Terra Incognita

by Connie Willis

  And it had never existed, that harmless, innocent world. In 1940, Hitler was bombing the hell out of London and already hauling Jews off in cattle cars. The studio execs were lobbying against war and making deals, the real Mayer was running the studio, and starlets were going pop on a casting couch for a five-second walk-on. Fred and Eleanor were doing fifty takes, a hundred, in a hot airless studio and going home to soak their bleeding feet.

  It had never existed, this world of starry floors and backlit hair and easy, careless kick-turns, and the 1940 audience watching it knew it didn’t. And that was its appeal, not that it reflected “sunnier, simpler times,” but that it was impossible. That it was what they wanted and could never have.

  The screen cut to legalese again, RKO-Warner’s appeal already under way, and I hadn’t seen the end of the routine, hadn’t gotten it on tape or even backed it up.

  It didn’t matter. It was Eleanor, not Alis, and no matter what Heada thought, no matter how logical it was, I wasn’t the one doing it. Because if I had been, litigation or no litigation, that was where I would have put her, dancing side by side with Fred, half turning to give him that delighted smile.

  MONTAGE: Tight close-up of comp screen. Title credits dissolve into one another: South Pacific, Stand Up and Cheer!, State Fair, Strike Up the Band, Summer Stock.

  Eventually, I ran out of places to look. I went down to Hollywood Boulevard again, but nobody remembered her, and none of the places had Digimattes except A Star Is Born, and it was closed for the night, an iron gate pulled across the front. Alis’s other classes had been fibe-op-feed lectures, and her roommate, very splatted, was under the impression Alis had gone back home.

  “She packed up all her stuff,” she said. “She had all this stuff, costumes and wigs and stuff, and left.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. Last week, I think. Before Christmas.”

  I talked to the roommate five weeks after I’d seen Alis in Seven Brides. At the end of six weeks, I ran out of musicals. There weren’t that many, and I’d watched them all, except for the ones in litigation because of Fred. And Ray Bolger, who Viamount filed copyright on the day after I went out to Burbank.

  The Russ Tamblyn suit got settled, beeping me awake in the middle of the night to tell me somebody’d won the right to rape and pillage him on the big screen, and I backed up the barnraising scene and then watched West Side Story, just in case. Alis wasn’t there.

  I watched the “On the Town” routine again and looked up Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, convinced there was something important there that I was missing. It was a remake of Gold Diggers of 1933, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. I put all the routines up on the array in order, easiest to most difficult, as if that might give me some clue to what she’d do next, but it wasn’t any help. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was the hardest thing she’d done, and she’d done that six weeks ago.

  I listed the movies by date, studio, and dancers, and ran a cross-tabulation on the data. And then I sat and stared at the nonresults for a while. And at the array.

  There was a knock on the door. Mayer. I blanked the screen and tried to think of a nonmusical to call up, but my mind had gone blank. “Philadelphia Story,” I said finally. “Frame 115-010,” and yelled, “Come on in.”

  It was Heada. “I came to tell you Mayer’s going nuclear about your not sending any movies,” she said, looking at the screen. It was the wedding scene. Everybody, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, were gathered around Katharine Hepburn, who had a huge hat and a hangover.

  “The word is, Arthurton’s bringing in a new guy, supposedly to head up Editing,” Heada said, “but really to be his assistant, in which case Mayer’s out.”

  Good, I thought, at least that’ll put a stop to the carnage. But if Mayer got fired, I’d lose my access, and I’d never find Alis.

  “I’m working on them right now,” I said, and launched into an elaborate explanation of why I was still on Philadelphia Story.

  “Mayer offered me a job,” Heada said.

  “So now that he’s hired you as a warmbody, you’ve got a stake in his not getting fired, and you’ve come to tell me to get busy?”

  “No,” she said. “Not warmbody. Location assistant. I leave for New York this afternoon.”

  It was the last thing I expected. I looked over at her and saw she was wearing a blazer and skirt. Heada as studio exec.

