Winter 2007

by Subterranean Press

  “You can get by after that red pick-up,” he says. “I see it.” She makes the turn, pulls into the lot and parks. “If that’s so, if that’s really what Isabel wanted, she got her wish,” she says. “No child should have to endure East Cipinang. You have no idea of the things I was forced to do as a result of your nonchalance, your triviality. Your shallowness.”

  She looks as if she’s about to spit on him, climbs out of the SK and then bends to the window, peering in at him. “This car won’t do, I’m afraid,” she says, blithely. “It corners horribly.”

  “What’re you trying to pull?” he asks. “You were at my house the other night, weren’t you?”

  “If you say so.”

  “What the hell do you want from me?”

  She straightens, as though preparing to leave, but then leans in the window again, her teeth bared and black eyes bugged. Except for the color of her skin, it’s the face of the witch, vividly insane, without a single human quality, and Cliff recoils from it.

  “If you want answers, watch Isabel’s movie,” she says, her face relaxing into that of a teenage girl. “I believe you have a copy.”

  Chapter Eight

  Cliff sits in his office for an hour, hour and a half, not thinking so much as brooding about Shalin’s story. It’s absurd, impossible, yet elements of it ring true, especially the part about him giving Isabel the STD. He digs deep, mining his memories, trying to recall how she was, how he felt about her, and remembers her as a simple girl, not simple in the sense of stupid, but open and unaffected, though it may be he’s prompted by guilt to gild the lily. She didn’t seem at all “a woman of power,” but then he didn’t take the time to know her, to look beneath the surface. His clearest memories relate to her amazing breasts, her dancer’s legs and ass, and to what a great lay she was. He wishes he could remember a moment when he loved her, an instance in which he saw something special about her, but he was a superficial kind of guy in those days, and maybe still is.

  Thoughts buzz him like mosquitoes, a cloud of tiny, shrill thoughts that swarms around his head, diving close just long enough to nettle his brain, questions about Shalin’s story, more memories of Isabel (once a trickle, their flow has become a flood, but all relating to how she looked, smelled, felt, tasted), and disparaging thoughts, lots of them, remarking on, as Shalin put it, his triviality, his nonchalance, his shallowness. If he could go an entire day without his life being captioned by this dreary self-commentary…

  The phone rings, and he picks it up, grateful for the interruption. His agent’s mellow tenor brings all the infectious banality of SoCal to his ear. After an exchange of pleasantries, his agent says, “Listen, Cliff. I was in New York last week. I had this crazy idea and you know me, what the hell, I pitched it to a couple of publishers. I said, What if Cliff Coria wrote a book, a memoir, about his life in the movies. This guy’s acted all over, I told them. Spain, Southeast Asia, Czechoslovakia. You name it. And he’s smart. And he’s seen celebrities in unguarded moments. He’s kind of an insider-slash-outsider. He can give you a view from the fringes of Hollywood, and maybe that’s the clearest view of all.”

  “I don’t know, Mark.”

  “Don’t you want to hear how they reacted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They were excited, Cliff. There could be serious money for you in this. And if the book does what I think it will, it’ll generate significant heat out here.”

  The Celeste’s Vacancy sign switches on in the twilight, seeming like a glowing blue accusation. Cliff lowers the Venetian blinds.

  “I believe there’ll be interest in you as a character actor,” Mark goes on. “Not just cheesy parts. I think I’d be able to get you serious work. I know you can do this, Cliff. Remember those letters you used to send me? Like the one about Nicholson’s ass hanging out of the car when he was banging that bit player? That was fucking hilarious! Come on! All I need is a few chapters and a rough outline.”

  Cliff assures his agent that he’ll give it a try. He leaves a note for Jerry, saying he’s going to take a few days off to deal with some personal problems, and then heads for Marley’s place. Crossing the Main Street Bridge over the Halifax River, which bisects Daytona, he sees several old men fishing off the bridge, half in silhouette, motionless, with buckets at their feet, the corpses of blowfish and sting rays bloodily strewn along the walkway, and thinks that if he were ever to take up fishing, this is where he’d like to drop his line. The idea of joining those sentinel figures appeals to him, as does the thought of hauling up little monsters from the deep.

