They lost all sense of time. Keep him working, Micah thought. Keep him busy and the work will bring him back to you. Familiarity will crowd out the exotic. Indeed, the work had already returned Izzy’s appetite to him. Micah had set up a military cot in the corner of the room, and the brothers took turns sacking out for an hour or two at a time, but the noshing was nonstop. The editing-room floor—a checkerboard tile littered with congealed Chinese-take-out cartons, halved pickles, milk-shake spills, crushed coffee cups, rinds of toast, accordioned straw wrappers, balled napkins, and smashed cigarette butts—came to resemble an archaeological dig fossilizing their diet.
Izzy had turned a corner of the suite into a shrine. There was a map of Africa overlooking wooden figurines, reliquaries, small finger drums, beaded bracelets, and the blunted copper head of a wrestling spear. Every time the winds of exhaustion whistled near or visions of the sensual paradise he had left behind threatened to get supplanted by other thoughts, Izzy would sit before this pond and bathe awhile in its colors. On the windowsill adjacent to this memorial, he arranged a collection of hourglasses, a half dozen of them, each bigger than the last, lined up in a row like a series of Russian nesting dolls, the first one good for counting off fifteen seconds, the next thirty, then a minute, two minutes, five. Filled with timeless blasted particles of rock, these wizardly ornaments suggested both an accurate means of measurement and the quarry of things limitless. Izzy put the hourglasses to good, practical use clocking sequences and gauging film time to real time. But it was more for symbolic reasons that, remembering King Mishi’s final words to him, he wished to keep these reminders of the finite and the illimitable near at hand.
“Izzy?”
“Yes.”
“We haven’t been outside in three days.”
Izzy interrogates an empty oyster pail of egg foo young. “Has it been three?”
“Margaret’s getting worried, we’re running out of oxygen, and my balls are turning blue. How’re you holding up?”
“I’m okay,” Izzy lies, pressing a thumb upon a single frame he had excised from a discarded take, the oils from his fingerprint forming a perfect palimpsest over a close-up of Cri’s face, the color, pliancy, and texture of the prince’s skin the product of several centuries’ worth of African sunsets. “But the thought of never seeing them again is just impossible.”
“I know.”
“We made a promise, Micah.”
“And I mean to keep it. We’ll meet with Sidney to talk provisions as soon as he circles back east. In the meantime, let’s finish our work here and I’ll make the trip out west,” Micah says, crushing an empty box of Camels underfoot, contributing to the impasto below. “I gotta get some smokes. I’m going outside—wish me luck!”
Consulting his wristwatch in the elevator, Micah is surprised to find it just after 3:00 A.M., the inexhaustible city at this hour quiet as a moon. Not even newspaper stands would be open. Hitting the lobby, he sniffs himself as the doors open: tobacco, coffee, dried sweat, an overlay of aftershave, an alchemy of smells that occur when men coexist in cramped quarters for too long. He can feel his eyes sunk deep in their sockets from lack of sleep and knows he looks like hell. Without fuel from cigarettes or sauce, Micah worries that his synapses will quit making cognitive leaps. Thankfully, Donnie “Shago” Moody, the colored night doorman, is sitting reliably at his station enjoying a smoke.
The night watchman’s desk is situated down a hallway perpendicular to the elevator bank, so as Micah approaches, he can see the doorman in profile without being immediately spotted himself. Shago can, however, hear the clackety-clack of Micah’s heels across the marble floor and answers the sound by visibly flinching. He stubs out his cigarette, puts his doorman’s cap atop his broccoli sprig of hair, straightens up a few pertinent inches, and places both hands flat on the desk, the dingy uniform against the ramrod posture lending him the look of a comic figure out of Shakespeare. Turning and recognizing Mr. Grand shambling down the hall—rather than a surprise late-night visit from the building’s management company or some senile dowager needing help with her dog—Shago exhales, loosens a measure of physical tightness, and relieves himself of some height. After months away from home, Micah is grateful for the lesson: confirmation that in America every black leads a double life.
“What’s shaking, Shago?”