  “You’re leaving?” I said blankly.

  “This afternoon,” she said. “I came to give you my access number.” She took out a hardcopy. “It’s asterisk nine two period eight three three,” she said, and handed me the piece of paper.

  I looked at it, expecting the number, but it was a list of movie titles.

  “None of them have any drinking in them,” she said. “There are about three weeks’ worth. They should stall Mayer for a while.”

  “Thank you,” I said wonderingly.

  “Betsy Booth strikes again,” she said.

  I must have looked blank.

  “Judy Garland. Love Finds Andy Hardy,” she said. “I told you I’ve been watching a lot of movies. That’s why I got the job. Location assistant has to know all the sets and stock shots and props and be able to find them for the hackate so he doesn’t have to digitize new ones. It saves memory.”

  She pointed at the screen. “The Philadelphia Story’s got a public library, a newspaper office, a swimming pool, and a 1936 Packard.” She smiled. “Remember when you said the movies taught us how to act and gave us lines to say? You were right. But you were wrong about which part I was playing. You said it was Thelma Ritter, but it wasn’t.” She waved her hand at the screen, where the wedding party was assembled. “It was Liz.”

  I frowned at the screen, unable for a moment to remember who Liz was. Katharine Hepburn’s precocious little sister? No, wait. The other reporter, Jimmy Stewart’s long-suffering girlfriend.

  “I’ve been playing Joan Blondell,” Heada said. “Mary Stuart Masterson, Ann Sothern. The girl next door, the secretary who’s in love with her boss, only he never notices her, he thinks she’s just a kid. He’s in love with Tracy Lord, but Joan Blondell helps him anyway. She’d do anything for him, even watch movies.”

  She stuck her hands in her blazer pockets, and I wondered when she had stopped wearing the halter dress and the pink satin gloves.

  “The secretary stands by him,” Heada said. “She picks up after him and gives him advice. She even helps him out with his romances, because she knows at the end of the movie he’ll finally notice her, he’ll realize he can’t get along without her, he’ll figure out Katharine Hepburn’s all wrong for him and the secretary’s the one he’s been in love with all along.” She looked up at me. “But this isn’t the movies, is it?” she said bleakly.

  Her hair wasn’t platinum blond anymore. It was light brown with highlights in it. “Heada,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I already figured that out. It’s what comes of taking too much klieg.” She smiled. “In real life, Liz would have to get over Jimmy Stewart, settle for being friends. Audition for a new part. Joan Crawford, maybe?”

  I shook my head. “Rosalind Russell.”

  “Well, Melanie Griffith anyway,” she said. “So, anyway, I leave this afternoon, and I just wanted to say good-bye and have you wish me luck.”

  “You’ll be great,” I said. “You’ll own ILMGM in six months.” I kissed her on the cheek. “You know everything.”

  “Yeah.”

  She started out the door. “ ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,’ ” she said.

  I watched her down the hall, and then went back in the room, looking at the list Heada’d given me. There were more than thirty movies here. Closer to fifty. The ones near the bottom had notes after them: “Frame 14-1968, bottle on table,” and “Frame 102-166, reference to ale
.”

  I should feed the first twelve in, send them to Mayer to calm him down, but I didn’t. I sat on the bed, staring at the list. Next to Casablanca, she had written, “Hopeless.”

  “Hi,” Heada said from the door. “It’s Tess Trueheart again,” and then stood there, looking uncomfortable.

  “What is it?” I said, standing up. “Is Mayer back?”

  “She’s not in 1950,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “She’s down on Sunset Boulevard. I saw her.”

  “On Sunset Boulevard?”

  “No. On the skids.”

  Not in a parallel timefeed. Or some never-never land where people walked through the screen into the movies. Here. On the skids. “Did you talk to her?”

