Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

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

  AN ENTIRE MITTELEUROPA VILLAGE SURROUNDING AN IMMENSE REINCARNATION OF THE MADHOUSE FAMILIAR TO MOVIEGOERS WHO’VE SEEN PARC PICTURES’ CURRENT THRILLER-DILLER BLOCKBUSTER, THE ASYLUM OF DOCTOR VARGLOM!

  Accompanying the ad copy was a panoramic watercolor painting of Ekelstadt. The artist’s conception almost perfectly matched my mental picture of Stradegorst’s supernaturally created village.

  While Vincent Price’s abominable thought-vampire was luring droves of moviegoers into theaters, the winter issue of Cinesthesia appeared on the newsstands. Lavishly illustrated with production stills, the Varglom novelette occasioned a barrage of letters from ecstatic readers. Desmond Mallery was pleased to inform Carlos’s newfound fans that the magazine had acquired an English translation of another lost story from Mexico’s master of the macabre and scheduled it for the spring issue.

  From my perspective, the really important event of the season of Ibarra Rojo was neither the success of the first Doctor Varglom movie nor the ballyhoo my brothers deployed as the sequel went into production nor even the well-received publication of my novelette, but a development of which the outside world knew nothing. Acting largely on a whim, Desmond Mallery mailed the winter issue of Cinesthesia to Beverly Knox, a fiction editor at Random House with whom he’d gone to college. He also sent along a photostatic copy of the “City of Wax” typescript, plus the PARC Pictures press release about the life and art of Ibarra Rojo. Mrs. Knox went into orbit. If the other recently discovered stories were as good as the two Cinesthesia acquisitions, she told Desmond, and if the author’s oeuvre was indeed in the public domain, then the whole series merited a hardcover collection. She wanted to call the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a clever enough title, though its whimsy was palpably at odds with Carlos’s proto-Kafka despair.

  In his naïveté, Desmond referred Beverly Knox to my brothers, presumed keepers of the rare manuscripts. Naturally Oswald and Waldo constructed the potential Random House omnibus not as a well-deserved windfall for their sensitive and talented younger sibling but as free publicity for the next five films in the Doctor Varglom cycle. It was almost as an afterthought that, upon reaching me through the farmacia phone booth (at the twins’ urging, I’d remained in Mexico, the better to sustain my psychic identification with our confected genius), Oswald explained that I would have to complete the remaining masterpieces sooner than anyone had anticipated.

  “Mrs. Knox is talking about an advance of two thousand dollars—isn’t that terrific?” said Oswald. “I told her we should call it Six Reliable Ways to Lose Your Breakfast, but she wasn’t amused.”

  “I could use that kind of money, even down here where everything’s so cheap,” I said.

  “Less ten percent for Waldo and me.”

  “No, this time around I’m going to use my actual agent. I’m going to use Yvonne.”

  “Like hell you are,” said Oswald. “The last thing we need is for somebody in the New York publishing establishment to learn that Mexico’s master of the macabre is a neurotic kid from New Jersey.”

  “I’ll tell Yvonne I decided to write a bunch of horror stories under a nom de plume.”

  “Try to get something through your head, Lucius. You’re a ghost, not a ghostwriter. Ghosts don’t have fucking noms de plume. The only real writer at the feast is Carlos Ibarra Rojo, got that?”

  I was tempted to tell Oswald, no, the ghost in our machinations was actually Ibarra Rojo, but he would never believe my tale of a visitation from the netherworld. I was no longer sure I believed it myself. But I had to admit he was right about leaving Yvonne out of the negotiations. Essentially I’d be asking her to lie through her teeth when dealing with Random House, a request I was loath to make, lest it end our professional relationship.

  “So how long do I have to supply the missing stories?” I asked.

  “I fed Mrs. Knox a lot of horse manure about some great-great-grandnephew of Carlos’s coming out of the woodwork and claiming to be his literary executor. I told her that nobody fucks with the Belasco Brothers, and we’d have the situation straightened out in a month.”

  “So you’re giving me one lousy month to write four brilliant novelettes?”

