Shiva and Other Stories

by Barry N. Malzberg

  * * *

  So Finzie, superhero, once tormented film-struck kid in the Flatlands of Brooklyn but now creator, producer, and director of a dozen increasingly important films limning the alienation and splendor of post-industrial circumstance, modestly accepts the laurel of the Leaf of Gold from the chairman of the jury, bows to the convulsion of applause which storms through the auditorium, then holds the microphone to make a brief speech which will be translated simultaneously into twenty languages and broadcast throughout the world. Hot stuff for the kid from Brooklyn. Eve Harlow stares adoringly from the audience, doubtless recalling their afternoon of love and the role which he had promised her in the new trilogy, and Finzie nods at her wisely, distantly, seeking to keep their relationship private even at this moment of such public triumph.

  “Those visions,” he says, “those visions which we hold to ourselves in the clutch of night, those dreams of childhood splendor, it is my earnest hope that I will bring these dreams, that child to splendor, to the world. I think the true filmmaker is not only a visionary but a seer, a reconstructionist who can make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain. For that and in that spirit I accept your award.” And so he does. The applause is tumultuous; it beats at him like the wings of a covey of birds, flushed from the auditorium, flushed from memory. Finzie can see the camera coming in on dolly, the close-up of his graceful yet subtly tormented face slowly dissolving then, cracking open in the heat and light to the face of the kid who might have been. Might not have been. It is difficult to tell, the past is as fluid, as shapeless as the present, it seems to shift under his attention just as sometimes during the conjoinment of love it all slips into the liquefied dark and he must begin again and again. Finzie, filmmaker to the world, splendid issue and prince of light, addresses the audience at Cannes clutching his Leaf of Gold, his sprig of astonishment, attending to the ghostly shrieks and stammer which lurk at the border of memory.

  * * *

  And still great hours later, still feeling the thrust and urgency of that applause, a vast and gaping need, an emptiness in the continuum which pleaded for him alone, the superhero and top director lies in his palatial bedroom clutching Eve Harlow or Dorothea Harkins (call her what you will, she remains adoring), watching a tape of his award-winning film on the videocassette recorder he takes with him everywhere. This film, Thrills and Wonder in America, traces the odyssey of a young man from Flatbush who comes to rule the world, first by film and then by American salute: he ventures into politics, becomes President and the leader of the new world government. Thrills and Wonder is a metaphor for his own desire, a subsumed autobiography: Finzie knows the real meaning of all this stuff. As in Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, huge crowds chant, there are posed friezes of splendid, beseeching athletes and supporters who usher the actor to ever greater power while Finzie, superheroic filmmaker and highly experienced lover of women who in the old days would have passed him in contempt, looks at his accomplishment in awe. He appears to be playing the lead role too, and making a splendid job of this. What he has done is truly remarkable, he thinks: he has through the medium of his art made the world an adjunct to his obsession. All these actors screaming, those thousands of extras posturing and saluting and he in control of every gesture. It goes beyond gesture, beyond metaphor: he has made the world the paradigm of his desire, his need. Griffith, Reifenstahl, Huston, Capra: these predecessors tried that as well but he, Finzie, has taken the obsession to consummation. Here in the splendor of Cannes he has made his film not an accessory but an empire. Shattered, almost humbled by the power of his vision, the magnificent and heroic director of the year reaches for Eve Harlow.

  “What do you think?” he says, “Is this as good as it gets or what? How could it be any better?”

  The splendid Eve grinds a hip, brushes a breast to his side, touches his back. “Who is to know?” she says. “If you say it’s so, then it is so.” An actress, not introspective like most of them, Eve Harlow seems to have exhausted most of her capacity for invention by accepting her change of name. Twice married and twice divorced with many feature films beside her and one Academy Award for best supporting, she lives in an eternal, glistening present and tries not to think of metaphor. Or so she had once told Finzie in one of their serious conversations. “You can make it better if you want,” she says. “You can make it even better than that.”

