by Various
For some reason, Dogzilla decided not to colonize the bed. I was alone. I fell asleep thinking about breakfast. I could have my usual oatmeal with boysenberry syrup, or maybe I could walk around the corner to the local diner and have bacon and eggs. Decisions, always decisions. That's why so many writers are alcoholics—writing is all about decisions, all day long, even if most of those decisions are, "Nope, that's not it either."
I slept badly. I dreamt I was in a twilight landscape, maybe a snow-covered plain with black and barren trees twisted like claws. Maybe a row of empty and forgotten buildings off to one side. The town square of a small deserted settlement? He was there, the ever-present companion. I don't know who he is. Mostly he's friendly, but sometimes he's just a bystander. He's a little taller than me. Always a dark indistinct shape. This time, there was something wrong. We were moving forward, toward a very close horizon—
And then a gigantic face came up at the edge of the world, filling the eastern sky—it was a horrible white face, with angry glaring eyes and a dark growling mouth. We were tiny people in a tabletop town and the hideous apparition was an enraged giant child hell-bent on vengeance—
I came awake gasping.
It took me a long time to fall asleep again.
In the morning, the mirror accused me of zombie cosplay without any need for makeup. My reflection looked gaunt and wasted, pale skin, dark circles under the eyes—almost as scary as the face in my dream. I felt weak, even a little woozy, and thought about going back to bed. But no—
The only good news, the scale said I'd lost a pound and a half since yesterday. And that was even before the porcelain performance.
The computer had rebooted itself in the middle of the night. Maybe it was Crash Tuesday. Microsoft had pushed another set of patches requiring a forced restart. It shouldn't have—I'm very careful about my settings when I upgrade. I'd gone to the group policy editor and set the do-not-reboot flag, I'd opened up regedit and added the appropriate do-not-reboot DWORD to the registry. I'd even gone to Windows Update settings and told it not to restart after updating without my permission.
But the machine had rebooted anyway.
I didn't lose any work. The [SAVE] key is my friend. I back up my work in six different places. That's the only advantage to having CDO. I mention this, Gordon, because this was one more of those moments of uncertainty that made me wonder if I was gaslighting myself.
I had a pitch meeting in the afternoon, so most of the morning was spent printing out leave-behinds. And because unlike the [SAVE] key, the 405 is not my friend, or anyone else's for that matter, I had to leave ninety minutes early.
Of course, the meeting was a disaster. My agent and I were talking to a committee of five, all fetuses-in-suits, none of whom had the authority to open a checkbook, and none of whom were interested in working with someone who looked like their grandfather, plus I was speaking into the shallow mindset that looks only to the previous season instead of the next. "That sci-fi stuff always gets canceled in the first season. Do you have anything with vampires or serial killers or cannibals?" Why do I even bother?
Returning home, it was now rush hour—another two hours in the car, with traffic inching forward like a herd of spastic snails and my lower back sending me little reminders that I was not going to rest well this evening—but I did get a long, lovely view of a gorgeous brown twilight over the Federal Building in Westwood while listening to the entirety of Marin Alsop's high-spirited rendition of Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony, the "Organ Symphony," and that was some respite—the music, not the view. It wasn't until we finally crawled past the Getty Center off-ramp that traffic began moving as fast as an elderly bicyclist again.
By the time I got home, it was a quarter-past Jeopardy, and I had just enough energy for a grilled-cheese sandwich. I must have been feeling my age, Gordon—because I went to bed without staying up for Elementary. It was a rerun anyway. Dogzilla refused to join me, preferring instead to camp out on the couch.
Have you ever been so tired you can't sleep? This was one of those nights. My mind churning like an unmixed metaphor. Will it blend? Nope, not this one. I felt like I was too tired even to die.
That's when I heard it.
The little rustling.
This is an old house. Older than I. There are holes in the walls, holes under the eaves giving access to the attic, holes under the foundation too. From time to time, the Chinese restaurant across the alley attracts unwanted nightlife of the order rodentia. Every few years, we get a family of freeloading tenants. I can tell by the chewing noises—usually right over my bed—Mama Rat is making a nest.
