Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  “Indeed.”

  “Would this person be foolish enough to accept it in exchange for twenty thousand pesos?”

  “Fifteen thousand pesos.”

  And so it was that, against the odds in defiance of the Devil, “El Sanatorio de Doctor Varglom” and five other stories were delivered from oblivion.

  After boiling “Ambassador to the Beyond” down to a conventional two-page press release and mailing it off to PARC Pictures, I turned to the business of composing the Ibarra Rojo novelette called “The Asylum of Doctor Varglom.” I began by reading Waldo’s screenplay. Though marred by overheated dialogue and gratuitous sensationalism, only a person even more snobbish than me would have dismissed this effort as dreck. I rather liked it. My brother had already alerted me to the setting, a nineteenth-century madhouse in an unspecified European country. The plot was simple but serviceable. Arguably more demented than any of his patients, the medical director of Krogskrafte Sanatorium, Anton Varglom, becomes seduced by the godlike powers he enjoys over the residents’ fortunes. He starts extracting cerebrospinal fluid from their brains, his theory being that, because he himself is already insane, such an elixir can only compound his brilliance. Doctor Varglom’s self-injections have an unintended consequence: He becomes a “thought-vampire,” addicted to the internal mental landscapes wherein the Krogskrafte inmates dwell, a craving that requires him to periodically saw open a patient’s cranium and, like a gourmand savoring a stew, devour the cerebral matter with a spoon. In the final reel Varglom’s experimental subjects get the upper hand, chasing him onto the roof and hurling him to his death.

  Although Waldo’s script should have been an easy act to follow, a full five days elapsed before I’d nailed down an opening scene. I hadn’t written fiction in over two years, and I reveled in the blessed pressure of the typewriter keys against my fingertips. In the weeks that followed, the remaining events rushed from my brain in a lexical cataract. Doubtless Ibarra Rojo had composed his tales in a similarly feverish state. I could practically hear the levers of his Sholes and Glidden nailing ink to paper to platen with the insidious rhythms of a sadistic mortician securing a cataleptic’s coffin prior to burying him alive.

  My interpretation of Anton Varglom proved rather more sympathetic than my brother’s. Born with the soul of a Renaissance architect and the sensibility of a Baroque painter, this tormented prodigy came of age determined to use his artistic talents in helping lunatics find their way back to daylight. Alas, no sooner does the young doctor assume charge of Krogskrafte Sanatorium than an idée fixe corrupts his noble nature. He resolves to turn the asylum into the most bizarre world imaginable, on the theory that an environment capable of driving a rational person crazy might very well restore a madman to sanity. And so, under Varglom’s direction, the passageways and staircases of Krogskrafte transmute into a twisted, crooked, insoluble labyrinth—evidently my clever doctor anticipated German Expressionism—even as the attic becomes a torture chamber filled with insidious devices, most notably “the loom of ruin,” reminiscent of the bizarre rack from Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. Shortly after he assembles it, Doctor Varglom’s loom acquires a mind of its own, a demonic consciousness through which it can sense the nature of a man’s most unforgivable sin, forthwith tattooing its name upon his jumping flesh with an array of steel needles. Alas, for reasons Varglom cannot fathom, the renovated asylum fails to cure anyone. Seeking to identify the flaw in his theory, he negotiates the maze himself. The jagged corridors inflict a kind of Nietzschean hypersanity on the doctor, so that, when the vengeful inmates hunt him down and strap him to the loom, his psyche melds with that of the machine, and soon thereafter he feels the needles etching his skin with narratives of sins that human beings have not yet learned to commit. The story ends on a cryptic note, when a Krogskrafte orderly enters the chamber and proposes to unbind Varglom. But the doctor rejects the orderly’s solicitation, declaring that he prefers to spend his remaining days “living in this delectable hell of nameless iniquities.”

  By the end of June, I had in hand a complete eighty-page draft of “The Asylum of Doctor Varglom.” My effort pleased me. It wasn’t as engaging as Carnage Pastorale, but it left Fatal Laughter in the shadows. In this lurid little tale I had wrought—or, rather, my Ibarra Rojo persona had wrought—something respectable and perhaps even remarkable.

