Sirens.
Fresh wounds; incoming. Maybe a gang shooting. A baby abandoned, hungry for food, touch. A light plane crash. He saw flesh, frightened eyes. Heard moans of anguish.
He wanted to open eyes, see the place they’d brought him to. He remembered the awards, the big round tables, the room filled with desperate smiles. Jordan eating. The music and the television cameras … the sequin prattle on stage … then, nothing.
Just sirens and whispers. Eyelids that pressed the back of his head hard against the pillow. Eyelids that locked him into a dark theater, in his skull. A place without EXITs, made of mildewed cinderblock, filled with a rotting stench. The torn screen showed movies with appalling close-ups. Ravaged victims. Black-and-white traffic-school footage of hideous things on roads. Then, it would quickly change to color. Dwell on deformity and helplessness, in perfect chroma-keys.
He tried to get out of the theater, running up the aisle into a bricked doorway. The projectionist’s windows, gunned out bright light and Alan looked up, screaming for help. A face came to one of the yellow squares and stared down at him and grinned, shoulders shaking with sick laughter. Alan couldn’t see the face, then as it turned slightly to see him better, the light hit it and he realized it was his own, staring down at him, hatefully. It gradually turned up the tortured soundtrack, as Alan begged for a way out.
The screen filled with bloated corpses, crippled bodies. Children with missing arms and legs, shrieking for their mothers in languages that didn’t exist. Barek moving through dense jungle, turning toward the camera and staring at Alan. Smiling, releasing a mouth of blood which drenched his shirt and chin.
The projectionist turned up the volume until Alan felt he was crouching, hands over ears, screaming. The projectionist watched him, an exact duplicate of himself and the grin fell. Now there was loathing and anger. The theater shook from the deafening soundtrack of pain and Alan began to claw at the cinderblock, trying to get out. The vibration was grabbing the walls and they began to wobble. Alan looked up, seeing the ceiling and walls collapsing in on him.
Then, silence. Blackness. Nothing.
realization
Alan …?”
Alan’s eyes were closed. Drugs.
“Were you sleeping?” The man wore blue jeans, deer moccasins. His white hair was long, uncombed. He was almost seventy, resembled an ancient Paul McCartney. The Sergeant Pepper mustache drooped neatly, and he looked ready to pound Blue Meanies.
Alan’s eyes lifted. The man came around the wheelchair. Kneeled. Took Alan’s shaking hand. The warm skin felt like a desert. The smile full of vitamins; minerals.
“… I’m Seth Lawrence. Your secretary Lauren called … told me you needed to talk. I called you one night. Do you remember?”
Alan let the sun creep up his legs, into his robe. His head felt heavy. “The book. You wrote it.…” He was whispering. “A woman told me we’d meet.” Alan tried to remember her name. “… a psychic.”
Seth slowly pushed the wheelchair around the UCLA Hospital grounds, said Mimi had died last year. A car accident. Alan told him so many had died.
“… murdered.”
Seth asked it casually. “Who’s killing them?” A test.
“Something that wants to get me. What I care about. Because of … the show.” His voice trailed. “… it made something happen.”
Seth stopped the wheelchair near a kinetic sculpture and the two watched water crawl on steel. Alan tried to remember; see Corea, in his mind. He remembered a bar full of smoke. Someone screaming. A monster’s smile.
“The man I hired to play the character … he’s changed … it isn’t him.”
“… who is it?”
Alan had no answer. He could see him now; the man in the bar. Dense body, hideous grin. “Lines. Didn’t have lines on his … palms.”
Seth nodded, saying nothing; interpreting. Minutes passed. Alan stared into space, wordlessly. Seth stretched, smiled brightly.
“Wanna hear a story?”
Alan sipped on the water bottle in his lap. “What kind of story?”
