Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  “Go on, make him right,” Beth said. Henry Asher sighed in his blood-stained surgical gown and then slowly set the excogitation node back into Emery’s body. The apprentice began unscrewing the lid to the jar that contained Emery’s pale heart.

  “Em, honey,” Beth said, reaching down and shaking his arm. He glanced upon his wife as his father, Henry, glanced upon Susa. The things love did. The utter depths to which the mind could creep in order to surprise a man, the lengths to which a heart would go in making a man do anything to protect and take joy in those who loved him, those for which he would do nearly anything. Henry was a butcher long past, one that had been regarded in his town with much relevancy. He had been a good father and a strong husband turned away, in time, by his children, and then coldly taken in his sleep. Emery was a writer being crushed that wanted only to be known in his town, to be a good father and a strong husband, but he had turned away from his family. Perhaps he deserved to be taken in his sleep. The harder he labored and the more sweat he poured, the harder he failed and the more distant he was from all good things.

  “Your brother,” Beth said, “he wants to talk to you.”

  Yes, his brother, up above and watching the dissection with the students. Perhaps he would come down soon and spend time with their father. Emery opened his eyes then and swallowed, running his hand over his chest in bed. Beth knelt beside him.

  “Nuh. Good morning,” he said, groggy. The little terrors were worsening of late, and the cancellation of his show was beginning to play into the nature of them. Emery looked up at the students of the surgery suite and saw only the light fixture. At least this one hadn’t taken place in the gulley, hadn’t kept him near the man at the end of the bayonet, though that man had been present.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. William called?”

  “Yes, from Miami. He’s on the phone.”

  Emery nodded and sat up, but this was automatic. Several seconds were a start to looking about, to being in a room with windows and bedding. Beth waited as the realization of a call from Miami so early in the morning reached into him. His eyes lifted to full function and he crawled from the bed in his underwear. Legs stiff, he hobbled over his shoes on the floor, nearly falling to the side before making it to the bedroom telephone. He blinked hard and lifted the receiver to his ear, slowly rubbing the grit from his eyes.

  “William? You there?” he asked. Beth stood in the room and watched her husband.

  “Yeah. No, it’s grainy but I can hear you,” Emery responded, “Listen, I’ve got unexpected time off, uh, a lot of it, so I’m flying out again tonight. I’ll be there early tomorrow morning.” This was a slight attempt at hope on Emery’s part.

  There was a moment’s pause before he slowly turned his head and looked at his wife. He said nothing. She tried not to look at him with inquisitiveness, to be less present in the room, but could not. She suspected. There had been a tone in William’s voice when she first picked up. She had understood that tone. Beth remained in the bedroom as the span of seconds, seeming to be buried in decades, washed over the morning, and she waited for her husband to hear what she knew was being said.

  Emery’s head dropped and he placed a hand over his eyes. She moved and, standing behind, put her arms around her husband. The entirety of the world passed by beyond the house, in the workings of sky and ground and Hollywood, through windows, television screens, in the eyes of those who learned of terrible things on continents adrift. He began silently to sob. She held her husband and said nothing while time ate up the past and breathed, while the world was disembowelled and perished at the hands of the present, always expiring, always introducing, taking fathers and mothers and making more, every moment the spark of a transformation against all the backdrops, act after act. People became echoes. The world was wondrous and ruled in moments. The world was also cruel and governed by chance.

  The air tangled to a hush and the daughters in the living room played.

