by Paula Guran
That done, Maeve took down all of the reference photos of mystical, fantastic birds that she had printed out and hung on her walls while painting the show for the gallery. She closed the covers of the bestiaries, and slid feathers into glassine envelopes, making bright kaleidoscopes of fallen flight.
She packed away the shadow boxes, the skeletons, the figurines, reshelved the fairy tales.
The return of the sketchbook had reminded her of one thing. If there were any magic she could claim, it was hers, pencil on a page, pigment on canvas. It came from her, not from anywhere else.
The only things Maeve left in sight were a white feather, a photo she had downloaded from her phone of a naked man perched in a tree, and the sketches she had made of Sweeney. Finally, she hung the recent sketches from the cathedral. She would have to go back there, she thought, before this was finished, but not yet. Not until the end.
At first, Sweeney thought it was the madness come upon him again. His skin itched as if there were feathers beneath it, but they were feathers he could neither see nor coax out of his crawling skin.
His bones ground against each other, too light, the wrong shape, shivering, untrustworthy. Not quite a man, not wholly a bird and uncertain what he was supposed to be.
The soar of flight tipped over the edge into vertigo, and he landed with an abrading slap of his hands against sidewalk.
And then he knew.
Maeve was painting. Painting his own, and perhaps ultimate, transformation.
Dizzy, he ran to where he had first seen her, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Maeve hated painting in public. Hated it. People stood too close, asked grating questions, offered opinions that were neither solicited nor useful, and offered them in voices that were altogether too loud.
The quiet space in her head that painting normally gave here became the pressure of voices, the pinprick texture of other people’s eyes on her skin.
She hated it, but this was the place she had to paint, to finish Sweeney’s commission here at the cathedral. The end was the beginning.
On the canvas: the shadow of Sweeney rising to meet him, a man-shape grayed and subtle behind a bird. Sweeney, feathers raining around him as he burst from bird to man. A white bird, spiraling in flight, haunting the broken tower of the cathedral, a quiet and stormy ruin.
The skies behind Maeve filled with all manner of impossible birds. On the cathedral lawn, women played chess, and when one put the other in check, a man in a far away place stood up from a nearly negotiated peace.
Behind Maeve, Sweeney gasped, stumbled, fell. And still, she painted.
This time, it felt like magic.
The pain was immense. Sweeney could not speak, could not think, could barely breathe as he was unmade. Maeve was not breaking his curse, she was painting a reality apart from it.
Feathers exploded from beneath his skin, roiling over his body in waves, and disappearing again.
He looked up at the canvas, watched Maeve paint, watched the trails of magic in her brush strokes. In the trees were three birds with the faces and torsos of women, sirens to sing a man to his fate.
The church bells rang out, a sacred clarion, a calling of time, and Sweeney knew how this would end.
It was not what he had anticipated, but magic so rarely was.
Maeve set her brush down, and shook the circulation back into her hands. A white bird streaked low across her vision, and perched in front of one of the clerestory windows.
“Maeve.”
She turned, and Sweeney the man lay on the ground behind her. “Oh, no. This isn’t what I wanted.”
She sat next to him, took his hand. “What can I do?”
“Just sit with me, please.”
“Did you know this would happen, when you commissioned the painting?”
“I considered the possibility. I had to. Without the magic binding me into one spell or the next, the truth is I have lived a very long time, and I knew that death might well be my next migration.”
Sweeney’s next words were quieter, as if he was remembering them. “No one chooses his quest. It is chosen for him.”
Sweeney closed his eyes. “This is just another kind of flight.”
Maeve hung the finished painting on her wall. Outside, just beyond the open window, perched a white bird.
Kat Howard is a speculative fiction writer, a former lawyer, and a fencer. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues, been nominated for awards, and included in “year’s best” and “best of” anthologies. One of her stories was performed on NPR’s Selected Shorts program. Roses and Rot, Howard’s first novel, was recently published by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press. She currently lives in New Hampshire.
A writer learns, as most who go there do, that there is no “Hollywood magic” is an illusion and wherever you want to go on the streets of L.A. takes thirty minutes. But he also discovers great stage illusions make us question the nature of reality and—if you can only pause and listen—the world is full of quiet magic.
The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories
Neil Gaiman
It was raining when I arrived in L.A., and I felt myself surrounded by a hundred old movies.
There was a limo driver in a black uniform waiting for me at the airport, holding a white sheet of cardboard with my name misspelled neatly upon it.
“I’m taking you straight to your hotel, sir,” said the driver. He seemed vaguely disappointed that I didn’t have any real luggage for him to carry, just a battered overnight bag stuffed with T-shirts, underwear, and socks.
“Is it far?”