“Adventure.” He stretched more, organized thoughts. Talked fast. “Okay … went like this, last summer I’m in Recife, Brazil, with some friends, doing research on a new book I was writing, about psychic surgery … you know, when they cut you open with their hands, no tools or anesthesia.” Alan knew. “Right, well, on the way to the surgeon’s apartment, we all wanted to see something different, so the taxi driver took us to this place, in the ghetto. Kind of an outside dancing area for the poor. Military goons, in machine-gun nests, watching. Making sure no one went crazy. Fingering their guns … just hoping, you know?” He closed one eye, aiming, mimicked pulling a trigger. “POW!”
Alan reacted to the loud sound and Seth cracked up, apologized. “Anyway, we had some time to kill, so we paid a couple bucks to get in … ended up dancing with the peasants. This big rainstorm came … all of us got soaked to the bone. I can still hear the rain on the mud, bare feet dancing.”
He waited for Alan to visualize it. Alan’s eyes began to close. Seth watched him carefully.
“We played primitive instruments, pounded empty cans with sticks. Real ‘Emerald Forest.’ Drank local poison called cashasta. Hundred proof. Talking mule piss.”
He winked, shut his own eyes, recalling detail. The closed eyes trembled. He could hear the beat; the numbing chorus of brown-skinned voices. His voice fell.
“Coupla peasants flipped … you know, from the cashasta, the beat. Started screaming.” His face froze. “This one peasant … he freaked … tried to rape this woman. We heard CLACKING. Machine guns. Looked up, saw the guards laughing, guns bouncing against their shoulders. He was shot at least twenty times. Big mess … he’s on top of her, she’s screaming, soaked with his blood. Major scene. The body gets taken away, dragged through the mud.” Seth opened eyes, rolled a cigarette. “Everyone kept dancing.”
“I don’t like this story.”
“Wait till you hear the good part. So, everyone kept dancing, right? Totally oblivious. Finally, it’s appointment time and I go a few blocks away to the surgeon’s apartment. He sits me on a chair, removes a benign tumor with his hands; no anesthesia. No pain. The perfect can-opener.”
Smoke in, out. Seth pointed with his cigarette.
“… hour later, I went back to the dance and there’s this flash of lightning, right? Suddenly, I see the guy who got shot, dancing in the rain, grinning ear to ear, eyes dead. Clothes bloody. Bullet holes all over his face. You could see brain tissue, bone. Horrible.” Seth sat on fountain edge. “But there he was. Try explaining that one, Jack.”
Alan shrugged.
“Who knows what he was, at that point. I mean, he was dead. But he was alive.” A point. “Go enough places, you see things that seem crazy.”
“What happened to your tumor?” Flat; unimpressed.
“Still had it when I got back to L.A. Guess I got ripped-off.”
Alan folded hands. Saw how loose his skin fit over bones. Remembered, again, he was dying. “Look, this doesn’t really help me.”
“Things that seem insane are possible, Alan.” He dipped a hand in water. “Your secretary told me what’s been happening. The things you told her. This lunatic you’ve seen. Know what I think? I think you’re right.” A look from Alan. “Maybe this thing you say you spoke with at the bar isn’t the actor. No lines on his hands. Pretty weird.”
“… then, who is it?” Alan could only think it so far.
“You’re a writer, think like a writer. If you wanted to tell a story about a man who encounters what he thinks is a monster … who would the monster be? The perfect one? Get thematic.”
Alan was in a story conference now. Riffing; sawing, pounding invisible nails for imaginary supports. He stared off, tried to get into the motives of the characters. No longer his problem, now just an interesting fiction. An algebraic stimulation.
“Simple. A monster the man needs.”
“For what?”
Alan thought. Weighed options.
“Choose something.” Seth kept pushing.
“Maybe he’s angry.”
“Generic. Everybody’s angry.”
Alan paused. “Maybe the man doesn’t know how to let it out.”
“Cliché. Who does?”
A glare. “The guy I met in the bar does.”
They looked at each other.
“We done with this game?” Alan was impatient.
“It’s not a game. So, why are you in the middle of this whole thing? What’s your role in this ‘story’?”
Alan gestured; a random thought. “Who the fuck knows. Maybe this thing has become like my hit man, killing all the fucking creeps in Hollywood I can’t stand?” It was a classy guess at best; he wasn’t trying to hide it.