  Chapter Twenty

  With warfare in the oceanic wilds of the Pacific, and maneuvers beyond the scope of his training, Emery had dropped from Skytrains with the frequency of a squirrel leaping boughs in a tree. With intimate matters, especially those involving the deaths of certain friends and family, Emery had always moved quickly, dislodging from his grief and rushing toward anything else. The passing of his father had come to him in the form of a letter, short and haggard, from his mother. It had been a heart-attack in the night, and the funeral for the father had occurred weeks before this letter ever reached either of the man’s sons. With William in Italy and Emery in Leyte, and with their mother in Ohio and their father now gone, though weeks back, there was little anyone could say or do. The funeral had been short, on a Wednesday afternoon, and neither boy had known about it. Consolation did not exist much for Emery. With his mind pinned against the fulcrum of maneuvers, his heart shoved down in his gut and constrained by the necessity of cleared thought and focus amid the howling of the world and its killers, he had been robbed of his ability to mourn. This was a sensation taken out of him and placed in a box, to be opened in the future, but a box soon forgotten in the onslaught of offensive efforts. What could he do? The death and burial of his father had occurred long before he was told.

  He had repeatedly fulfilled orders and there had been many easily-lost lives to accompany. This was charged as defending the innocent, bracing one’s fellow soldiers, promoting that well-regarded freedom from which his country had imbibed so much. The orders were at times reprieving, but not often; they were scripts from Command, outlines from a distance, and they would always find their way to him. Maneuvers seemed hungry or else without care, sending him further into that stream of escalating danger. Emery had often been charged into places where there may have been enemies, then beyond, into places where there would certainly be enemies, and then further still, into the depths of foreign islands where the very folds of the land were known to be crawling with the enemy.

  Each order sent him into a greater heat of combat, a bloodier, more exclamatory mode of surviving, and worse, each order brought him in contact with enemies that were growing more accustomed to the American system of military reaction. The Japanese had begun to know the approaches and where to lay wait. The worst was that Emery might have been killed without even knowing it, as had happened to Private Dodder, who blinked into non-existence in a moment when all had seemed well.

  The work of appeasing one’s mortality, of living and thus following the next of Chance’s orders, depended on muddy, internal variables. For Emery, the most important of these had been the ability to clear his head. In the slow hours, he would scrape the clay from his thoughts by focusing on the logic of troop movement and every plan at which he could grasp, giving him the clarity to maneuver and act during the quicker hours. He kept other things from his mind, for fear he might go for a walk and get lost again, dreading that his demotion into the demolitions squad would become permanent. He needed to keep his head nearby and not let his ruminations overtake him. He had to foster stringency in himself, and not allow those moments of idle thought to compel him a fantasy or three. His mind could romanticize or go cloudy, and it could do this with much speed if not monitored. He was already in trouble; he needed to keep strict with his thoughts.

  Emery had been denied the means of grieving for his father. He had received a letter only, and it had registered as something he would handle when he was not guarding his life. The loss of his father would be something to experience honestly and terribly, but later. When he returned home, however, back in his country and with the war having been pushed close to an end, he was not himself. His pulverized knee had begun the long process of a more permanent recovery, and there was worry about his future, and difficulty with the previous year, and in the force of these dilemmas, the natural death of Henry Asher had seemed already to be a distant memory. The loss almost seemed to belong where Emery had first learned of it, back in the Pacific with al
l the other sad departures. Not a full year had passed, but the death of Emery’s father had occurred in a previous era.

  The nature of Emery’s culpable memory however, and the horrific medley of repugnancies the world had offered him, would not give him relief. The morbid things built themselves and grew limbs, infiltrated his sense of how people interacted, and struck him in the odd hours of the night, distantly in the future, whether sleeping beside Beth in bed, or sitting upright with his hands across a typewriter. The greater sadness was that these memories were hungry. They begged to be rummaged through and twisted, viewed through the day’s prism and filtered for whatever color and substance might be gained. They returned often and new thoughts were built from them. Emery did not grieve; the troublesome thoughts and memories did not find a decent place in him. They ripened with time, discharged pus, were let loose to culminate and bleed into the other parts of his mind. Some reached deeper than others.

  In being so potent and concentrated, the memories of warfare had trampled his memory of Henry Asher. That death was inadvertently placed into a storage bin of awful events, one that had been labeled: Deaths, Wartime. There were so many. A man you shot at a distance was set down beside your father in this place. All were dead. Gone. The same. Their meanings and memories suppressed one another due to proximity in having happened in the atrocious days. In not addressing these figments early, they could now overwhelm him, and with ease.