  “Figure six weeks. I’ll pretend our translator’s a perfectionist. But let’s not drag this thing out, little brother. From what I hear, New York publishing is as capricious as Hollywood—it’s all show biz, right?—which means hot properties can turn cold overnight. This fucking Random House tide is at the flood, and now’s the time to take it.”

  Even as I sat in the phone booth listening to Oswald pontificate about entertainment industry realpolitik, my brain was buzzing with ideas for the third story. This time around I would attempt the Grand Guignol narrative, Doctor Varglom urging his patients to enact ever more ghoulish and gruesome theatrical diversions for the appreciative citizens of the village. Surprisingly enough, I finished the thing in a mere eight days of marijuana-fueled frenzy. (You could get anything you wanted at Señor Iglesias’s farmacia if you knew how to ask.) While “Ticket to an Evisceration” was not as perverse as “The Asylum” or as darkly poetic as “City of Wax,” I was pretty damn happy with it, so I mailed the manuscript off to PARC Pictures.

  I heard from Oswald ten days later. Desmond was nuts about the new novelette, and Mrs. Knox thought it was, quote, “as gorgeously crafted a story as I’ve ever read,” and she was putting together a contract. Her only stipulation was that, after Cinesthesia published “Ticket to an Evisceration,” no more Ibarra Rojo fiction would appear in its pages. Feeding the nascent cult was all to the good, but revealing the entire contents of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast would seriously hurt sales.

  “Waldo and I don’t like ‘Evisceration’ quite as much as Mrs. Knox did,” said Oswald, “but we’re still planning to turn it into our next picture.”

  “Three down and three to go,” I said. “When do I see some dough from Random House? For that matter, when do I see my three thousand for the ‘City of Wax’ movie deal?”

  “We collect half the Random advance on signing, half after Mrs. Knox approves the whole package.”

  “And the ‘Wax’ money?”

  “Be patient, little brother. That village set nearly broke the bank. We’ve budgeted the rest of the picture down to the last fucking roll of gaffer tape, and there’s nothing left in the kitty.”

  “Hey, Oswald, you don’t purchase literary properties out of a goddamn ‘kitty.’”

  “Little known fact. Mary Shelley got paid out of a kitty. Or are you telling me it’s time for Waldo to take a turn at impersonating our boy?”

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Admit it, kid. You love writing this crud for us.”

  “I love it, Oswald,” I said sotto voce, heaving a sigh. “I truly do.”

  March in Mexico is normally a Goldilocks month, not too cold, not too hot, but in the circumscribed world of Calle Moctezuma 14 a sweltering climate obtained, so intense was the heat generated by Lucius Belasco at his most productive. Although I never feared that the Remington would catch fire, I did worry that my furious fingers might break the machine before they brought into being “Blood Temple of Asmodeus” (the story set in the forbidden abbey, Varglom sacrificing his patients on a stone altar and thereby enticing obscene deities onto the mortal plane) and “Dreams of a Deranged Ape” (all about the junglelike conservatory Varglom had populated with blasphemous beasts of his own design). Inspiring my endeavors was a collection of artifacts that had spontaneously turned my apartment into a kind of Ibarra Rojo museum. A cover proof for Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast graced the bathroom door. My flea-market coffee table overflowed with copies of the spring Cinesthesia: IN THIS ISSUE, DOOM COMES TO EKELSTADT IN A NEW CARLOS IBARRA ROJO STORY. The kitchen wall displayed an anticipatory one-sheet for the City of Wax movie (sent to me b
y my brothers on the day they finished building their colossal Mitteleuropa village), featuring full-length portraits of Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, and Barbara Steele.

  With high hopes and soaring expectations, I entered my garden, sat down at the Remington, and attempted to begin the haunted-swamp story. I hammered out a scene breakdown for the first two acts, and, after winding a fresh sheet against the platen, typed a working title, “Liquid Infinity.” But that was all I produced that day. Or the next day. Or the next.

  Or the next.

  So this was what it was like, I thought, the disease all writers dread. The orchids mocked me. The roses stank. The bougainvillea released malevolent spores, aggravating the malady to which I’d thought myself immune, my transient “City of Wax” block notwithstanding. I decided that only a divine act would deliver me from the abyss that now engulfed my garden, my mind, my soul, but I believed in a benevolent deity even less than I believed in La Momia Azteca or any of his uncanny kin.