Seth listened, thought. Shrugged. Kept himself out of it. Alan shook his head, displeased. Contemptuous.
“It’s simplistic. Derivative. Nobody would watch. People would change the channel.” Then, he thought about how many there were. The ones who’d wounded him.
The Creeps.
The hurt they’d brought. How he stored quarts of it in canisters of gloom and unforgiving resentment like radioactive material. All that pain. All those lies. All the cruelty. The fucking Creeps were everywhere.
“You’re right,” said Seth, “it is too simplistic.” He killed his cigarette under a boot; a glowing victim. “I think you’re nuts.”
“No, you don’t …”
Seth smiled. “You know what I think is interesting? This ‘monster’ looks almost exactly like the star of a show you created.” Seth said nothing more. Waited for Alan to respond. Alan came up with nothing, lost; mind exhausted. Then, something.
“You saying the character and that thing are the same thing?”
“Getting warm.”
“You know and aren’t telling me?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m sick of riddles. Why did you come?”
“You asked.”
“Look, you can’t leave me in the dark, like this. I’m sick and I’m scared. People are dying. I feel like I’m dying. If you know something, you have to tell me.”
“I’m telling you everything that can be said right now. If there was anything else, we’d both know it. But if you want a suggestion … suppose you wrote the character differently? Make him nicer?”
Alan got angry, couldn’t believe they were exchanging fucking lunacy about zombies, and evil Creatures, and changing the primal order of a fucking television character who was a slightly elevated scribble.
He sighed; a trapped noise. “Look, what the fuck are we talking about?”
“You’re the one who’s talking. I’m just smoking a cigarette.”
“Who the hell are you, anyway? Why should I listen to you.”
“So far, you’re not. I used to be a psychoanalyst. Wanted to know more about the mind … traveled the world, trying to inventory all the natural hallucinogens that grow wild. See how they might cure mental illness. Lived with primitive people. Saw magic.” He weather-vaned a finger. “From there, got to here.”
Alan backed off, cooled down.
“I want to know if there really is something inside me. You know how to do hypnosis or …”
“Too complicated. Annoy both of us. Better idea … we give you a pen, you close your eyes, start writing. Whatever comes out helps us to see inside you. Shrinks use it to help patients contact the inner child. We use your opposite dominant hand. Tends to bypass the conscious mind. Have to. Thoughts have incredible power. Never forget that It’s the key to everything.”
The two moved to a bench and sat. Seth pulled out a pad. Alan held pen above paper for ten minutes but nothing happened. He began to perspire slightly and there was a fractional slippage of ink on paper.
All at once, his hand began to move, skating angrily, as if gouging something into tree bark; gripping the pen, like the hilt of a knife. He pressed it so hard, against the paper, it broke, exposing words he’d written; ragged, angular scrawl. They stared up from the paper; gloating bullies:
You Die
moral support
Alan and his father walked on the beach, near the house, and as Alan talked more about quitting “The Mercenary,” Burt was stunned by how sick Alan looked. How scared he was. It was the first Burt had seen of him close-up in almost a year, and he was shocked by Alan’s appearance; the wasted flesh. He’d seen him on the “People’s Choice” nightmare, but makeup had partially hidden the ruin.
“Is your marrow supposed to hurt, Pop? I think I need to make a marrow escape …” He tried to sound like he wasn’t terrified. Tried not to shatter into a million pieces.
Though Burt asked about his health and obvious weight loss, Alan didn’t tell him everything; it was too complicated and he wasn’t sure what to say. About the collapse at the Awards. The UCLA stopover; encroaching madness. What he and Seth had talked about. He was afraid of making it worse. He knew his father could see the avoidance.
Burt told him he could always tell him the truth. It was the only way to flee internal tortures. Alan felt him struggling to open a subject and Burt confessed he and Wanda had been having troubles. There had been recent arguing. Sexual tensions. They’d been to see a therapist and the truth had emerged about her rape.
“… rape?” Alan’s face died.
Burt said she’d barely been able to talk about it, but the therapist encouraged trying and she finally told them both in agonized fragments.