  Susa’s death had brought on a charmless, bitter Emery. Beth found herself walking with care when he was near, which was constant, owing to the cancellation of the show. The eager moments, when the fog of his mood separated enough to glimpse the man she loved, occurred only when the telephone rang. Emery would rush to the call and talk fervently with whatever sort of person had sought him out. This urge to work and have the next thing underway was crumbled quickly, as if a manifestation of his posture, when the call would turn out to be someone wishing to give condolences on the loss of his mother, and not an offer for the work he sought. His mother was gone, but he could not let her vanish so easily, and so she was placed with her husband in the bin. Perhaps he would dote on her in the quiet of the subconscious.

  The weight of a certain world had rested on his shoulders, and he had performed as an Atlas well enough, but now that this weight had been removed, he had begun searching for more of it with desperation. He was as if a despondent, motherly cat whining through the house at odd hours, searching for the litter of babies taken away from her and sold too soon. The demise of his mother had twisted this search into a sort of self-oppression. His dour mood and increase in drink were self-energized punishments for having failed family, his work, and himself. In an overly-creative mind, the world was a monster where reward, escape, and punishment were often one, eating and breathing as a single, demanding entity.

  The funeral was quiet and more than sobering. There was talk of blood pressure, the mention of a ‘better place’, and stories of the past. This was a wall he stood before, staring, as if down into the casket, itself. In the rare moments when Susa and Beth had been granted the chance to be alone together, to talk and exchange musings in the past, Beth had discovered something of unusual interest: William was nothing like Susa, but Emery was every bit his mother’s boy. The sensitivity in humor, which was slight but always keen, and her physical habits… brushing her thighs quickly as if to remove any dust before crossing a street… these were available in Emery, and made much of his personality.

  The trouble was that Emery did not know how to settle with the deceased. Beth tried to reach him in these matters, but Emery was not present where those talks could be born. The funeral came and went, and for it, Emery came and went. He consoled others, but not himself. He attended the service and wake, spoke much with his brother, but not once mentioned his mother or father. The sole subject of this funerary process was the only subject for which he had no opinion to give.

  Both of his parents were now gone, yet he tried to hold so little emotion. He seemed almost to dismiss the funeral as being unimportant. This was a mood both his brother and his wife noticed, each exchanging looks with the other. When it was over, Emery began swerving frantically in other directions. He inundated himself in projects, working over his second motion picture for Pacific and nagging himself over his typewriter while trying (and failing) to transpose the elements of Coronach into a live theater format. Beth knew what this turn in mood meant: Her husband was overwhelmed so far in it might never come out, and he was a man who could disguise things within other things without even knowing it. He was a perfectionist in many ways, but kept certain things unresolved in that same, perfection-making way, to keep them alive, perhaps, shut-up somewhere and hived away. During the funeral, Emery had almost seemed to judge others as weak for shedding tears over his mother. He had that look on his face, the smug, holier look. There were times when Beth had a very difficult time loving him.

  There had been several job offers over the past month, these wanting him to monologue over moments of shows, mostly as a gag, which he found silly and vain. One persistent group however, called him numerous times in a single week and wanted him to advertise soap. They had asked him for a full year’s endorsement campaign spread over six commercials, along with the right to use his image in print-ads: When you want clean, only Lennox knows the formula for scrubs with suds. He had told them he needed time to think over their offer. This was a lie: He would do it if he couldn’t find real work soon.

  Emery began disrupting things at home, complaining about dinner or what was on television, disliking the light bulbs, and interrupting various conversations to express his dislike of the conversation at hand. He seemed also to have become a depleting sort of father; he both cherished and seemed insulted by his daughters, loving them but seeming oppressed when they wanted his attention. This came out in strange tantrums of quiet, during which he drank much. She would come to realize that Emery’s troubles had done more than trample him; they had left him beleaguered by regret and self-loathing. She would see in his future stories a timid man disguised as a bold one, trying hard to release what he could of his mother, to free his memories and view of her from the stony bulwarks of his guilt.