“And a fine evening to you, Mr. Grand.” Rescuing his cigarette butt, the doorman’s practiced tones of survival and supplication giving way to the man’s true voice, a rolling, tumbling thing. Across Shago’s cheeks are a collection of weird moles and growths, specks of cocoa drying on a kitchen counter, that light up when he inhales. “Cutting your latest picture?”
“Yeah, been holed up for a few days,” Micah says, airing out his jacket of hamburger grease and stale fart. Shago packs the carton tight and passes it to the filmmaker. “You’re a prince at midnight,” Micah says, shaking off the compression bends and recognizing with a shock his own weary expression warped and reflected in the lobby’s brass piping.
“Mr. Grand, let me ask you a question,” Shago begins, leaning in with a light. “Speaking hypothetical now, if a person was inquiring around about an individual—a bad dude from uptown, say—would that information be worth something to someone?”
“Depends who’s buying,” Micah says, peeling a dollar bill off a roll and laying it in Shago’s leathery palm.
“Flank’s a fine cut of steak,” says the doorman, “but no sirloin.”
The filmmaker adds two more singles to the pot.
“Papa likes them potatoes crispy.”
And a five.
“Pour some gravy on them biscuits, baby, you’ll get it all.”
“All right,” Micah says, laying another Lincoln across the man’s hand. “What’s the rumpus?”
“Coupla coon-ass black-ass jackaboo motherfuckers looking for you, Mr. Grand,” Shago says. The doorman proceeds to fill Micah in on recent goings-on uptown, relaying how during the few short months the filmmaker has been away, the twenty-two-year-old Bumpy has broken ties with Mr. Waldo and taken up with Stephanie St. Clair, the Martinique-born Frenchwoman known as Madam Queen or Queenie, who has become the dominant player in the numbers racket uptown. Shago explains how Queenie lured the wild child away from his brokenhearted mentor, Mr. Waldo, who has fallen deep into debt, dejection, and addiction. First St. Clair assumed all of Mr. Waldo’s business interests. Then, taking Bumpy under her wing like a mother hen, St. Clair transformed the young thug into a freshly minted prince of Harlem, unleashing his gang of enforcers across the midnight city and consolidating power uptown just like Dutch Schultz had done for the Jews, Lucky Luciano for the Italians.
“Mr. Waldo’s no longer running the show?” Micah asks.
“Byron Marcus Waldo’s fortunes are as flat as a tire.”
“I’m away for three months, no one notifies me about the change in management?”
“The young dude talking up how he’s in the motion-picture business now,” says Shago, explaining how Bumpy has been asking about the filmmaker since he got wind of Micah’s return. “Says he got points. Says he wants his piece of apple pie—with a slice of American cheese.”
“Huh.”
“Pardon my French, Mr. Grand,” the doorman marvels, “but you making a movie with these motherfuckers?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You a respectable person, Mr. Grand. What are you doing getting mixed up with these characters?”
“Let it drift,” Micah says, stubbing out his butt and scribbling on the back of a note. “Listen, here’s another five-spot. This is the direct line to the editing room: At the first sign of Bumpy or any other dudes with lapels like pelican wings, I want you to call that number, okay?”
“Can’t take that,” Shago protests.
“I just gave you ten bucks.”
“Thirteen, but who’s counting?” Shago says. “That’s Christmas dinner, thank you very much. I take that”—pointing to
the rejected bill—“I’m on the payroll. Therein lies the distinction. Mr. Waldo, he’s old-school—a person can cut deals, talk sense, wiggle-waggle. But this next generation coming up, Bumpy and the crowd he runs with, is wild, man. They will slice you up like banana over cornflakes soon as look at you twice. Brothers like that are like pigeons—lay down with them once, you mate for life. You understand? You see each other ten years from now, you still make it, it’s never over with that kind. Lemme offer you a piece of advice, and I’ll provide it free: It comes to fellas like this, there are exits, but there are no escapes.”
Four pieces of correspondence reach Micah care of the editing facility during the brothers’ hibernation. The first is a telegram from Marblestone, summoning Micah out west to screen the Africa footage ASAP. (WELCOME HOME BOYCHICK. WHERE ARE MY LIONS AND TIGERS?)