She’d been attacked on a beach in Florida, during high school; six guys took her to places, on that wet, night sand, she’d never returned from. Places Burt said he could still see in her little-girl face. If he looked for a second longer than normal, a private slide show crept out: men with pants at ankles, rocking, laughing. Slapping her. Stretching her on the sand; a bruised X. Beer bottles thrown against cement pier pilings. Lifeguard truck beams, roving sand, just missing the spot where the savage party writhed.
Burt looked off, said it had been when the original seizure struck. The men had been revolted and kicked at her naked, torn flesh, shouting at her to stop. Screamed at her, spit on her. Walked away, leaving her to die, in sperm and blood.
Burt said every detail was there in her eyes. Then, a second later, it wasn’t. She’d gotten so good at living with it, she could nail terrible doors shut; make it go away.
“… things don’t go away,” said Alan, feeling awful for her. It was like discovering the ghastly ways circus animals are trained to seem happy. He felt condemned.
WE ALL HAVE TERRIBLE SECRETS. NO ONE CAN KNOW US. WE ARE ALONE.
It was a T-shirt that gained popularity back in college. Over time, Alan’s had faded, became a rag. He used it to polish cowboy boots, but the thought, the full-frontal despair never went away. He remembered the shirt, realized he’d treated Wanda like a one-celled smile. He knew he had to sit and talk with her. Sit and tell her all the pain he understood now; the anguish.
As they strolled sand, Burt said he understood Alan wanted out of the show and suggested the two work together on a film in France, he’d just been offered. He didn’t say how awful he thought Alan actually looked; didn’t want to alarm him.
“A comedy, thank God …” he added, as foam soaped their feet.
He said Alan could produce, and he would direct. It was also in bad need of a rewrite and Alan was the perfect guy. Burt’s famous directing would “roar again,” and give Oliver Stone “the hot-angst popper,” and all those “fucking two-hundred-million-dollar brats” a run for their massive bank accounts.
Alan skipped a rock. Coughed and felt dizzy. Burt steadied him and the two sat on the warm sand, watching a group of porky scuba guys bobbing in a boat. Then, Alan grew quiet and said yes, he would do it. He admitted, he needed the picture in France.
Burt smiled, putting his arm around him. Told him he needed to change perspective; stop thinking about “
The Mercenary.” “Hell,” said Burt, doing his best to cheer Alan up, “maybe we’ll even win an Oscar. If not, food’s better in France. We can get fat. You could use a little meat on you.”
Alan knew his father could see how sick he was and leaned on him a little. Burt gave him a hug and felt Alan’s thinness. How cold his skin was. How he seemed to be shaking though it wasn’t cold out.
They watched the sun flatten on blue and for the first time, since Alan was a kid, Burt told him he loved him. It felt wonderful.
And to Alan it felt like what you tell a dying man.
ten percent four
Jordan. A personal visit? I’m stunned.”
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” He was raising his voice.
Alan leaned back in his desk chair. Jordan moved to desk’s edge.
“I’ve been on the phone all the way over with Jack Feiffer. The man is insane.”
“You just heard?”
“Who gave you the right to start changing ‘The Mercenary’?”
“I created it. Remember? It came out of my head.”
“The network owns it now. And the agency packaged it. That means we get a fee. Shall I explain that?” Jordan stared, a sheet of ice. “Why are you fucking with a good thing?”
“For me, it’s a bad thing.”
“… for you it’s a bad thing. It looks like it. You look like shit. Thought they were going to do something for you in the hospital. Alan, Feiffer told me the new script has Barek helping a destroyed enemy village rebuild itself. That he’s got a scene where he plays with enemy children!”
“… they’re just children, Jordan.” Alan looked up, pleasantly.
“… another where he goes for a walk with a gorgeous young villager and there’s no sex. No nudity.”
“They hold hands.”
“No. Wrong. They don’t ‘hold hands.’ ”
“What do they do?”
“They roll in the grass and he tears her clothes off and they fuck and she loves it and she screams and claws his back on camera and we see her nipples get hard and everybody is happy. Feiffer, the affiliates, fucking world audience, the studio, me … everybody!”
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