Before Dogzilla there was Kiki, the tuxedo cat. Mama Rat would have maybe a week of free rent. Then she gets to be a gift on the front porch. But once, during a particularly rainy February (a rarity in California, it made the Guinness book), the litter had a few weeks of grace—so when Kiki was finally able to resume patrolling, we found a young rat on the porch every day for a week, and Mama Rat on Sunday.
Kiki was also very good at removing gophers from the front lawn, the back garden, and all the neighbors' yards for half a block in all directions. When Kiki died, so did the unbroken greenery of the landscape.
Dogzilla has the enthusiasm for the job, but not the patience to sit and watch a gopher hole for hour after hour. Cats seem to be perpetually stoned while dogs are hardwired with their own personal methamphetamines.
I've lived here long enough, I'm familiar with all the different noises of the neighborhood, especially the noises that come from the attic over my bed or under the floorboards or even once in a while, inside the walls.
This wasn't any of those noises.
It wasn't like any sound I could describe or compare it to. Howard Phillips Lovecraft would have had the appropriate vocabulary. He never met a befouled unearthly adjective rising from the elemental depths of an eldritch language that he didn't like, but the best I can come up with is that it sounded like several very small things moving around inside a very strange little house.
Putting up tiny curtains? Rearranging diminutive pieces of furniture? Preparing minuscule place settings for a feast of roast spider?
I raised myself up just enough to look over at the shelf.
As I did, all the lights in all the little windows went out, one by one, as if something inside was hurriedly rushing around, snuffing out tiny candles and lamps.
I flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
No. Just no.
I did not need this.
Not now.
After everything else I've been through—
No.
I'd have to tell Dr. Morgan—but I didn't dare tell Dr. Morgan.
Either my meds have stopped working and I'm losing my grip on reality—or my meds are working and reality is losing its grip on me. Either way, I'm in trouble.
I raised up on my elbow again. The lights were out in the little House of Usher, the door was closed, and everything was silent.
Gordon, you know how you pause sometimes—like your brain has just frozen up? And all you can do is just breathe? Kind of like Oliver Hardy just after Stan Laurel has come up with something surreal?
Hardy, very patiently: "Nothing is impossible, Stanley."
Stanley thinks. "I know something that's impossible."
Hardy, slightly exasperated: "What?"
Stanley, brightly: "Striking a match on a bar of soap."
Hardy looks to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as if to ask, "Why? Just why?"
That was me. Very Oliver Hardy.
Why can't I be Bugs Bunny once in a while? Nothing fazes the wabbit.
I sank back onto the pillow. I stared up at the ceiling again and pretended everything was normal. I'm good at that. When all else fails—fake it.
I went back to plotting the gay erotic novel I would probably never write. I was still trying to figure out how to justify the establishment of a monosexual culture. I had a good start though. The
colony isn't self-sufficient yet. There aren't the resources to support pregnant women and babies. And there might be unknown pathogens, particularly virulent for women. So emigration has to be one-way. No return tickets. We can't risk any kind of contamination coming back. And we can grow babies in bottles. So there's a cultural argument about whether or not we should grow female infants or stay all-male. But that's not the story, just the background. The story has to be about a reluctant colonist learning to fit in—
I dreamt I was trying to get away from something, trying to hide. I had to go to a tiny little room at the back of an unfamiliar house, and then scrooch down on the floor so I could twist through a vent into an impossible closet, through a tiny slot down to an underground room, where I would have to open a door in the floor and take the narrow stairs—so dark the bottom seemed a gloomy black pit—all the way down to the deep deep basement below, where behind the heavy shelves there was a heavy wooden door, old and ornate, that had to be unlocked, and it creaked when I pushed it open, and now I was descending on spiraling stone steps, pushing aside cobwebs—I could barely see, I had to grab a torch from the wall, but I kept going, I had to keep going down, I had to hide from the—
Came awake, puzzled.