  At the apartment Cliff pours a vodka from a bottle chilled in the freezer, turns on the TV, and pops Sword Of The Black Demon into the DVD player. While the opening credits roll, he calls Marley and tells her he’s coming up to the Surfside sometime between nine and ten. He fast-forwards through the movie until he finds the entrance of the witch queen and her chunky blue retinue; then he sits on the edge of the bed, sipping vodka, watching Isabel Yahya and the other women attending a ceremony in a torchlit cave made of acrylic fiber painted to look like rock—it involves the queen choosing a new fuck toy, a young Filipino youth with oiled muscles. She leads him to the royal chamber, where a bed with blue satin sheets awaits, screws his brains out and, while he’s helpless, limp and nearly unconscious from her amorous assault, she drains him of his soul, laughing as she coaxes it forth by means of a lascivious dance. The soul resembles a stream of pale smoke from which faces surface. Cliff assumes them to be the youth’s memories. The smoke dwindles to a trickle and at long last, after much eye-rolling and twitching, the youth dies.

  In another scene, Ricky Sintara, a striking young man with even larger muscles, also oiled, and Dak Windsor enter the cave, seeking to capture the queen and persuade her to divulge the whereabouts of the wizard who has loosed the black demon; but they are themselves captured by the royal guard. The queen drags Ricky off to suffer the same fate as the youth, but once in the sack, Ricky proves to be no ordinary man—his incomparable lovemaking renders the queen hors de combat. This is all shown tastefully—no actual penetration; only full frontal female nudity—and dredges up a chuckle from Cliff, because Ricky, a fine fellow and terrific drinking companion, would on occasion wear women’s clothing when relaxing during the shoot and had a boyfriend who was prettier than the majority of the actresses.

  Meanwhile, in another part of the cave, Dak is chained to the wall and Isabel is preparing to scourge him with an S&M dream of whip whose lashes appear to be fashioned of live scorpions. He takes a few strokes, writhes in pain, calls out to God for assistance, using a specific phrase that causes Isabel to realize that he is the son of the doctor who saved her village from a cholera outbreak years before—she was a little girl at the time, but developed a crush on the teenage Dak that lasts to this day. Turned aside from the path of evil by the power of love, she frees Dak and they kiss, a miracle of osculation that changes her skin from blue back to a pleasing caramel, and together, along with Ricky, they flee the cave, carrying with them the comatose queen.

  Lashed to a bed in Ricky’s shack (the hero has hewed to his humble village origins), the queen strains mightily against her ropes, mimicking her earlier struggles in the act of love, breasts heaving, hips thrusting, tormented by Ricky’s questions, and eventually she yields up her secrets. But that night, while Dak and Ricky are reconnoitering the wizard’s lair, she calls out to Isabel, whom she still controls to an extent. By means of her occult powers and a cross-eyed, beetling stare, she coerces Isabel into untying her bonds. She then knocks her to the ground and stands over her, waggling her fingers and projecting dire energies from their tips, bursts of blue light that cause her former minion to shrivel, to grow desiccated and wrinkled, dying of old age in a matter of seconds.

  Is that, Cliff asks himself, what Shalin wants him to believe may be in store for him? He recalls her talk about Isabel’s premature aging, her comment regarding a karmic agency being involved in all of this—a sudden withe
ring would be an apt punishment according to karmic law. But he refuses to believe Shalin capable of doling out such a punishment.

  He goes to the refrigerator, pours another vodka, and watches the rest of the movie. The queen escapes through the surrounding jungle, but is killed by Ricky, who throws his magical dagger at her. It tumbles end over end, traveling hundreds of yards through the darkness, swerving around clumps of bamboo, tree trunks, bushes, and impales the fleeing queen through her malignant heart. Dak grieves for Isabel, but is bucked up by Ricky and rises to the moment with renewed zeal. With the help of a friendly shaman, they plot the attack: Dak will lead the simple villagers (there are always simple villagers in Filipino fantasy movies) in an assault on the wizard’s palace, distracting the evil one so that Ricky can sneak inside and do him in.