He shook his head. “Maybe twenty-five, thirty minutes. You ever been to L.A. before?”
“No.”
“Well, what I always say, L.A. is a thirty-minute town. Wherever you want to go, it’s thirty minutes away. No more.”
He hauled my bag into the boot of the car, which he called the trunk, and opened the door for me to climb into the back.
“So where you from?” he asked, as we headed out of the airport into the slick wet neon-spattered streets.
“England.”
“England, eh?”
“Yes. Have you ever been there?”
“Nosir. I’ve seen movies. You an actor?”
“I’m a writer.”
He lost interest. Occasionally he would swear at other drivers, under his breath.
He swerved suddenly, changing lanes. We passed a four-car pileup in the lane we had been in.
“You get a little rain in this city, all of a sudden everybody forgets how to drive,” he told me. I burrowed further into the cushions in the back. “You get rain in England, I hear.” It was a statement, not a question.
“A little.”
“More than a little. Rains every day in England.” He laughed. “And thick fog. Real thick, thick fog.”
“Not really.”
“Whaddaya mean, no?” he asked, puzzled, defensive. “I’ve seen movies.”
We sat in silence then, driving through the Hollywood rain; but after a while he said: “Ask them for the room Belushi died in.”
“Pardon?”
“Belushi. John Belushi. It was your hotel he died in. Drugs. You heard about that?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“They made a movie about his death. Some fat guy, didn’t look nothing like him. But nobody tells the real truth about his death. Y’see, he wasn’t alone. There were two other guys with him. Studios didn’t want any shit. But you’re a limo driver, you hear things.”
“Really?”
“Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. They were there with him. All of them going doo-doo on the happy dust.”
The hotel building was a white mock-gothic chateau.
I said good-bye to the chauffeur and checked in; I did not ask about the room in which Belushi had died.
I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through
the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.
Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.
I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.
The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.
I watched a little television—the rerun wasteland: Cheers segued imperceptibly into Taxi, which flickered into black and white and became I Love Lucy—then stumbled into sleep.
I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.
The phone woke me. “Hey-hey-hey-hey. You made it okay then?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jacob at the studio. Are we still on for breakfast, hey-hey?”
“Breakfast . . . ?”
“No problem. I’ll pick you up at your hotel in thirty minutes. Reservations are already made. No problems. You got my messages?”
“I . . . ”
“Faxed ’em through last night. See you.”
The rain had stopped. The sunshine was warm and bright: proper Hollywood light. I walked up to the main building, walking on a carpet of crushed eucalyptus leaves—the cough medicine smell from the night before.
They handed me an envelope with a fax in it—my schedule for the next few days, with messages of encouragement and faxed handwritten doodles in the margin, saying things like This is Gonna be a Blockbuster! and Is this Going to be a Great Movie or What! The fax was signed by Jacob Klein, obviously the voice on the phone. I had never before had any dealings with a Jacob Klein.
A small red sports car drew up outside the hotel. The driver got out and waved at me. I walked over. He had a trim, pepper-and-salt beard, a smile that was almost bankable, and a gold chain around his neck. He showed me a copy of Sons of Man.
He was Jacob. We shook hands.
“Is David around? David Gambol?”
David Gambol was the man I’d spoken to earlier on the phone when arranging the trip. He wasn’t the producer. I wasn’t certain quite what he was. He described himself as “attached to the project.”
“David’s not with the studio anymore. I’m kind of running the project now, and I want you to know I’m really psyched. Hey-hey.”
“That’s good?”
We got in the car. “Where’s the meeting?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s not a meeting,” he said. “It’s a breakfast.” I looked puzzled. He took pity on me. “A kind of pre-meeting meeting,” he explained.
We drove from the hotel to a mall somewhere half an hour away while Jacob told me how much he enjoyed my book and how delighted he was that he’d become attached to the project. He said it was his idea to have me put up in the hotel—“Give you the kind of Hollywood experience you’d never get at the Four Seasons or Ma Maison, right?”—and asked me if I was staying in the chalet in which John Belushi had died. I told him I didn’t know, but that I rather doubted it.
“You know who he was with, when he died? They covered it up, the studios.”
“No. Who?”
“Meryl and Dustin.”
“This is Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman we’re talking about?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know this?”
“People talk. It’s Hollywood. You know?”
I nodded as if I did know, but I didn’t.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.
The irritating question they ask us—us being writers—is: “Where do you get your ideas?” And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together.
The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
It began with a documentary on Charles Manson I was watching more or less by accident (it was on a videotape a friend lent me after a couple of things I did want to watch): there was footage of Manson, back when he was first arrested, when people thought he was innocent and that it was the government picking on the hippies. And up on the screen was Manson—a charismatic, good-looking, messianic orator. Someone you’d crawl barefoot into Hell for. Someone you could kill for.