  This had a beginning in loss, and if Beth knew her husband on page, in the new and short scripts he had been writing, she would have found a different man than the disruptor who drank in his chair before the television. She would encounter this other man off page, in time, but for that month following the funeral, Beth had known an Emery that disturbed her, a flinty man that seemed to be dragging his motives and thoughts far behind him. Beth’s husband was still a boy, really, one that wrote out his worries and fears and adorations in a late-night diary full of codes, parables, and the hidden directives of his chosen fantasy. His more hidden thoughts and emotions made their way into scripts with regularity, if one knew where to look. His psychosis was an utter fear of losing the good in his life, while paradoxically keeping these things at a distance. Perhaps he needed a doctor with which he had not exchanged vows.

  Over the following month, Mrs. Asher kept her hands busy with the girls, and Vivian’s 2nd birthday had proven to be a wondrous relief. The writer had left his busy typewriter and dull eyes for an entire day, and for once in a long while, he had been himself again. Vivian’s utterance of a profanity at the end of the day had even culled a laugh from him. A genuine laugh. The Belmonts came by and Larry’s presence seemed to relax Emery. When Larry and Helen went home for the night, Emery’s cheer was strong and he spent some time in a nice conversation with his wife. The two of them felt warm, and it was good to talk together, as so little of this had lately occurred. This closeness would prove short lived, however; at three in the morning, she woke to discover him missing again. The clatter of keys in the kitchen, where he had returned to work, was an attempt at capturing his earlier sparks, an attempt of finding work after the cancellation, and this kept her discomforted and brimming with a sigh that was always on its way to her mou
th, but never quite reached the teeth. His mood was low again by morning, and remained there.

  CUT TO:

  INT. A BALLROOM - NIGHT

  We see a broad room with a well-lit floor, but the ballroom is empty save for a Mark V 500lb. demolition air-drop bomb, standing on its struts (about 5 ft. tall) in the center of the room. It is simply present in military olive, its designations and information stenciled in black along the body.

  Strauss’ Lagoon Waltz begins. The waltz builds quite slowly in volume. We focus on the bomb in the ballroom’s center as the room goes dark and a spotlight fades on, highlighting the explosive. We pull toward the spotlit bomb until we’re in a medium shot. Beat. From the left, out of the dark and into the spotlight, steps HENRY ASHER wearing the sort of suit in which a man might be buried. His face bears the traces of funeral parlor makeup. He stops just before the bomb, in the spotlight. We see him check his watch and then remain stationary, waiting.

  Slowly, we see SUSA ASHER, also in her funeral clothes and burial makeup, step in from the right. HENRY extends his hand over the bomb, and SUSA takes it. They move toward us then, about two feet, and come around the front of the bomb, arranging themselves for the dance. They begin to waltz to the music.

  We get a POV from HENRY, watching his wife as she dances with him. We cut to the same shot from SUSA’s point of view. The two dance slowly to the music. Stepping into the spotlight at the rear, behind the bomb, is SOLDIER ASHER, Emery wearing his demolitions uniform and gear. He stands there, looking back and forth between his parents. The music stops. HENRY and SUSA continue dancing the waltz, seeming pleased with one another.

  We have a close shot where we can see the upper halves of all three in the spotlight, then the two dancers leave frame to the left and right, leaving only DEMOLITION EMERY as we slowly tilt upwards. EMERY’s head finally descends out of frame. We continue tilting upward until we can see the spotlight-maker itself, a glow of bright light that we begin moving toward. We draw close and the spotlight comes into focus. It is a television in the ceiling. We have a slow zoom to the program being aired on it. The Other Side is on, with HOST ASHER giving a monologue we can not accurately hear. When we get to ECU, the television abruptly cuts to static and stays that way. We hear the obnoxious sound of television static.