I thought I heard a scream. Inside my head. High-pitched and unearthly. A little like an old-fashioned train whistle or the safety valve of an industrial steam engine, but also like that hideous shrieking noise in the stage version of Sweeney Todd. (What was Sondheim thinking anyway?) If banshees were real, this was what they would sound like. Horrible and unreal—but faint and faraway while still piercing the inside of my skull through my ears.
The Internet tells me that the internal auditory meatus (also internal acoustic canal, or IAC) is a canal in the petrous part of the temporal bone of the skull, on each side, that serves as the passageway for the cranial nerves, namely cranial nerve VII and cranial nerve VIII, and for the labyrinthine artery between the middle and inner ear. This does not explain why I felt as if Chuckles the Clown had shoved icicles into my head from both sides simultaneously.
I looked over at the clock. Not quite three.
I glanced to the shelf.
The house was silent.
Sure, now.
I did not fall asleep again. Instead, I tossed, turned, wrestled with the pillow, thought about redheads, tossed and turned some more, got up to pee, rearranged the bedclothes, thought about buying a better mattress, and eventually, finally, just as dawn was breaking wind, fell asleep again. The next time I awoke, it was afternoon and Dogzilla was frantic about the possibility of starving to death.
The mirror showed me the reflection of a corpse. I now looked like my driver's license picture. The old joke had come true. Driver's license pictures look like they do so it's easier to identify the body. Mine was still ambulant, but only because even after death, you still have to pee.
The good news? Yes, there was some. The scale reported that I had lost another two pounds. Well, one point nine, actually—but I could round up. Apparently, the cost of my weight loss was a corresponding loss of my so-called "boyish good looks." By the time I hit my target weight, I would be ready to star in a found-footage film about demonic possession.
After coffee and shower and more coffee and a walk outside to see if the rest of the world was still there—I realized I had hit another one of those empty moments. That thing some people call "writer's block." There's nothing there. Nothing to say. Nothing to share. As if everything has been flushed away, yet the fill tank remains empty. (Not the best metaphor, no, but the most appropriate one for the feeling.)
I suppose this is a good place to talk about Chuck, the Bad Luck Fairy.
As much as I want to believe in a deterministic universe, an orderly explainable machine, there are two arguments that work to test that belief.
The first argument is that the universe is so vast—practically infinite—anything is possible. No matter how impressively the odds may be stacked against it, the size of the universe guarantees that the event or phenomenon is still inevitable somewhere.
Imagine that the universe has several godzillion clusters. And each of those clusters contains several godzillion galaxies. And those galaxies are made up of several godzillion stars. And each of those stars has maybe a half-dozen planets. Do the math. We're talking six-times-godzillion-cubed.
If the odds against something happening in a six-times-godzillion cubed universe are a hundred godzillion to one, then the thing has already occurred somewhere in the universe—at least a few million times. It's not impossible, it's only uncommon. You and I exist because this is the place in the vast universe where the universe worked in such a way as to cause us to exist.
Taking that thought one step further…things that operate beyond the boundaries of the immediately explainable are inevitable if this is one of those places where things can operate beyond the boundaries of the immediately explainable.
The other argument against the deterministic universe is much simpler. The universe is not orderly and explainable at all.
In either case, the existence of Chuck, the Bad Luck Fairy, is evidence.
Chuck was a real person. I'm not making this up.
During that time in my life when I still thought I could work my body into reasonably attractive shape, I joined a gym. Chuck was the "pusher." The pusher was the guy who went around exhorting people to do extra repetitions. "Push! Push! Push!"
He wasn't very good at his job, mostly he stood around and flirted, but he did look the part—that was probably why they cast him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and well tanned. He had a near-perfect athletic build, gleaming white teeth, and a smile like a honey-trap—he was the ideal California surfer-dude. You could have put him in a Pepsi ad. As long as you didn't ask him to move, as long as all you needed him to do was stand still and look good, he was ideal.
