In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch

by Thomas Ligotti

  “There are owls here?” she had asked him, thinking she had walked out of her little desperate plot of Van Nuys and onto a movie set where she was the leading lady.

  “Owls?” he had said. “What?” and looked at her like she was crazy.

  “Didn’t you hear that? That sounded like an owl.”

  “There’s only one bird-brain here, and I’m looking at her,” he had said.

  She’d started giggling; she couldn’t help it, it was just like he was on TV, the smart-aleck line from the tough, cool cop.

  “Shut up, now,” he said, his voice husky, that same character when he’s about to give the lady what’s coming to her, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  Only, she was wearing heels and he was short so it was more chin than mouth, and then he pulled her head and hair down into him, and bit her lip, and it hurt a little, and she liked it. She had liked assertive men, but more than that she had liked famous men.

  Now—what does she like now?

  She hears it again. A whoosh of wings. A call in the night.

  He’s out there. Montgomery Clift. The man of her dreams.

  It doesn’t matter about the drinks. It doesn’t matter that she will fall when she runs because she is drunk and doesn’t know just how much so. She should run to that boy and tell him she never should have cheated on him, never should have hurt him, never should have wanted more than that perfect dream of a perfect boy with nothing but a pure heart and eyes like stars dying.

  “There’s an owl out there,” she tries to say to him, but she slurs it a bit.

  The Character Actor is distracted. He doesn’t even respond. “Get in the car,” he says.

  She does.

  He doesn’t.

  She looks at him with a face that is both numb from the drinks and dumb in its understanding, but with the beginning of an expression like a question. In less than thirty seconds, she will get shot in that face. He tries to say goodbye but his voice starts to crack, like it did when he went through puberty and everyone could see the death sentence of his career. Well, he came back, didn’t he? You don’t need to be no cute little kid to be famous. You can be anything. A cute kid, a rough and tumble detective, a monster, what does it matter when the light is in your eyes—you can’t see what’s out there, anyway.

  Or who.

  Who?

  “If you didn’t do it, who did?” they will ask him. “Who? Who? Who?”

  “What are you, a fucking owl?” he will say to them, and they can’t help but crack a smile. Always the wise-ass. Just like his character on TV.

  TREMBLER

  KEVIN SAMPSELL

  You wanted to do it from behind but I said I wanted to see your eyes. We hadn’t seen each other for several days. This was when we were both married to other people.

  The passenger seat was pushed back and reclined. We were in your car, parked by the train tracks. It was far away from any busy street, so it was private enough. An abandoned warehouse gave us a little shield on one side, even though anyone on the passing cargo trains could see us easily. Maybe we were giving some hobos and conductors a show. But it was cold outside and our heat fogged up the windows.

  You straddled me and wiped a clear spot in the window next to us, so you could watch the trains pass by. We could feel the vibration of their heavy loads, with names of companies like Bekins and Burlington Northern scrolling by. Elaborate graffiti of distorted faces and taggers’ names decorated many of the cars. The windows kept fogging, so you reached up and opened the sunroof. You stuck your head out and for a second I could imagine the headless horseman riding atop of me. I heard you gasp and say, “There’s someone over there.”

  “Where?” I said, “Is he coming over here?”

  “He’s just standing there, about a hundred feet away,” you said. “But he’s watching us.”

  The way you kept moving told me that the person didn’t bother you too much. I tried to imagine what it looked like to that person—a small trembling Subaru with a woman’s head sticking out of the top. Half woman, half car.

  But maybe the person couldn’t see us very well. It was pretty dark out and the only light came from some of the blinking red lights by the tracks.

  You slowed down to a grind and we both came. You weren’t saying anything but I could see your breath puffing out of your mouth like a steam whistle.

  You slid back into the car and closed the sunroof and turned the key in the ignition. You laughed a little and said, “That was treacherous.”

  I nervously pulled my pants back on and looked out the window to see if the man was still around. “I wonder if that guy called the cops,” I said. “We could get busted for public indecency.”

