Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  “Huh, I see. Well, what I remember most is learning my father had passed while I was in Leyte. And then heading to Manila and thinking I was going to starve to death there, and how terrible all of that felt. Everything happened at once and I couldn’t clear my head for some time.”

  “Sad thing about your father. That’s some bad deal. You were NAVY, right?”

  “No, ARMY.”

  “Out in the islands. Ground force?”

  “Paratrooper. But then ground for awhile; demolitions. I uh, stepped on the wrong C.O’s boots one too many times.”

  “Oh, I can picture it.”

  “Yeah, well, I was just about back to airborne but once we got into those trenches, we were definitely grounded.”

  “I hated going subterrain.”

  “Awful. And we got messy out there. In and out of contact. We all started getting real hungry and I was almost ready to try eating the leather from my boots. There were a few days in particular where things became... questionable. They were the bad ones. We were in a gulley, and just stuck there. In Leyte. My knee was garbage, but I could walk, so I was sent to the ditch after two weeks of morphine in a sick bed. The orders wouldn’t change and the chain of command out there was barely holding together, dangerously close to falling apart. We could all feel it. I was sober again, and hungry because morphine subdues the appetite and it had worn off. I could barely think straight, and even when I could clear my head, all I could think about was how hungry I was. We still had Manila to deal with, but Leyte was where things started getting ugly.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “All the resources and attention were on the NAVY because the Japanese fleet was in the gulf. Those of us between the hills, the ARMY, we were just supposed to hold tight and keep what we had. But it kept on. And then things started to happen. Stealing. Fights. You know. Young men. Power struggles. At first, it was personal stuff, grudges, and then it started getting into the chain of command. I did it, too. Everybody seemed up to something. There wasn’t any insurrection so much as disregard, and it started to feel like it was every-man-for-himself. I was a small guy. I didn’t like my odds if that happened.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Couple of us tried to eat leaves. These big, green ones with yellow tips. Tasted like pepper and asprin. Anything we thought could be edible. And the Japanese face terrified us. It could have been anywhere. Still gets to me, of course.”

  There was a moment during which Sol sipped his beer, but then he abruptly set it down, nearly spilling foam from the head. He slid from the barstool and set some coins on the counter. Emery was addled by this.

  “It was all rough,” Sol commented, putting on his coat.

  “Are you leaving?” Emery asked.

  “Yeah, I’m tired. I know I asked you out for a beer, but I think I have to go back on that. Get myself home.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, I know that’s a little unacceptable, but uh… I hate talking war while drinking. I know I’m being rude, but I just want to get home.”

  “Sol, I feel the same way about that kind of talk. It’s depressing, but you asked.”

  “I know I did. Shouldn’t have. I uh... listen; I want to thank you for following along earlier, backing me up with Tult when I let him go. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “No?”

  “Well, I don’t know that I would have. I’ll see you on the set tomorrow.”

  “Sure, see you then,” Emery said, thrown off by the unexpected dismissal.

  Sol Jamison was an odd person, and even stranger off set, it would seem. The executive producer gathered up his mood and began to exit the pub. Emery decided to say a particular thing, blunt but honest.

  “Sol, there’s a part of me that wants to like you. But you’re not making it easy.”

  The executive producer turned his head a moment as he walked, his profile bearing a look of annoyance. He slowed for a step but then returned to his usual speed as he neared the exit.

  “It’ll pass,” he said, waving a hand and walking out of the pub, taking all his dreary unexpectedness with him. Emery stared at the doorway and puzzled over what had just happened. There was no real rationality in the night. There had been a firing, an attack, and then Emery had gone out for a beer with Sol Jamison, who was somewhat of a nemesis to him, and nothing had happened. No bonding talk, no shop talk, no argument, no discussion of home-towns or family, and barely any talk on the situation that had created the offer for the beer, the dismissal of Warren Tult. No anything. Flustered and with a near full pint of beer in front of him, Emery lit another cigarette and quickly finished his glass while the non-talkative bartender read a magazine at the end of the bar. When the beer was no longer wasted, Emery exited and began walking back to the studio and his car.

  There was simply no knowing certain people. Strangest of all was that he could not decide whether he liked Jamison more or less after this bizarre encounter. He was leaning toward less, but it was somehow a more human, understanding, and even compassionate less.

  Chapter Seventeen

  INT. MOULIN ROUGE NIGHTCLUB – 1959 EMMY CEREMONY - NIGHT

  We see seats packed from stage to rear wall, hundreds in attendance. Bright lights and a smoky atmosphere.

  EMERY sits with his family several rows from the front, in a suit and with a pleased smile. We see BETH lean over and comment on something. There is much cheer in the air and the two daughters are sitting somewhat still.

  CUT TO:

  The AWARDS STAGE. GARRISON HELLER stands behind the announcement podium and begins to announce an award.

  HELLER:

  And this year’s winner for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama is…

  HELLER opens the unsealed envelope and reads. He gives a slight chuckle through the microphone.

  HELLER:

  Well, what do you know! Two in one night!