  At first there was only his breathing, a fusillade of distraught exhalations punctuated by coughing. A few minutes later I apprehended his scent, or rather the scent of his cologne, a floral formula he’d probably contrived himself. I looked up, shifting my gaze from the blank page to a fountain of bougainvillea.

  Carlos stood amidst the vines, satchel on his shoulder, gaunt face aglow with the noonday sun, leaning on his walking stick in a debonair pose. He had brought along the inevitable bottle of mezcal, and I briefly entertained the notion that the swamp-dwelling monster in my comatose novelette should be an immense agave worm.

  “And so I return, darling, summoned once again by the clamor of your despair.”

  Alternately smiling and scowling, Carlos sauntered across the garden. Reaching the wrought-iron table, he set down the mezcal bottle and seized my scene outline.

  “This has promise,” he said after studying all three pages. He returned the sketch to the table. “Tell me, how fares the beauteous Gloria? Did she ever finish her Melville play?”

  “I believe she lost faith in it,” I said. “We’re not on very chummy terms these days.”

  “Were you ever?”

  “I need a drink.”

  Carlos instantly produced two small tumblers from his satchel, then filled both to the brim. “This time I get to eat the worm,” he said as we sipped our liquor. I nodded in assent. “Permit me to offer a preliminary diagnosis,” he continued. “The foul and watery setting you chose is perfect, so revelatory of Varglom’s character. Whereas normal people prefer to drain their swamps, he decides to install one. But then you bring a tedious aquatic monster on stage, all tentacles and barbels and banality. It simply won’t do.”

  “I like my monster,” I said, imbibing.

  “It’s jejune.”

  “Then Beowulf is jejune.”

  “I’ve always thought so, yes. How does this sound, mi querido? One day, while surveying his swamp, Varglom gets an idea for curing his most delusional patients. He imagines outfitting them in deep-sea diving suits—you know, the sort of rubber-and-brass ensemble Captain Nemo wore on the ocean floor—then immersing them in the swamp. According to Varglom’s theory, each madman will fancy he’s descending into the noxious bog of his own mind, surrounded by sunken fears and repressed remembrances.”

  “I thought you were gone forever.”

  “Strange are the ways of metaphysics. What do you think of my premise?”

  “Varglom as the ancestor of Freud? I like it. Of course, most of the story should be from the viewpoint of a particular lunatic as he plunges ever downward into himself.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Our prose must be—”

  “Experimental,” said the phantom, siphoning mezcal through his thin lips.

  “Yes, I agree. Impressionistic.”

  “Even surrealistic. ‘City of Wax’ was some sort of great story, but ‘Liquid Infinity’ will be unlike any work of fiction ever written. We shall give the reader no compass, no signposts, no comfortable coordinates. How felicitous that we agreed to forswear celebrity and embrace satisfaction. Our visions are not for sale, are they, darling? Let’s get to work.”

  For two unbroken hours my creature and I collaborated, drinking mezcal and taking turns at the Remington as, sentence by eccentric sentence, paragraph by savage paragraph, the story took shape. By the tenth page we’d drained the bottle, and Carlos announced that he wanted to clear his brain with caffeine. Might I repair to the kitchen and brew a pot of strong coffee?

  The instant the phantom uttered the word “kitchen,” my recklessness visited itself upon me, a rush of dread rippling through my flesh. How foolish I’d been to appoint my apartment with collector’s items spawned by the season of Ibarra Rojo. Affecting nonchalance, I said I’d be pleased to make him some coffee, then sidled into the kitchen.

  For a fleeting moment it seemed that my indiscretion would go unnoticed. Taking hold of the preproduction City of Wax one-sheet, I tore it free of the wall. But then suddenly Carlos was beside me, displaying the mezcal bottle and pointing to its vermian occupant.

  “Drop the worm in the coffee pot,” he instructed me. “It will sweeten the brew.” His eyes wandered to the poster, and he unleashed a howl that might have come from a PARC Pictures reform-school werewolf. “I forbade it!” he cried. “I forbade it!”