The trial started; and, a few weeks into it, the orator was gone, replaced by a shambling, apelike gibberer, with a cross carved into its forehead. Whatever the genius was was no longer there. It was gone. But it had been there.
The documentary continued: a hard-eyed ex-con who had been in prison with Manson, explaining, “Charlie Manson? Listen, Charlie was a joke. He was a nothing. We laughed at him. You know? He was a nothing!”
And I nodded. There was a time before Manson was the charisma king, then. I thought of a benediction, something given, that was taken away.
I watched the rest of the documentary obsessively.
Then, over a black-and-white still, the narrator said something. I rewound, and he said it again.
I had an idea. I had a book that wrote itself.
The thing the narrator had said was this: that the infant children Manson had fathered on the women of The Family were sent to a variety of children’s homes for adoption, with court-given surnames that were certainly not Manson.
And I thought of a dozen twenty-five-year-old Mansons. Thought of the charisma-thing descending on all of them at the same time. Twelve young Mansons, in their glory, gradually being pulled toward L.A. from all over the world. And a Manson daughter trying desperately to stop them from coming together and, as the back cover blurb told us, “realizing their terrifying destiny.”
I wrote Sons of Man at white heat: it was finished in a month, and I sent it to my agent, who was surprised by it (“Well, it’s not like your other stuff, dear,” she said helpfully), and she sold it after an auction—my first—for more money than I had thought possible. (My other books, three collections of elegant, allusive and elusive ghost stories, had scarcely paid for the computer on which they were written.)
And then it was bought—prepublication—by Hollywood, again after an auction. There were three or four studios interested: I went with the studio who wanted me to write the script. I knew it would never happen, knew they’d never come through. But then the faxes began to spew out of my machine, late at night—most of them enthusiastically signed by one Dave Gambol; one morning I signed five copies of a contract thick as a brick; a few weeks later my agent reported the first check had cleared and tickets to Hollywood had arrived, for “preliminary talks.” It seemed like a dream.
The tickets were business class. It was the moment I saw the tickets were business class that I knew the dream was real.
I went to Hollywood in the bubble bit at the top of the jumbo jet, nibbling smoked salmon and holding a hot-off-the-presses hardback of Sons of Man.
So. Breakfast.
They told me how much they loved the book. I didn’t quite catch anybody’s name. The men had beards or baseball caps or both; the women were astoundingly attractive, in a sanitary sort of way.
Jacob ordered our breakfast, and paid for it. He explained that the meeting coming up was a formality.
“It’s your book we love,” he said. “Why would we have bought your book if we didn’t want to make it? Why would we have hired you to write it if we didn’t want the specialness you’d bring to the project? The you-ness. “
I nodded, very seriously, as if literary me-ness was something I had spent many hours pondering.
“An idea like this. A book like this. You’re pretty unique.”
“One of the uniquest,” said a woman named Dina or Tina or possibly Deanna.
I raised an eyebrow. “So what am I meant to do at the meeting?”
“Be receptive,” said Jacob
. “Be positive.”
The drive to the studio took about half an hour in Jacob’s little red car. We drove up to the security gate, where Jacob had an argument with the guard. I gathered that he was new at the studio and had not yet been issued a permanent studio pass.
Nor, it appeared, once we got inside, did he have a permanent parking place. I still do not understand the ramifications of this: from what he said, parking places had as much to do with status at the studio as gifts from the emperor determined one’s status in the court of ancient China.
We drove through the streets of an oddly flat New York and parked in front of a huge old bank.
Ten minutes’ walk, and I was in a conference room, with Jacob and all the people from breakfast, waiting for someone to come in. In the flurry I’d rather missed who the someone was and what he or she did. I took out my copy of my book and put it in front of me, a talisman of sorts.
Someone came in. He was tall, with a pointy nose and a pointy chin, and his hair was too long—he looked like he’d kidnapped someone much younger and stolen their hair. He was an Australian, which surprised me.
He sat down.
He looked at me.
“Shoot,” he said.
I looked at the people from the breakfast, but none of them were looking at me—I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye.
So I began to talk: about the book, about the plot, about the end, the showdown in the L.A. nightclub, where the good Manson girl blows the rest of them up.
Or thinks she does. About my idea for having one actor play all the Manson boys.
“Do you believe this stuff?” It was the first question from the Someone.
That one was easy. It was one I’d already answered for at least two dozen British journalists.
“Do I believe that a supernatural power possessed Charles Manson for a while and is even now possessing his many children? No. Do I believe that something strange was happening? I suppose I must do. Perhaps it was simply that, for a brief while, his madness was in step with the madness of the world outside. I don’t know.”