  She shook her head. “It was morning rush hour. I was coming back from Mayer’s, and I just caught a glimpse of her. You know how rush hour is. I tried to get through the crowd to her, but by the time I made it, she’d gotten off.”

  “Why would she get off at Sunset Boulevard? Did you see her get off?”

  “I told you, I just got a glimpse of her through the crowd. She was lugging all this equipment. But she had to have gotten off at Sunset Boulevard. It was the only station we passed.”

  “You said she was carrying equipment. What kind of equipment?”

  “I don’t know. Equipment. I told you, I—”

  “Just got a glimpse of her. And you’re sure it was her?”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but Betsy Booth’s a tough role to shake. And it’s hard to hate Alis, after everything she’s done.” She gestured at her reflections in the array. “Look at me. Chooch-free, klieg-free.” She turned and looked at me. “I always wanted to be in the movies and now I am.”

  She started down the hall again.

  “Heada, wait,” I said, and then was sorry, afraid her face would be full of hope when she turned around, that there would be tears in her eyes.

  But this was Heada, who knows everything.

  “What’s your name?” I said. “All I have is your access, and I’ve never called you anything but Heada.”

  She smiled at me knowingly, ruefully. Emma Thompson in Remains of the Day. “I like Heada,” she said.

  Camera whip-pans to medium shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Sunset Boulevard” in yellow.

  I took the opdisk of Alis’s routines and went down to the skids. There was nobody on them except a huddle of tourates in mouse ears, a very splatted Marilyn, and Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, Mary Pickford, and Harrison Ford, emerging one by one from ILMGM’s golden fog. I watched the signs, waiting for Sunset Boulevard and wondering what Alis was doing there. There was nothing down there but the old freeway.

  The Marilyn wove unsteadily over to me. Her white halter dress was stained and splotched, and there was a red smear of lipstick by her ear.

  “Want a pop?” she said, looking not at me but at Harrison Ford behind me on the screen.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said docilely. “How about you?” She didn’t wait for me, or Harrison, to answer. She wandered off and then came back. “Are you a studio exec?” she asked.

  “No, sorry,” I said.

  “I want to be in the movies,” she said, and wandered off again.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. It went silver for a second between promos, and I caught sight of myself looking clean and responsible and sober. Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No wonder she’d thought I was a studio exec.

  The station sign for Sunset Boulevard came up and I got off. The area hadn’t changed. There was still nothing down here, not even lights. The abandoned freeway loomed darkly in the starlight, and I could see a fire a long way off under one of the cloverleafs.

  There was no way Alis was here. She must have spotted Heada and gotten off here to keep her from finding out where she was really going. Which was where?

  There was another light now, a thin white beam wobbling this way. Ravers, probably, looking for victims. I got back on the skids.

  The Marilyn was still there, sitting in the middle of the floor, her legs splayed out, fishing through an open palm full of pills for chooch, illy, klieg. The only equipment a freelancer needs, I thought, which at least means whatever Alis is doing it’s not freelancing, and realized I’d been relieved ever since Heada told me about seeing Alis with all that equipment, even though I didn’t know where she was. At least she hadn’t turned into a freelancer.

  It was half past two. Heada had seen Alis at rush hour, which was still four hours away. If Alis went the same place every day. If she hadn’t been moving someplace, carrying her luggage. But Heada hadn’t said luggage, she’d said equipment. And it couldn’t be a comp and monitor, because Heada would have recognized those, and anyway, they were light. Heada had said “lugging.” What then? A time machine?

  The Marilyn had stood up, spilling capsules everywhere, and was heading over the yellow warning strip for the far wall, which was still extolling ILMGM’s cavalcade of stars.

  “Don’t!” I said, and grabbed for her, a foot from the wall.

  She looked up at me, her eyes completely dilated. “This is my stop. I have to get off.”

  “Wrong way, Corrigan,” I said, turning her around to face the front. The sign read Beverly Hills, which didn’t seem very likely. “Where did you want to get off?”

  She shrugged off my arm and turned back to the screen.