  The audience begins to cheer and clap, realizing now that someone has won two Emmy’s this evening.

  HELLER:

  I wouldn’t mind keeping this one for myself, but if you’d like it, well, come on up here and get it, will ya, Mr. Asher?

  The crowd cheers and many stand, as does Emery, smirk on his face, bearing the look of trying to restrain himself. Beth has tears in her eyes and the girls are puzzled, watching their father leave the row for the second time that night. We see Emery make the stage, ushered by a man in a suit near the stairs. He walks to the microphone and shakes Heller’s hand. Heller mutters something in his ear and Emery smiles. Heller exits stage left.

  EMERY:

  (calming, clearing throat)

  See friends, I’m in some trouble; I didn’t expect to be up here again tonight. For the first time in my career it seems that I don’t have any material.

  The audience gives a small laugh. EMERY thinks for a moment.

  EMERY:

  (smiling)

  Folks, I’ll say this. In the short time with which I have written for those wondrous boxes in each of your homes, I have been privileged to meet and work with some of the greatest television talents of our time. However, I have to keep myself to special thanks, this time, and I offer the following with more gratitude than I can express. First and before all others, my wife, Elizabeth. This is your second public thanking tonight, dear. I love you so much. You’re the first to read the script, and either to your own good or bad luck, the last to see the program.

  We hear chuckles from several audience members. Several quick shots then of people in the crowd. We see ALFRED HITCHCOCK speaking to a woman beside him. Several other members of the audience. We see HAL WHITCOMB nodding with pleasure. We then get a C.U. on BETH, frowning in amusement.

  EMERY (cont.):

  I’d like to thank last, but certainly not the least in my mind, every man, woman, and child who has turned on their television and enjoyed what they see there, regardless of whether I’m involved in that moment or not. Thank you for watching. Thank you for these
awards. My youngest daughter Vivian will be so pleased. She is nearing two-years old and very much likes to play with daddy’s fun little statues.

  Louder chuckles from audience.

  EMERY:

  And due to the speculative nature of The Other Side, the figure of a winged woman holding up an atom is quite nice, really. Maybe poetic.

  (beat)

  I just want to say that you’re all very dear to me and I owe you everything.

  FADE TO:

  The two Emmys. His third and fourth. That these awards were of august shine and a specialized glamour gave the audience much at which to marvel. Black suits, slicked hair, the glimmer of gold and the singularity of a podium in the center of a large, otherwise vacant stage. Curtains, wood, and between them, the exhibit. More eyes on a man than he could ever feel. Emery felt truly watched, more so than in reviews or by fans, more so even than on those few sets that contained the larger crowd scenes. It felt like college graduation somehow magnified and given money and more attention. This was being noticed. This was standing before the tribe and casting a bit of magic and explaining that yes, his spell was what had made the crops come up that year, and thank you so much for believing.

  As he finished his speech, he noticed a peculiar blur in his vision, over a portion of the audience near the rear of the club. He blinked a moment and his sight returned to proper function, but the people across whom the blur had occurred did not. Emery stared at this mass of blur and indistinct movement. Perhaps this was a tension headache, or the brightness of the lights playing with his vision.

  Emery gasped and stepped back, his eyes moving quickly over that portion of the audience as his vision came into focus. This was no hallucination of lighting. The people he viewed were not human. They were as if horrid, tall beetles, large as men, faces corrugated with black mandibles and antennae rising from their thick heads into the air. They were snapping their forelegs together, beside people, to no one’s notice. Clapping. As his eyes wavered over the crowd, from one side of the large club to the other, Emery discovered that many of the seats were filled with these terrible insect interlopers. They were humanoid in posture, jaws outstretched and chests emblazoned with hard, black shine. He faltered and closed his mouth, standing before the packed house.

  They were everywhere, had infested the crowd. There were rows of them, all horrible, mutated, sinister looking creatures. Insect men sat amidst the Los Angeles television elite, hats between their long, metameric antennae, insect females with handbags settled on their abdominal segments. Emery swallowed, seeing all the legs sticking out in odd directions, all the buzzing, hissing noise of their ovation. This infestation existed beside real people who were oblivious to the true form of their neighbors in the seats. There was a haze of cigar and cigarette smoke above the audience, and in this fog of exhales, he thought he could see smaller things swarming about, into and out of the smoke. He saw moths and wasps, flies and hornets. The crowd slowly stopped clapping. He simply stood behind the awards podium.

  Emery could not move. His feet would not respond. He choked for a moment and dropped his cigarette to the floor, could not back away from the podium. There was a sheet of paper atop it, he noticed. Had it been there before? No, he was being made to notice, for his thoughts were beginning to dull and his posture began to relax against his desire to run. He could hear an engine-like hum building at the base of his skull. It was as if a small motor had been activated in his mind; it was a druzzing, fly-like scatter of noise in his thoughts. Emery looked down at the sheet of paper while the insects and humans in the audience quieted.