  Mirabile dictu, my benevolent alter ego wasn’t finished possessing me. Even as I sat down to correct the present pages, the arc of the whole Anton Varglom cycle arrived entire in my brain. The five remaining installments, I saw, must all occur in the sanatorium. As the series unfolded, this cathedral to the doctor’s megalomania would acquire additional and increasingly strange appendages: a subterranean gallery of forbidden art, an abbey in which only malevolent deities were worshipped, a junglelike conservatory populated by horrific evolutionary mistakes, a theater in which the lunatics staged Grand Guignol entertainments for the residents of the surrounding village, a vast swamp concealing some unspeakable beast—each such installation rife with plot possibilities and thematic riches.

  For the next hour I forced myself to negotiate the immediate manuscript with a lead pencil, elevating the diction, imposing personality tics on the characters, and replacing overly self-conscious metaphors with acceptably self-conscious metaphors. I tossed the pages onto the backseat of my Beetle and set out for Glendale with the aim of delivering them to Oswald’s secretary so she could type the fair copy. Underground gallery, obscene abbey, nightmare jungle, theater of blood, haunted swamp: Yes, no question, I had hit a mother lode. Lucius Belasco was back in the fiction game.

  Arriving at the Pico Building, I was delighted to find Merle in the foyer—she’d just returned from lunch—because I sure as hell didn’t want to talk with my brothers: Their chatter would break the hypnotic spell in which I found myself, the ensorcellment through which I’d apprehended the entire unwritten oeuvre of Carlos Ibarra Rojo. I handed the manuscript to Merle and, after deputizing her to correct my spelling and fix obvious typos, returned to the car.

  Back in the motel room, I popped a beer, swilled it down, and scrolled a blank sheet into the Remington. I decided to key the new novelette to the art gallery hidden in the bowels of Krogskrafte Sanatorium. By moonrise I’d crafted an outline for the first two-thirds of a story called “Ars Longa Vita Brevis.”

  Mysteriously delivered from the loom of ruin, Doctor Varglom learns that a catastrophe has befallen the village of Ekelstadt. The town is dissolving, its buildings, thoroughfares, and squares melting like paraffin in the sun. As panic reigns in the viscous streets, many citizens flee to the gates of Krogskrafte, where they attempt to impersonate lunatics in hopes of gaining admittance.

  Unmoved by the citizens’ plight but intrigued by the mystery at hand, Varglom researches the history of the asylum. He learns that, fifty years earlier, Krogskrafte was the abode of an artist and aristocrat, Janos Stradegorst. A student of the black arts, Baron Stradegorst once claimed he could bring an entire world into being by painting it with alchemically created oils, the shapes, figures, and colors supplied by his imagination alone. Evidently the village and its environs were the results of this experiment. Whatever its location, the occult mural is obviously starting to disintegrate, for how else to explain the plague that has come to Ekelstadt?

  Doctor Varglom deduces that the epicenter of the catastrophe—the mural itself—must reside within the asylum walls. He forthwith visits the subterranean gallery, where the resident painting master, the handsome and clever Garrick Bloom, is hanging an exhibition of his students’ work, assisted by his talented but unbalanced protégé, Sonya Dagunzar. The images are disturbing in the extreme—hence the need for secrecy—but none depicts a Mitteleuropa village.

  Determined to find Baron Stradegorst’s mural, Varglom and Bloo
m venture into the deepest reaches of the asylum, from basement to subbasement to subsubbasement. Eventually they discover a vast circular room. The walls hold a decaying cyclorama of Ekelstadt, the pigments succumbing to the appetites of demonic worms.

  I had no idea what would happen next, but I felt confident that my inner Ibarra Rojo would soon provide the necessary twists and turns, and I went to bed a happy man.

  After fifteen days of banging away on “Ars Longa Vita Brevis,” I had only twenty pages to show for my efforts. I’d managed to depict the dissolution of Ekelstadt, including darkly comic scenes of the terrified citizens feigning lunacy, but then the words stopped flowing. I wondered how long it would take me to send Anton Varglom off in search of the cyclorama. A week? Two weeks? I wasn’t blocked, exactly, but I feared that several months might elapse before, eyes fixed on the final paragraph, I typed the words “The End.”

  On the morning of day sixteen, the telephone summoned me from an uneasy sleep. Oswald was on the line. I’d never heard such elation in his voice.