  The battle goes badly for Dak at first. The villagers are being hacked to pieces by the wizard’s guard. All seems lost, but the ghost of Isabel appears, wreathed in swirling mist to disguise the fact the actress is no longer Isabel (a love scene between her ghost and Dak was intended for the night before the battle, but she vanished from the project and a rewrite was necessary), and she inspires him with a message of undying love and tells him of a secret tunnel into which they can lure the guard and fight them in a narrow confine, thus neutralizing their superior numbers. As this is happening, the Black Demon accosts Ricky outside the palace and all, again, seems lost. Not even he can defeat a giant. But the ancient gods, played by white-bearded men wearing silk robes and several busty Filipina babes in brocaded halters, intervene. They whisk Ricky and the Black Demon away to a cosmic platform surrounded by a profusion of stars and clouds of nebular gas (glowing, Cliff notices, rose and purple, green and white, like the lights he saw outside his cottage), shrink them to almost equal size (the demon still has a considerable advantage), and let them fight. Fending off blows with a magic bracelet given him by his dying father, a silvery circlet wrought from the stuff of a dying star, Ricky bests the demon and takes his sword—it is, by chance, the only weapon that can slay the wizard. He is returned to planet Earth where, after a torrid chase, the wizard changes into a huge serpent that Ricky chops into snake sushi.

  In the final scene, also rewritten late in the game, a big celebration, Ricky wanders about the village, a girl on each arm, searching for his pal. Following an intuition, he divests himself of the ladies and enters the local temple, where he finds Dak on his knees, praying for the soul of Isabel at an altar surmounted by her portrait. He puts his hand on Dak’s shoulder. The two men exchange sober glances. Then Ricky kneels beside him and adopts a prayerful attitude. Solemn music rises, changing to a bouncy disco theme as the screen darkens and the end credits roll.

  Cliff thinks now that the last scene might have been intentionally ironic. He recalls that the director dogged Isabel throughout the shoot and seemed miffed when she got together with Cliff. He may have fired her because she wouldn’t sleep with him and rewrote the scene to make a point. Not that this bears upon anything relevant to his current problem. He drains his vodka, idly gazing at the credits, puzzling over the film, wondering what Shalin wanted him to take from it. Maybe nothing. Maybe she just wanted him to endure the pain of watching it again. And then he spots something. A name. It flips past too quickly and he’s not sure he saw it. He hits reverse on the remote, plays it forward, and there it is, the logical explanation he’s been seeking, the answer to everything:

  Special Effects: Bazit Palaniappan

  He knew it! They’ve been trying to gaslight him the whole time. He remembers the F/X guy, a thin man in his fifties with graying hair who bore a passing resemblance to the owner of the Celeste. He must be Bazit the elder’s son and dropped the Jr. after his father died. Why didn’t he mention the connection? Surely he would have, unless he was too excited at seeing Dak Windsor. No, he would have mentioned it. Unless he had a reason to keep quiet about it…which he did. It occurs to Cliff that Bazit might be one of those soul transfers such as she claimed to have undergone, but he’s not buying that. With knowledge gained from his father, Bazit tricked up the dunes around Cliff’s cottage and put on a show. Shalin must have assumed that he wouldn’t watch the end credits.

  Exhilarated, Cliff starts to pour another drink, then decides he’ll have that drink with Marley. She gets off at ten—he’ll take her out for a late supper, somewhere nicer than the Surfside, and they’ll celebrate. She won’t know what they’re celebrating, but he’s glad now that he didn’t burden her with any of this. He trots down the stairs and out into the warm, windless night, into squeals and honks and machine gun fire from the arcades, happy shouts from the Ferris wheel, now lit up and spinning, and the lights on the miniature golf course glossing over its dilapidation, providing a suitable setting for the family groups clumped about the greens. The bright souvenir shops selling painted sand dollars and polished driftwood, funny hats and sawfish snouts, and the sand drifting up onto the asphalt from The World’s Most Famous Be-atch (as an oft-seen t-shirt design proclaims), and the flashing neon signs above strip clubs and tourist bars along Main Street, the din of calliope music, stripper music, tavern music, and voices, voices, voices, the vocal exhaust of vacationland America, exclamations and giggles, drunken curses and yelps and unenlightened commentary—it’s all familiar, overly familiar, tedious and unrelentingly ordinary, yet tonight its colors are sharper, its sounds more vivid, emblematic of the world of fresh possibility that Cliff is suddenly eager to engage.