  “The way out’s that way,” I said, pointing to the front.

  She shook her head and pointed at Fred Astaire emerging out of the fog. “Through there,” she said, and sank down to sitting, her white skirt in a circle. The screen went silver, reflecting her sitting there, fishing through her empty palm, and then to golden fog. The lead-in to the ILMGM promo.

  I stared at the wall, which didn’t look like a wall, or a mirror. It looked like what it was, a fog of electrons, a veil over emptiness, and for a minute it all seemed possible. For a minute, I thought, Alis didn’t get off at Sunset Boulevard. She didn’t get off the skids at all. She stepped through the screen, like Mia Farrow, like Buster Keaton, and into the past.

  I could almost see her in her black skirt and green weskit and gloves, disappearing into the golden fog and emerging on a Hollywood Boulevard full of cars and palm trees and lined with rehearsal halls full of mirrors.

  “Anything’s possible,” the voiceover roared.

  The Marilyn was on her feet again and weaving toward the back wall.

  “Not that way,” I said, and sprinted after her.

  It was a good thing she hadn’t been headed for the screens this time—I’d never have made it. By the time I got to her, she was banging on the wall with both fists.

  “Let me off!” she shouted. “This is my stop!”

  “The way off’s this way,” I said, trying to turn her, but she must have been doing rave. Her arm was like iron.

  “I have to get off here,” she said, pounding with the flat of her hands. “Where’s the door?”

  “The door’s that way,” I said, wondering if this was how I had been the night Alis brought me home from Burbank. “You can’t get off this way.”

  “She did,” she said.

  I looked at the back wall and then back at her. “Who did?”

  “She did,” she said. “She went right through the door. I saw her,” and puked all over my feet.

  MOVIE CLICHE #12: The Moral.

  A character states the obvious, and everybody gets the point.

  SEE: The Wizard of Oz, Field of Dreams, Love Story, What’s New Pussycat?

  I got the Marilyn off at Wilshire and took her to rehab, by which time she’d pretty much pumped her own stomach, and waited to make sure she checked in.

  “
Are you sure you’ve got time to do this?” she said, looking less like Marilyn and more like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

  “I’m sure.” There was plenty of time, now that I knew where Alis was.

  While she was filling out paperwork, I accessed Vincent. “I have a question,” I said without preamble. “What if you took a frame and substituted an identical frame? Could that get past the fibe-op ID-locks?”

  “An identical frame? What would be the point of that?”

  “Could it?”

  “I guess,” he said. “Is this for Mayer?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What if you substituted a new image that matched the original? Could the ID-locks tell the difference?”

  “Matched?”

  “A different image that’s the same.”

  “You’re splatted,” he said, and signed off.

  It didn’t matter. I already knew the ID-locks couldn’t tell the difference. It would take too much memory. And, as Vincent had said, what would be the point of changing an image to one exactly like it?

  I waited till the Marilyn was in a bed and getting a ridigaine IV and then got back on the skids. After La Brea, there was nobody on them, but it took me till three-thirty to find the service door to the shut-off section and past five to get it open.

  I was worried for a while that Alis had braced it shut, which she had, but not intentionally. One of the fibe-op-feed cables was up against it, and when I finally got the door open a crack, all I had to do was push.

  She was facing the far wall, looking at the screen that should have been blank in this shut-off section. It wasn’t. In the middle of it, Peter Lawford and June Allyson were demonstrating the Varsity Drag to a gymnasium full of college students in party dresses and tuxes. June was wearing a pink dress and pink heels with pompoms, and so was Alis, and their hair was curled under in identical blond pageboys.

  Alis had set the Digimatte on top of its case, with the compositor and pixar beside it on the floor, and snaked the fibe-op cable along the yellow warning strip and around in front of the door to the skids feed. I pushed the cable out from the door, gently, so it wouldn’t break the connection, and opened the door far enough so I could see, and then stood, half hidden by it, and watched her.