  You drove away calmly and quietly with a smile on your face and your shirt still unbuttoned. I saw my sweat drying on your chest. A few minutes later you said, “He had his dick out.” The way you said it I couldn’t tell if you were excited or repulsed.

  A MODEL MADE OUT OF CARD OR, THE ELEPHANT MAN AND OTHER REMINISCENCES

  GABRIEL BLACKWELL

  That Obscure Object of Desire

  Over the course of ten films and one-third of a century, filmmaker David Lynch has fashioned an oeuvre as hermetic and idiosyncratic as any painter’s or poet’s, which is to say freakishly rare in Hollywood. And yet, Lynch’s artistic escutcheon is not wholly free of blots—two early stains, in particular, reveal the malign influence of acculturative producers: a 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune, that, due to unfortunate last-minute tinkering by Dino de Laurentiis, Lynch considers a failure and has attempted to disown, and 1980’s Brooksfilms production, The Elephant Man, a much more successful and “Lynchian” film, if still not immediately identifiable as the product of David Lynch.

  On taking up Mel Brooks’s offer to adapt and direct the story of Joseph Merrick for the big screen, Lynch has said, “[The Elephant Man] seemed right down my alley, though I’m not sure just what that alley is.” Joseph Merrick’s was, in that summer of stage adaptation (Richmond Crinkley and Nelle Nugent’s Broadway production of Bernard Pomerance’s play) and book publication (Michael Howell and Peter Ford’s The True History of the Elephant Man), an alley as resounding with echoes and as busy with mystery as the bisecting courtyard of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Conspicuously missing from that alley, the Anna Thorwald of this riptide in the zeitgeist, were the shadows that Merrick’s disfigured face cast, or would have, if anyone were brave enough—or perhaps only cynical enough—to light it for the audience. Deformity, the very thing that had made the man notable in the first instance, was notably absent from the stage production (a conscious decision on the part of Pomerance), and the book contained not a single illustration in its first printing (though this was eventually remedied with a ten-page appendix of black-and-white photographs).

  Lynch’s unique contribution to the study of the Elephant Man then, was his enthusiastic, some said tasteless, willingness to exhibit Merrick’s neurofibromatosis-ravaged visage, until then, veiled and occulted to all but those contemporary few blessed with the proper introduction or the price of admission. That these few had subsequently turned away from that face, possibly even sought to erase it from the history books, was perhaps testimony of its power to affect. The books Lynch and his screenwriting partners, Christopher DeVore and Eric Bergren, consulted were emblematic. Frederick Treves’s unillustrated memoir, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, accounted for their script’s mistaken appellation of Merrick, called there “John” Merrick, a signal, if unintended, obfuscation heaped upon a more significant transgression against history: Treves, Merrick’s doctor at the London Hospital, spuriously claimed that Merrick’s remains had been cremated following the Elephant Man’s death, when in fact Merrick’s skeleton and samples of his skin, as well as numerous casts of the areas of greatest deformity, were all preserved and on display in the London Hospital Medical Museum, courtesy of Frederick Treves. Ashley Montagu’s volume, The Elephant Man: A
Study in Human Dignity, based in large part on Treves’s memoir, repeated many of Treves’s errors, and, like Howell and Ford’s more thoroughly researched study to come, contained not a single photograph or illustration of Merrick, though several were extant.

  Nor were Lynch and his co-writers entirely innocent of the occluding gesture. Christopher Tucker’s Elephant Man make-up goes unseen through fourteen minutes of film as Treves makes his way through a rowdy Whitechapel night and not one but two doors labeled “No Entry,” threading a labyrinth of blanket-partitioned freakshow exhibits before finally arriving at Merrick’s, where there is, in fact, no Merrick in evidence. It is only on a second visit that Treves and the audience are finally able to glimpse Merrick, and then only for a moment. The Elephant Man we are given is dressed in cloak and hat, a canvas sack with a single slit cut in it covering his face. When Merrick is examined by Treves and the Royal College of Surgeons, he is seen only through a screen, and from the back—the restive viewer could be forgiven for wondering whether, through nearly half an hour of Lynch’s The Elephant Man, this peep in the shadows is all we are to get, what we have paid our money to see.