  Chapter Nine

  It’s a good week for Cliff and Marley, a very good week. There is no recurrence of demons, no witches, no bumps in the night. Jerry is furious with him, naturally, and threatens to fire him, but he has no leverage—the job is merely a pastime for Cliff and he tells Jerry to go ahead, fire him, he’ll find some other way to occupy his idle hours. He works on the book and is surprised how easily it flows. He hasn’t settled on a title yet, but anecdotal material streams out of him and he’s amazed by how funny it is—it didn’t seem that funny at the time; and, though he’s aware that he has a lot of cleaning up to do on the prose, he’s startled by the sense of bittersweet poignancy that seems to rise from his words, even from the uproarious bits. It’s as if in California, those years of struggle and fuck-ups, he realized that the dream he was shooting for was played-out, that the world of celebrity with its Bel Air mansions and stretch limos and personal chefs masked a terrible malformation that he hated, that he denied yet knew was there all along, that he didn’t want badly enough because, basically, he never wanted it at all.

  The relationship, too, flows. Cliff has his concerns, particularly about their ages, but he’s more-or-less convinced himself that it’s all right; he’s neither conning Marley nor himself. He can hope for ten good years, fifteen at the outside, but that’s a lifetime. After that, well, whatever comes will come. It’s not that he feels young again. His back’s still sore, he’s beginning to recognize that he needs more than reading glasses, but he no longer feels as empty as he did and he thinks that Marley was spot-on in her diagnosis: he was lonely.

  They make love, they go to the movies, they walk on the beach, and they talk about everything: about global warming, the NBA (Marley’s a Magic fan, Cliff roots for the Lakers), about religion and ghosts and salsa, about dogs versus cats as potential pets, about fashion trends and why he never married, and veterinary school. Cliff offers to help with the tuition and, though reluctant at first, Marley says there’s a well-regarded school in Orlando and she’s been accepted, but doesn’t know if she’ll have enough saved to go for the fall term. Cliff has major problems with Orlando. There’s no beach, no ocean breeze to break the summer heat, and he dreads being in such close proximity to the Mouse and the hordes of tourists who pollute the environment. Rednecks of every stamp, the blighted of the earth, so desperate in their search for fun that they make pilgrimages to Disneyworld and commingle with one another in a stew of ill-feeling that frequently results in knuckle-dragging fights between hairy, ov
erweight men and face-offs between grim-lipped parents and their whiny kids. But he says, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  He’s scared by what he’s beginning to feel for her, and he’s not yet prepared to turn loose of the pool ladder and swim out into the deep end; but his grip is slipping and he knows immersion is inevitable. At times, in certain lights, she seems no older than twenty. She’s got the kind of looks that last and she’ll still be beautiful when they cart him off to the rest home. That afflicts him. But then she’ll say or do something, make a move in bed or offer a comment about his book or, like the other night at the movies, the first move he’s attended in years, reach over and touch his arm and smile, that causes him to recognize this is no girl, no beach bunny, but a mature woman who’s committed her share of sins and errors in judgment, and is ready for a serious relationship, even if he is not. That liberates him from his constraints, encourages him to lose himself in contemplation of her, to see her with a lover’s eye, to notice how, when she straddles him, she’ll gather her hair behind her neck and gaze briefly at the wall, as if focusing herself before she lets him enter; how her lips purse and her eyebrows lift when she reads; how when she cooks, she’ll stand on one foot for a minute at a time, arching her back to keep on balance; how when she combs out her hair after a shower, bending her head to one side, her neck and shoulder configure a line like the curve of a Spanish guitar. He wants to understand these phrasings of her body, to know things about her that she herself may not know.

  The ninth morning after Cliff quit working for Jerry (he hasn’t made it official yet, but in his mind he’s done), he’s lying in bed when Marley, fresh from a shower, wearing a bathrobe, tells him she’s going to visit her mother in Deland; she’ll be gone two or three days.