  “Lucius, kid, I love it!”

  “Love what?” I mumbled.

  “Your novelettization—”

  “There’s no such word.”

  “It’s terrific, little brother, the bug’s nuts. Don’t tell Waldo, but I prefer your novelettization to his screenplay. Too bad we finish principal photography on Friday, or we’d stick some of your ideas in the show, especially that demonically possessed torture rack.”

  “Oswald, you made my day,” I said. “So how’s Vincent Price working out?”

  “Between takes he gets bored, but he chews the scenery on cue. Here’s the really good news. Desmond Mallery thought your Ibarra Rojo story was, quote, ‘a tour de force of horror fiction.’ He’s goosing the normal print run by ten thousand copies, and he wants to see another lost-and-found novelette as soon as it’s translated.”

  “I’m hard at work on a new one, ‘Ars Longa Vita Brevis.’”

  “Lousy title.”

  “How about ‘City of Wax’?”

  “Much better.”

  “When do I get my six hundred dollars?”

  “Five hundred forty. Waldo and I own ten percent of you, remember? Cinesthesia pays on publication. Now here’s the really, really good news. If ‘City of Wax’ is as fabulous as your last story, we’ll buy it from you outright and put it into production.”

  “It’ll be fun thinking up a new tagline, huh, Oswald? ‘From the chilling quill of Carlos Ibarra Rojo, legendary lunatic of Latin letters!’”

  “Don’t make fun of us.”

  “‘From the perverted plume of Carlos Ibarra Rojo, bizarro brainiac of Oaxaca!’”

  “Stop it, little brother.”

  The longer I chatted with Oswald, the more convinced I became that I’d never make any headway on “City of Wax” and its sequels unless I returned to the native land of Carlos Ibarra Rojo. I needed the stark and torrid ambience from which his febrile visions had arisen. When I told Oswald he must send me to Mexico City again, he agreed to buy the bus ticket, but he drew the line at paying my hotel bills. I told him I would rent an apartment with the money I had coming from Cinesthesia for the novelette and PARC Pictures for the press release.

  “Your check is in the mail,” said Oswald. “This is big, Lucius. You and me and Waldo are going to the moon and back.”

  On a sweltering day in late August, as the sun rode the sky over Mexico City like the crucified doubloon glinting from the mainmast of the Pequod, I plunked a thousand pesos onto the desk of my new landlord, Octavio Iglesias, thereby laying claim to top-floor accommodations at Calle Moctezuma 14 in Cuauhtémoc borough, not far from the Centro Histórico. I’d lucked out. Apartment 5-B had a functional gas oven, an efficient icebox, a small but congenial parlor, a quaint little wrought-iron balcony, and a shower that delivered reliably hot water. Best of all, the kitchen opened onto a lush rooftop terrace planted with roses, orchids, and bougainvillea vines. True, there was no telephone, but Señor Iglesias told me his tenants could make and receive calls from a booth in the first-floor farmacia, which he managed with the aid of his dipsomaniacal brother-in-law, Julio, and preadolescent nephew, Armando.

  “Julio will send Armando to tell you when you’re wanted on the phone. For a modest fee, we can explain to bill collectors, alimony lawyers, and police officers that you are no longer in residence.”

  I installed my typewriter on the kitchen table and, after smoking a Chesterfield and reading the twenty extant “City of Wax” pages, wound a fresh sheet into the machine. Immediately I realized that, in returning to Ibarra Rojo’s milieu, I’d made the right decision. A torrent of sentences rushed from my fingertips. In prose that I, for one, found more poetic than purple, Doctor Varglom investigated the plague that threatened Ekelstadt, eventually learning about the sorcerer Stradegorst. As September brought its warm, wet breezes to southern Mexico, the story progressed, the doctor enlisting the aid of the asylum’s painting master and (after encountering many a cul-de-sac) discovering the secret cyclorama. I still had no idea how this would all play out, but—God and Ibarra Rojo willing—act three would emerge ere long.

  On the first day in October the kid from the farmacia, the exuberant Armando, interrupted my verbal bacchanal, screaming, “Señor Belasco! Señor Belasco!” from the hallway outside my apartment. (He wasn’t precisely a person from Porlock, but then again I wasn’t composing “Kubla Khan.”) I let him in. He caught his breath, then announced that a phone call awaited me below, a Señora Gloria. The fantasies kicked in instantly. She missed me. She needed me. She wanted us to renew our wedding vows. Maybe we should have a child.