  The film was received, despite the critical acclaim of the press, with a similarly obfuscatory impulse on the part of the establishment. Tucker’s make-up, praised almost to the degree of the deformity it represented, was nonetheless denied a special award by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at their annual Oscar awards. The following year, the Academy, embarrassed by the cicatrix of bad press attending its snubbing of the film for a total of seven Oscars, including Best Director for Lynch and Best Actor for John Hurt, felt compelled to create, too late for Lynch’s production, a new award to honor The Elephant Man’s innovation: Best Make-Up, a category previously unheralded at the ceremony. “The whole thing’s a whitewash for them, a cover-up. They [are going to give] this treacle an award to honor the very thing that hampered John’s ability to play the part and probably cost him the Oscar in 1980. It’s a tragedy!” one of Hurt’s costars reportedly complained when the film Mask, the story of Roy Dennis, a boy suffering from an affliction which caused the bones in his skull to expand and his facial features to congeal to an unchanging, vaguely benign, expression, won the award in 1985.

  Tucker’s make-up, prepared from Treves’s casts, was perhaps Oscar-worthy, but only as given life by the actor bearing it. Hurt is practically a ghost under the bulbous promontories of Tucker’s prostheses—only his eyes, penumbras of such aggrieved mournfulness they draw the lens their way like an observer passing the event horizon of a black hole, are recognizable as his, but it is his eyes that give Hurt’s performance. The make-up itself is so extraordinary as to set Hurt apart, as though he were appearing in a completely different film than his costars. Otherwise banal scenes become uncanny simply because Hurt as Merrick is onscreen. It is this more than anything else which marks the film as Lynchian.

  But was Lynch’s decision to make Merrick’s face the centerpiece of his production an innovation or an unwitting imitation? In fact, it seems that Lynch was unknowingly taking up a project that had very nearly reached the production stage at Universal Pictures in 1946, when the star of that production, as well as its writer, director, and producer, suddenly died of a heart attack.

  Vatican of Fools

  Rondo Hatton, at the time of his death at age 51, veteran of over thirty films, first discovered the story of Joseph Merrick while on the set of RKO’s 1939 William Dieterle-directed adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In the opening scene of the movie—Hugo’s “Pope of Fools” contest, a competition to make the most gruesome face—Hatton plays the second of Quasimodo’s rivals. He was hired largely because, as producer Pan Berman later joked, “That poor guy didn’t even need to make a face to win that contest.”

  Hatton had intended to try out for the part of Charles Laughton’s double, but was dismissed before call as being hopelessly inappropriate. Laughton, possessed of an ideal height and frame even if not exactly hideous of aspect, was thought perfect for the part of Quasimodo, while Hatton, the natural grotesque, was unfortunately much too tall to play either Laughton’s double or Hugo’s dwarf. Spotting Hatton’s massive brow above a crowd of released extras, Berman signed Hatton for the Palace scene on the spot. But there was one snag—while the shooting schedule was being drawn up, Berman had personally excised the Palace scene from screenwriter Bruno Frank’s script in order to save money on sets and conserve precious screen time. With Hatton’s hiring, the scene had to be re-added to the slate, dressed, and rehearsed virtually on the eve of shooting. RKO’s set dressers had to rush from studio to studio, looking for a standing set that wouldn’t have to be too heavily rehabilitated to fit the huge scene Dieterle and Berman had in mind.

  Hatton would go on to bigger roles, of course, but in many ways this small cameo was the token of his Hollywood career. Those in the theaters who knew the book might be excused for having taken Hatton for Quasimodo: coming at the very opening of the movie, Laughton, with his cartoonishly distorted features, has not yet appeared onscreen when Hatton steps proudly into the stocks and endures the jeers and rotting vegetables of the crowd. Already horribly disfigured by the acromegaly that would eventually cause his fatal heart attack, Hatton nevertheless took the red ribbon while the garishly made-up Laughton was awarded the blue. The camera pans over Hatton gamely vamping for the yokels as a crowd of extras raises Laughton to their shoulders, bearing him quickly out from under the kliegs, his primitive prosthetics drooping and jouncing with their steps. Hatton, a spectacle on the set, was barely a sideshow when the cameras were rolling. In all, he is onscreen for less than a minute, thirty feet of celluloid. It was all RKO could spare—Laughton’s expensive contract did not allow for Hugo’s brand of panoptic democratic attention.