  There was a paragraph on the page with the heading above it:

  Emery Asher, to Announce

  He glanced out and saw his wife, his wondrous Elizabeth, sitting beside their two daughters. She looked bemused at first, curious. The audience watched and waited. Beth then seemed confused that he was still standing at the podium after having obviously ended his speech. She began gauging him with care. What was happening? Behind his wife was the towering monstrosity of a larger creature, an insect being of much height and pedigree. The shoulders of this being were emblazoned in red from maturity, and its mantis-like head peered quizzically above Beth’s skull, watching Emery. Its thorax bore a sporadic pattern of fibrous hairs. Larry Belmont, sitting two seats to Beth’s right, stared up at Emery with a degree of pride as his own wife, a horrific, midge-like monster, sat beside him. Larry’s young son held Vivian’s hand. Emery’s fair daughter, so innocent and unconcerned, had her hand in the claw of a small, louse-like dipteron, a demon arthropod drizzling saliva from its elongated mouth and druzzing its small wings against the nightclub chair. Larry didn’t know… he couldn’t see what was happening, that his family had been infiltrated.

  “I- I don’t...” Emery tried to speak.

  Bernie Dozier’s lateral eyes glinted in the reflection of light from the ceiling, while his median eyes caught the light of the stage. Dozier monitored Emery closely, still in his seat with a silent, unmoving head. Beside him sat poor Jamison, oblivious, looking for once to be enjoying himself and unaware of the abominations that surrounded them all, the hideous monsters that masqueraded as human beings. How long? How long had they been infesting Hollywood? Was it just Los Angeles, or were they everywhere?

  Emery twitched a moment and his hand came up, placing itself atop the sheet of paper. The hand turned the sheet of paper over and his eyes fell to the text. His mouth opened.

  Read, He heard in his mind. It was a tinny and alien sound. This was not a voice, but a vibration of foreign tissues that had invaded the realm of human thought. His own. This became a chorus. Dozens of sounds telling him to read the paper, making him move his lips and don the falsest smile a human being could muster.

  In the front row, First Cavalry Lieutenant Merrill of the Confederacy stood from his seat, concerned. He settled his old hand on his pistol and began looking about in suspicion.

  CUT TO:

  The AWARDS STAGE. EMERY is behind the podium, addressing the audience with worry in his voice.

  EMERY:

  (reading)

  Also... everyone... uh, you should... you should try Richardson’s Auto Wax... a... a wax so pure it... it contains the essence of shine, itself. I-I can’t stress enough the value...

  The audience stares. MERRILL appears to see the insects for what they are. Shocked, he stands fast and draws both his pistol and saber.

  MERRILL:

  (alarmed and addressing crowd)

  HOLD! Who are you? What manner of abomination has trespassed on the sanctity of this hall?

  We see MERRILL falter a moment as the insects stand and move quickly toward him. Some scurry down the aisles, some crawl over the seats. Several smaller creatures, insect offspring, take flight into the air. MERRILL shouts in fear and raises his pistol.

  We see him fire, bringing one of the flying creatures down. He swings his saber into another, larger insect that is leaping over the seats for him. Knocked to the floor and firing his pistol, jabbing his saber at the unstoppable crowd of monstrous attackers as they swarm over him on the floor of the Emmy awards ceremony, MERRILL screams his last order at Emery on the stage.

  MERRILL:

  RUN BOY! GET OUT OF HERE!

  We see the insects grapple him, crawling atop him, a man disappearing in a massive swarm of shells and legs, wings, antennae, and iridescent segments of thorax.

  In moments, the crowd of monsters draws back, revealing that Merrill is gone, the body devoured, leaving behind but a large spilling of blood in which rest the saber and pistol, a few red-stained chevrons and patches, the gnawed-through, Confederate boots beside his broken riding strop, and the lay of broken, exposed bones. At the edge of this gory pool, we can make out the scattered clumps of his torn-out beard beside the blood-soaked Medal of Honor.

  CUT TO:

  Cayuga. Sanctity. Taughannock with the family. Emery closed his eyes, hands on the podium, and visited many summers. The clean l
ake surface carried the harks of geese across. The playful splashes of his brother, in childhood, were a short read from the sunning eyes of a lakeside Beth. Taughannock and the busted read of trails that read one through the small attractions. Nature had conspired for everyone who read, to the delight of vacationing ruminations. The smell of car exhaust mingled with the read of the walnut trees, the grassy itch against his ankles as he lounged beside the summer cabin. His father was reading over the fire, and the smell of a dozen meals from a dozen camps could be read. Emery read out over the lake and read a woman giving a read of surprise as she surfaced from the surprisingly cold water beside a boat in the read. The wonderful sensation of Cayuga lake was home, the lake’s limbs around boys in a hug of days they would read for many a read after, with a nostalgia that read… for… when one read more of it. When one read the Cayuga brochure. The advertisement. Everyone should have read the advertisement. Reading was all-powerful.

  “Our automobile wax is specifically formulated in the Richardson labs,” he read, “to keep... to keep your paint-job…”