  I flipped Armando a ten-centavo piece, then stubbed out my cigarette, boarded the treacherous elevator, descended to the farmacia, and, wedging myself into the phone booth, grabbed the dangling handset. The connection was terrible, but Gloria and I managed to have a conversation. Of course I was all wrong, or mostly wrong, about her motivations. Her desire to talk with me was professional, not connubial. The celebrated Broadway director Joshua Logan had recently acquired the dramatic rights to Herman Melville’s dark and satiric novel The Confidence-Man, and he’d given her a plum of an assignment, adapting it for the stage. At some point, of course, Logan would probably take over the writing, but first he wanted to see what Gloria could do on her own. Given my enthusiasm for Melville in particular and pessimistic fiction in general, she was hoping we could spend two or three days sitting in Mexico City cafés talking about the existing scenes (she’d already completed act one) and brainstorming ideas for act two.

  “I’m booked on a morning flight,” she said.

  “I’ll greet you at the Aeropuerto Central with a sign reading, ‘Pan-American Pessimists Convention.’”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll take a taxi.”

  “You can have my bed. I’ll sling a hammock on the balcony.”

  “No, Lucius, I’ll sleep in my hotel.”

  “There are no hotels in a twenty-mile radius of here.”

  “I already reserved a room.”

  “Only opium dens—”

  “I bring news from Oswald.”

  “And bordellos. What news?”

  “I’m to tell you Doctor Varglom is in postproduction,” said Gloria. “The rough cut looks terrific, and it’ll be in theaters by January. Gotta run, Lucius. See you soon.”

  I sauntered back to Calle Moctezuma 14 and sat down before the Remington. Nothing happened. No words materialized on the page. True, the fact of Gloria’s imminent arrival had lifted my spirits, but not to an elevation sufficient for bringing “City of Wax” to fruition. I retrieved a Corona from the icebox, soured it with a slice of lime, and nursed it while staring at the malicious white void.

  The proper course was obvious: I
must take the rest of the day off and visit a local movie palace—and so it was that PARC Pictures’ most reliable scout indulged in a kind of busman’s holiday, spending the afternoon at the baroque but decrepit twenty-four-hour Teatro Regio watching a triple bill. Coincidentally enough, El Ataque de las Brujas, El Espectro del Estrangulador, and Santo contra el Cerebro Satánico were preceded by trailers for three of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the cycle whose success my brothers were trying to emulate. Starting tomorrow, La Caída de la Casa de Usher, El Pozo y el Péndulo, and El Entierro Prematuro would grace this torn and dingy screen.

  The following morning, shortly after noon, Gloria knocked on my door. Much to my disappointment, she carried no luggage, having already dropped it at the Hotel Paraíso down the street. (Truth to tell, I’d been imagining she’d changed her mind while flying over the Rio Grande and now wanted to move into my apartment.) She wore a powder-blue Gainsborough hat and a brilliant white sundress—a kind of inverse shroud, I decided: My wife was so supremely alive she would defy all cerements until well into the next century. The lenses of her sunglasses were mirrors. The pleasure of seeing myself in her eyes did nothing to mitigate the pain of exile from her affections.

  “Here’s the first act of my Confidence-Man adaptation, a rough draft, Precambrian in fact.” She deposited a sheaf of typescript on the kitchen table. “Be insanely brutal, but within reason. Shall we have dinner tomorrow night and talk about Melville’s great trickster?”

  “Splendid idea, sweetheart. I’ll whip us up some pollo asado and a fresh fruit salad.”

  “I meant in a restaurant.”

  “OK, but how about breakfast instead? Salsa and eggs and confidence men. I’ll pick up the tab.”

  “I’m planning to sleep in.”

  “Lunch?”

  “I’m already booked for lunch.”

  “Oh?”

  “While I was waiting to check in, I had a terrific conversation with a fascinating Mexican writer,” said Gloria. “He complimented me on my Spanish. Somehow Melville came up, so I gave him the carbon of act one. We’re meeting in the hotel café tomorrow afternoon.”