  Rondo Keith Hatton was born a happy and healthy baby on April 22, 1894, in Hagerstown, Maryland, but spent most of his childhood in Tampa, Florida. An athlete, lettering in football and baseball, he was graceful and charming—Hatton was voted Most Handsome by his graduating class at Hillsborough High School, and the October 31, 1917 issue of Stars and Stripes reports that Private First Class Hatton “never has any trouble finding a date, never has a slow mail day, and never fails to bring a smile with his goofy grin.” But shortly after returning home from the front, he began to experience phantom pains like limbs and digits that had never existed had been smashed with a hammer or ground underfoot. He called in sick so often at the Tampa Tribune that he nearly lost his job, but the paper’s editor, E. D. Lambright, took pity on his cub reporter, until then the most dependable and the most genial of anyone in his pen. Lambright hoped that Hatton’s bad luck and bad humor would soon pass.

  Instead of passing, however, Hatton’s condition worsened. The diagnosis—acromegaly—might as well have been in Greek as far as he was concerned. Back at the paper, he looked it up in the morgue; the pictures there were even more horrible than their descriptions. His doctors tried to reassure him that the disease affected different people to different degrees, that there was no way of knowing exactly what it would do to him—it might be no more severe than the headaches he was presently experiencing, perhaps a slight swelling of his hands and feet. Already, though, Hatton had had to throw away several pairs of gloves and all of his shoes. In six months, his shoe size had gone from an eleven to an eleven-and-a-half. Then a twelve. Then a thirteen. He could no longer fit his fists into his pockets. His headaches, unimaginable to begin with, only got worse and his neck was constantly sore from the strain, as though his head had been chiseled out of stone and then filled with cement.

  In Hatton’s case, it wasn’t just an enlargement. The bones in his head jutted out at their seams in obtuse angles, pushing his face into a smaller and smaller set of expressions. In the rare moments he could forget his acromegalic agony, his brows wouldn’t relax their apostrophized menace, his scowl wouldn’t straighten. Strangers would no longer look him in the eye, and childr
en wouldn’t look at him at all, not without tears. He stopped going out, his friends say, even stopped answering the door when they called on him at home. His colleagues at the Tribune tried their best to cheer him up, holding a bachelor auction in his honor, at which, of course, they made sure he went for the highest price. The winning bidder, a visibly horrified Tampa debutante whose father was on the Tribune’s board, did not return his phone calls, and the date never came off.

  Lambright kept sending his young reporter out, though, giving Hatton the assignment to cover the filming of Henry King’s Hell Harbor (1930), just getting underway then in Tampa. Hell Harbor is the story of a young woman sold into marriage by her own father. Hatton was spotted by the enterprising King and offered a small part as a tavern owner in league with the scheming fiancé, a low-life openly despised by his future wife. Hatton’s character falls in love with the girl and attempts to save her by betraying his partner in crime. At first, Hatton demurred, telling King that he was no actor; evidently flustered, he seems to have forgotten the several amateur productions he had starred in at Hillsborough High. But eventually King wore the reporter down, and Hatton agreed to appear in the film.

  In the wake of Hell Harbor, friends teased Hatton that Doug Fairbanks ought to start looking to his laurels, but he stayed at the Tribune for another five years, working stoically on in the face of growing difficulties—he could hardly hope to get a story out of sources too scared to talk to him and, no matter what it was he was supposed to be covering, he was more often news himself than an objective reporter of it. He was finally pensioned and persuaded to put his handicap to work for him in the summer of 1935, when he left Tampa behind for the bright allure of Tinseltown.