  He yanked the one-sheet from my grasp and tore it in two, bisecting Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, and Barbara Steele across their abdomens as if they’d encountered Poe’s pendulum. I lurched toward the bathroom door, but the phantom was there first, ripping down the Six Impossible Things cover proof and shredding it with preternatural wrath. The next thing I knew, he was in the parlor, scooping up the spring issues of Cinesthesia. He ran onto the balcony and began dropping the magazines one by one over the side, so that they went fluttering to the mud below like geese blasted from the sky.

  “I was happy!” he cried as, clutching the last magazine, he scrambled onto the balcony railing. “How can you not understand? And yet I still love you, darling! Adios!”

  He spread his arms in a cruciform posture and dived, screaming, into the air. I half expected him to sprout wings, like a vampire bat or a satanic cherub, but instead, in a reprise of his departure from the cemetery, he simply vanished, still holding the magazine, as if he meant to share “City of Wax” with certain discerning citizens of the netherworld.

  Although Carlos’s second visitation shocked me no less than the first, it was now obvious how I could avoid additional such hauntings. Once I’d fulfilled my obligation to Random House by delivering the final Doctor Varglom tale, either “Liquid Infinity” or something from a different sector of Krogskrafte, I needed merely to forsake my Ibarra Rojo pseudonym. But I would not return to composing autobiographical fiction. The proficiency with which I’d ground out “Ticket to an Evisceration,” “Blood Temple of Asmodeus,” and “Dreams of a Deranged Ape” had convinced me I was a fabulist at heart. After completing the Varglom cycle, I must remain in Mexico and, energized by the culture that had brought forth the Crying Woman and El Demonio del Volcán, write works of unbridled speculation and fantastical contrivance that I signed with my own name.

  I decided I should not pursue this scheme before talking to my agent, so in early April I called Yvonne and told her I wanted to compose a long, melodramatic but stylistically ambitious novel in the manner of the nineteenth-century literary genius, Carlos Ibarra Rojo.

  “I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

  “His stories have been appearing in Cinesthesia.”

  “Synesthesia? The sensory-crossover phenomenon?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Anesthesia?”

  “Vincent Price recently starred in an adaptation of an Ibarra Rojo story called The Asylum of Do
ctor Varglom.”

  “Why the hell would Lucius Belasco want to write something that’s vulnerable to becoming a Vincent Price movie?”

  “Believe me, Ibarra Rojo was a class act. Random House is publishing all his surviving fiction.”

  “Do you have a premise yet?”

  “No, but I’m living in Mexico now. The culture inspires me.”

  “Mexico?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Listen, Lucius, if you really want to do this, far be it from me to discourage you. In a peculiar way, it sounds auspicious.”

  I said adios to Yvonne, then proceeded to my garden with the aim of outlining a primevally weird novel or two.

  Someone was waiting for me, a scarecrow of a man wrapped in bandages, a moldering serape hanging in tatters from his frame. His head suggested a sugar skull left over from El Día de los Muertos.

  “My name is Popoca,” wheezed the intruder. Scraggly cords of black hair sprouted from his cranium. His fingers were as long and thin as trussing needles.

  “I know,” I said, frozen in my tracks. “I’ve seen the movies. You’re that accomplished actor Ángel Di Stefani, star of the Momia Azteca trilogy.”

  “A reasonable guess, but wrong.”

  “Carlos? Is that you under those rags?”

  “I am Popoca.”

  “As you wish.”

  “When I appeared in her office yesterday morning, Señora Knox accused me of being a prankster in a Halloween costume.”

  “You went to Random House, Carlos? Dressed like that? Mierda.”

  “Hágame un favor, mi amigo. Let the mummy talk. Emphatically I informed Señora Knox that I was not a playing a joke. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘There are some things irrationality cannot explain,’ I replied. ‘I’m a busy woman,’ she said. ‘Ibarra Rojo must retain his obscurity,’ I insisted. ‘But he’s dead,’ she said. ‘So am I,’ I noted. ‘His collection is on the fall list,’ she protested. ‘Your name is on a death list,’ I retorted, adding, ‘My grip is of iron, my scruples are nonexistent, and I am prepared to strangle you.’ These last remarks made a deep impression on her, and as our conversation progressed, she agreed to cancel Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Señor Belasco, you look as if you don’t believe any of this.”