“Bellyache better,” begins the second post, a rare handwritten note from Henry Till, who is as terse a wordsmith in print as on camera. “Had Marblestone to the house,” continues the letter that Micah keeps hidden from Izzy. “Half the man he was. V. ill. Till.”
Third is a notecard that had been slipped without notice under the editing-room door days earlier. Printed on engraved stationery bearing the calligraphy initials “S. St. C.” and a return address at 131st Street, the message inside the card reads simply and cryptically, “Wednesday at noon.” It is only after his conversation with the doorman that Micah understands this to be a royal summons, an invitation from Stephanie St. Clair that he would be wise not to ignore.
“This is the beginning of the end,” Micah says of the final and most elaborate of the missives, a gilt-edged invitation from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Douglas Fairbanks explaining that Quicktime has been nominated in the category of Best Comedy Direction as part of a new industry awards ceremony to celebrate the best films of 1927 and 1928. Micah folds the gala-event subpoena into a paper airplane, which he sends sailing across the room. “Once we start pinning medals to our chests, forget it.”
“Maybe,” answers Izzy, who agrees to stay behind in New York to work on the rough assembly of Pot of Trouble, while Micah travels to Los Angeles to attend the awards dinner and review the stock footage with Marblestone. To Micah’s mind this is no bargain: forty years’ desert travel by donkey preferable to the forty-eight-hour futurist ordeal involving overnight trains and jumper planes—bad back, stiff joints, and constipation his almost certain rewards for making the trip west.
“You want to take a look at this?” Izzy asks, rewinding a split reel. They’ve been working all day on the slave-roundup sequence, and he readies a rough cut for his brother. Izzy stands huddled over him as Micah presses his face to the viewer, eager to gauge his brother’s physical reaction to the winnowed selection of shots, the braiding of light and dark, the rhythmic cutting and metronomic pace, the entire heightened, deterministic reassembly of experience.
Micah has been handling Africa footage all week, cataloging hundreds of takes in a spiral notebook, wielding the grease pencil, trimming fractions of seconds like a topiary gardener pruning pine needles; he is a professional who prides himself on call-and-response powers of detachment and engagement, but still, viewing the assembled sequence comes as a shock. Have such faces as these ever been seen before, in this way, in all their dignity and ranginess and human singularity? He is viewing their work—a reiteration of land, sky, water, and faces—and it is at once naturalistic, archetypal, and consummately strange.
Through the viewer pass before them friends and colleagues, a magic foreign land, a temple of radiance, a parade of history written in light. Through the little screen, horrors assemble themselves, wiping across the kingdom of enchantment like clouds building toward a storm, swells at sea, plague made visible. Though the brothers themselves have orchestrated what they are watching, though they have choreographed and been present for the staging of it, Micah is unprepared for so unsettling a realization, unprepared for his own reaction to the full flower of imagery written in bone and blood. The footage fulfills the requirement of all great work: It widens the availability of experience a lane, restoring to the world a degree of the uncanny while confirming that, yes, this is the way the world works. The recognizable is made shocking; the unfamiliar is made proverbial. When it is over, Micah steps down from the stool and puts an arm around Izzy’s back.
“Well?” his brother asks.
“It’s good work,” Micah says. Then, taking a breath, “Goddamn it, it’s important.”
THREE
“I have been spending more and more time in the Americas,” begins Sidney Bloat in his crypto-European accent. It has been three months since the brothers last saw him before departing from the Congo. Upon learning of the importer’s visit to New York just before Micah is due to leave for L.A., they had arranged to meet for dinner at the Mercantile—a smart, clubby, smoke-filled midtown restaurant within walking distance of the editing suite. Bloat was already seated at the table—nattily dressed in a blue velvet blazer and royal purple cravat, his dark hair and mustache longer and more cosmopolitan-looking than they’d remembered—when the brothers made their unkempt, unshaven, cavernous-eyed appearance.
“How’s America been treating you?” Micah asks, extending his hand while settling into his chair.
“America?” Bloat replies, his pointed nose performing figure eights around the rim of a brandy snifter. “America is like the prettiest girl in class. One smile from her and you’re hers. One smile from her and you’re ruined.”
“And New York? How’ve you been finding our fair city?”
“If other cities are nouns”—repeating the aphorism he’d coined since his arrival—“New York is a verb.”