But as soon as he started to move—or speak—disaster trailed in his wake like a drag queen's feather boa.
Let me explain this. I'll get back to Chuck shortly.
One of the greatest drag performers of the twentieth century was Charles Pierce. He was legendary. His repertoire of diva impersonations set the standard. He was a better Bette Davis than the original, complete with cigarette holder and curled upper lip. He would walk out on stage in his All About Eve dress and wig and bright red lipstick—and just stare at the audience until the applause finally subsided. ("You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead…. Good.")
In 1975, or maybe it was '76, it was after my stint on Land of the Lost, Charles Pierce did a one-night stand at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—the most beautiful theater in Los Angeles. The place was the very definition of elegance.
Also on the bill was Sally Rand, the world's most famous burlesque star. She was seventy-something years, still in stunning shape, and still touring with her legendary fan dance—and the bubble dance too!
The fan dance was performed with two ostrich feathers—and not much else, maybe a tiara. Wikipedia says the nudity was an illusion—if so, then Ms. Rand's skill was to demonstrate that the imagination is far more powerful than the fact. The bubble dance was an equally graceful exercise performed with a giant balloon.
Of sidereal interest, in a later conversation Robert A. Heinlein told me that he knew Sally Rand. He had been an admirer of her terpsichore in his earlier days. (I had to go home and look up the word "terpsichore." I was disappointed to find out it meant dance.)
Anyway, back to Charles Pierce.
The theater was sold out, packed with mostly gay men from all over Southern California. This was going to be a legendary evening.
The stage was empty, a large bare space. No scenery, just a black curtain and a spotlight. After an overture that was more fanfare than overture, Charles Pierce strode out, looking like a pumped-up Mae West on steroids, blond wig towering higher than Yeoman Janice Rand at her most extreme, silver-sequined gown glittering li
ke a news anchor's smile. Enough rhinestones and sequins and faux-diamonds to blind the first six rows. And a feather boa that stretched the length of the stage—and to prove it, Pierce strode across the full width of the stage trailing that impossible accessory behind him, then back again.
When the applause finally ended, Pierce said—in his normal voice—"Some people say I dress like a woman." He paused, looked out at the audience, then added, "Now tell me. Have you ever seen a woman dress like this?"
It was the kind of moment that defines "show-stopper."
For the finale, after Ms. Rand's astonishing bubble dance, Pierce returned as Jeannette MacDonald in a gaudy belle-of-the-ball confection that still defies description—I won't even try. Perched on a high flower-entwined swing that came out over the audience, Pierce sang "San Francisco" to the delight and laughter of the audience. The laughter came when he reached the farthest forward part of the swing and spread his legs wide apart revealing multiple petticoats and horrendously frilly pantaloons. There are some things that once seen cannot be unseen.
Anyway, the point of this digression was to acknowledge Pierce's feather boa, which stretched at least the full width of the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—and back. (Pierce called it "Dotty's Place." Dorothy Chandler was still alive and active in the performing arts community in those days. I don't know if she was in attendance that night or what she might have thought about the evening's somewhat unorthodox performances, but if I wore a hat, I'd have to tip it in her honor. It was a great night.)
So when I say that Chuck trailed bad luck behind him like a drag queen's feather boa, I do not mean just any drag queen. I mean like Charles Pierce strutting the full width of the giant stage of Dotty's Place hauling behind an accoutrement so extravagant it becomes the stuff of legends. When Chuck moved through a life, you could hear things breaking, one after the other—mirrors, tables, motorcycles, agreements, hopes, and especially hearts. Everywhere he went, he left a trail of breakage.
I'm not sure he did it intentionally. I don't think he understood. He was like the toddler who walks unnoticed between the adults' legs and scoops out a chunk of someone else's birthday cake before the candles have been lit. He's having so much fun, chocolate and icing all over his face, that he doesn't comprehend the dismay he's causing outside of the locus of his consciousness.