”.
Board finally tilted back his head to smile up at her. Her name was Mary Brooks but she used her middle name, Louise, instead. They had met on the set of The Street of Forgotten Men, in which she had had an uncredited role playing a “moll”. Now, they were working on the comedy The American Venus together. Louise Brooks had a somewhat larger role this time, playing “Miss Bayport”. She would be the lead actress in another comedy, A Social Celebrity, soon; her star was definitely on the rise. Board would not be the cinematographer on that one, however. He hoped that man, Lee Garmes, wasn’t good-looking.
But he had no illusions about hanging onto this woman. If he allowed himself that foolishness, that vulnerability, he would be putting his heart on the anvil for sure. The only way for him to survive this was to know it would end, probably soon. Again, she was a star approaching meteoric speeds, and at forty-three he was old enough to be the twenty-year-old’s father. She had recently been seeing a businessman named George Marshall, and there were substantial rumors going around that at nineteen she had had a fling with Charlie Chaplain (she’d been a bit old for him, Board thought to himself with an indulgent dab of bitterness).
She was beautiful, of course, with her wide-set eyes that dipped down at the corners, her brows straight and thin above them, her thin lips quick to spread in a grin. Most distinctive was her glossy black helmet of hair, a beetle-like “Dutch Bob” with wings that curled up against her cheekbones (or hung down over him now as she rubbed his shoulders). The low bangs of her shimmering dome of hair hid a surprisingly broad forehead. When she wore her hair parted she looked much older, more intelligent. And she was intelligent. Witty. Sophisticated. Maybe that was her attraction to an older man like himself. When they had met on their last picture, they had found they were both reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel American Psychopath, a hideously violent (but they thought, scathing and hilarious) satire on the shallowness and avarice of the wealthy young men of the decadent jazz age. Finding out Board had once been a still photographer, Louise had invited him to her place to have a peek at some risqué, carefully draped nudes she had done at the age of eighteen for pin-up magazines like Artist and Models. He’d ended up staying the night, and saw the real thing, carelessly undraped.
“Want to get dressed and go out for breakfast?” he asked her, extending his arms behind him to cup the backs of her bare legs.
“Sure thing. Then you want to drive me to Paramount? I’ve got a meeting with Malcolm at ten.” Malcolm was the director of her next film, A Social Celebrity. Again, Board felt an ill-advised pang of jealous possessiveness.
“On Sunday?”
“I have lots to do, Jaby!” She pretended to strangle him from behind, shaking his head to emphasize her words: “I’ve got…two…more…movies…to do…this…year…so far…”
“Okay, okay,” he told her, slapping her calves and then rising from his chair with a small morning groan. Board had filled out a little from his days at Max Pen, which he had only recently told Louise about. He had also taken on the perhaps self-consciously artistic affectation of a mustache and goatee, but Louise said she loved them (“You look European!”) and so he kept them.
They headed for a diner they liked on Costilla Street, overlooked by the rugged Los Huesos Hills. Rearing up from these hills were the fifty-foot-tall letters that spelled out BONELAND, loosely nicknamed after Los Huesos’ English translation. The sign, lit at night by 4,000 bulbs, had been erected three years earlier by the Los Huesos Real Estate Group. As he drove, Board threw a few glances at the looming white letters. One time, while driving to Paramount, he had seen a centipede that must have been longer than a man skitter up over one of the letters.
There was nothing marring the vast blankness of the letters today, but before they could reach the diner they hit a snarl in traffic. Slipping out of her window to perch her rump on its edge, Louise reported what the problem was. Ahead of them, a fat white beetle nearly as big as an automobile had lumbered out into the street, making its way along with mindless nonchalance.
It must have come down from the thick scrub of the hills. More and more, such mutations were making their presence known, some of them having grown very large very slowly over a period of up to ten years, others apparently having been bred more quickly through generations of mutations, each larger than the last. Rather than being failed instruments of the Guests, they were insects that had, nonetheless, been inadvertently effected by the Guests’ influence.
Cars honked at the thing crawling slowly in the road, but Board just sat back and enjoyed the sweet, ephemeral moment, as Louise slipped back into the car and snuggled close to him, resting her Dutch Bobbed head against his shoulder.
-2-
Louise had begun filming A Social Celebrity, her first starring role, and Board—who had sent all his footage for The American Venus via computer to the Paramount labs—found himself between jobs.
As with the two movies for which he’d been the cinematographer (his first and only two thus far), Louise’s new movie would be filmed by a living camera. Once, the arthropod instruments would only have been interested in scenes of blood and suffering. Now, though the creatures were no doubt less enthusiastic, less stimulated, they put up with filming light comedies like The American Venus. They would even allow themselves to record inorganic subject matter t
hese days…landscapes and such without a human or even animal visible in them. Mechanical cameras were being used less and less. After all, they couldn’t film in color or record sound like the living cameras did. If not for them, Louise’s movies might be in black and white, and silent.
Board felt a bit lost without another shoot lined up, a bit left out, as Louise’s magic would now be captured by another man. But, he lectured himself, that he could not expect to film his girlfriend in every movie she appeared in. And he reminded himself that to even think of Louise as his long term girlfriend was masochistic, madness. He chided himself for what his brain called childishness, what his heart—and loins—called longing.
Bored today, and with the stark California sun burrowing into his throbbing brain, Board decided to duck into a cool movie theater to catch a flick. In the lobby of the brand new Mandible’s Chinese Theater, with its green copper pagoda-like roof, he scanned what the multiple screens had to offer. Of the eight films, there were six movies for general consumption, but also two that were rated XX, these being the horror film Night of the Undead and the thriller Silencing the Lambs. The latter was about a deranged mass murderer; Board saw too many of those in the newspapers (mass murderers were seemingly being mass produced in a factory somewhere). He was in no mood for a comedy. He wanted something dark, and chose the horror movie. He heard it had special effects by Lon Chaney, who was also one of Board’s favorite actors (he’d enjoyed Chaney, surprisingly without grotesque makeup, in this year’s Tell It To the Marines, a fairly lighthearted flick about a green recruit who ended up saving his tough drill instructor, Chaney, when they came under fire in Baghdad).
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