Bloat is in town to promote the license and distribution of Pfefferminz, miniature toy dispensers of pelletlike peppermints that have become all the rage in Vienna. “The figurines are inspired by characters from folklore, myth, and legend,” Bloat explains, placing one of the harmonica-size novelty items in the center of the table. “Ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, prophets and oppressors from Testaments Old and New, Hans Christian Andersen’s diffident mermaid, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the rogues’ gallery from The Canterbury Tales, Quixote and his faithful Sancho Panza. I consider this my small contribution to world culture—a way to popularize the canon of great literature while simultaneously keeping clean the breath of befouled, grubby children.”
“I don’t get it,” Micah says, fumbling with a hand-carved porcelain Grendel.
“Here.” Bloat pulls back the monster’s head and elicits a squeal of delight as a rectilinear-shaped chalk-white candy emerges from the creature’s gaping neck. “You pull back the character’s head like so and voilà—Pfefferminz! My plan is to popularize them in the Americas with notables from your motion-picture industry: Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, Fairbanks, Jolson in blackface, Little Nemo, even Walt Disney’s irritating singing mouse.”
Micah begins working the hinge, examining how the candies are stacked and loaded into the cylinder’s chamber. “I get the toy part, but not the decapitation routine.”
“Americans truly are comical in your innocence! To the children of Europe, Pfefferminz makes perfect sense. We’ve even a special bejeweled line of PEZ dispensers featuring all the great crucified, beheaded, pitchforked, and assassinated figures in world history, from Jesus to Marie Antoinette, Rasputin to Archduke Ferdinand. The kiddies there make the connection intuitively. To what do you awaken from the nightmare of history? Candy!”
Izzy maintains a wary silence during these opening salvos and Pfefferminz small talk. Though he was still uncertain whether or not he could trust the man, once the meeting was planned, Izzy could think of little else. When finalizing arrangements with Micah, Bloat intimated that he had news of the Malwiki. Now, seated next to the importer, Izzy can feel his forehead gleaming and is uncertain whether this is from anxiety or because his chair is positioned in front of an immense fireplace showering h
im in waves of warmth.
“So what service may I provide the brothers Grand?” Bloat asks. “Where might your next intrepid adventure take you?”
“Well, as Micah mentioned when we left Africa”—Izzy’s ill-lubricated voice a car skidding over ice—“we promised we’d send some provisions.”
The importer’s left hand resting on the saltshaker, his right on the pepper, he leads the pair in table-waltz miscegenation. “And you mean to make good on this pledge?”
“We mean to, yes,” Micah says.
“And may I ask why?”
“Because we love them,” Izzy blurts.
Micah leans forward and places a conciliatory hand on Izzy’s forearm. “What my brother means to say is we’d like to thank the Malwiki for the hospitality they afforded us during the shoot.”
“You know, the Europeans have an expression: ‘What happens in the forest belongs to the trees,’ ” Bloat says. “The sun makes us say funny things, do funny things. No one expects you to honor something you might have uttered in passing, on a lark, least of all to an ill-educated people whose language you do not share.”
Izzy shrugs free from Micah’s hand. “We very much mean to honor those things.”
“I see,” Bloat says, eyeing Izzy carefully. “You know, Isidor, everything has an end—only sausages have two.”
“Well, it’s not really for you to say how we choose to spend our money, is it? I mean, who are you anyway, Sidney? You’re a glorified errand boy who dresses like the bathroom attendant at the Oak Room.”
“Easy, Itz.”
Izzy leans back in his chair. “Apologies, comment withdrawn.”
“That is unnecessary, I assure you. One gets paid with neither compliments nor contrition.” Bloat considers his next few words carefully before addressing Micah alone. “If you would like provisions sent to the Malwiki privately, without British approval or under the aegis of some goodwill agency, there are two things I will need to perform this action: The first is a good deal of money, the precise sum to be determined dependent upon the list of goods you will provide. The second is a set of forgeries of all required paperwork, which will take me a bit longer to procure and will also cost you a considerable sum. Before we proceed, however, you should be made aware of certain conditions that have come to exist in your jungle haven since your haste-filled departure.”
O, Africa! Page 24