  Her hand pleads exactingly for a more convincing gesture. Finzie gives it to her. Unheeded now, the film clatters on in the clutch of the player, the scenes of the great dictator’s magnanimity and sexual skills not to be noticed by the pair tangled on the bed. It is splendor, splendor Finzie thinks, but now and again that perilous insertion fails and he must start all over again. Take five, take six. Climb the slippery and elusive Pyrenees. Groan the expiring sigh of the damned and the doomed into the solid panels of his lady’s neck.

  And that groan then the true encapsulation of an admission which Finzie could not have otherwise made: somewhere back there in Flatbush the kid, not yet a superhero, not even a top student in his audiovisual course, tugs for a firmer grip upon himself, trying to overturn that sense of fragility and despair which utterly encapsulates; but the mature Finzie, this sliding and groaning Finzie as it were, cannot help the kid, cannot communicate in any way. Finzie has his own and fraught concerns, not only sexual climax but enlightenment seems to spill as he allows the calming and soothing gestures of that appendage, Eve Harlow, to carry him his anguished way home. In the spaces of his own theatre, on the internal screen, an ever-greater and wondrous film of another kind seems to be unreeling but Finzie is not able to see it now, so narrow is his funnel of attention, so elongate the tube of concentration. Oh Eve, oh Eve this famous filmmaker grunts, oh Eve, hold me, how he cries and softly, insistently, in search of a plum role, Eve Harlow gathers him in.

  * * *

  Later, sometime after the press has disbanded and the juries have returned to their individual countries of origin, after the starlets have replaced their upper garments and the last cajoling interviewer has packed away recorder and headed for the Concorde, Finzie walks out and along the waters by himself, the fine grains of beach glinting at him with small and confidential messages. Gone too is Eve Harlow, returning to loop dialogue on a romantic comedy, then an Arthur Miller revival in London for a few months for the prestige before she returns to Finzie’s palatial, guarded, hidden estate in Glendale where she has promised to live with him and embark upon pre-production. All alone now except for his memories, his conscience, and his agent is this Finzie who walks slowly along the beach, pondering many possibilities and the nature of his destiny. Superguy Finzie, his Leaf of Gold-winning autobiographical odyssey already booked into a thousand theatres worldwide, more thousands to follow: Finzie sending unanswered and unanswerable messages to the kid in Flatbush who perished in an apartment building fire in 1963 and whose ashes were interred with those of his parents in a small mausoleum in the borough of Queens. Vanity, Finzie thinks, all is vanity and watches three young women, glorious in their youth and necessity, gambol on the sands before him. None can be older than fourteen and each in her special way has destroyed him. He is the remnant, he thinks, of their design. “Have you need of anything?” the bodyguard, detailed by his agent and studio to keep him company in these final days asks. “Can I service you anything, sir?” Finzie in whose right hand half of our possibilities and all of our dreams will soon enough dwell looks at the man absently, his face for the moment stripped of pain and pleasure as well, a perfect and inscrutably vacant frame upon which anything at all could have been inscribed. “Only my history,” Finzie says. “It is a superhero who can survive a fatal fire, don’t you think? How remarkable but I seem to have left my history behind.”

  “Ah sir,” the bodyguard says with exquisite and poised understanding, “Ah sir, it is this lack of history which has given you this power,” and reacting to the sheer and mortifying truth of this observation, Finzie—

&n
bsp; * * *

  Puts aside the necessary equipment of the auteur, the cape, the mask, the special wire, the equations of history and thrall which have given him such awful if inconsequent power, puts these toys away now as so long ago the fire had put away that necessitous part of himself. Finzie puts aside the clutter of the superhero because, having transcended fire and destiny, he no longer needs to be one, needs the costume no more and leaving a warning for Eve Harlow and the others that they will have to make do with crumpled mask, hidden cloak, the all-encompassing, serious and now latter-period Finzie whose distraught and distressing visions will define what if anything will be remembered of the shining city on the hill, Finzie the auteur without mask or cape breaks into groans much like those he had groaned against the neck of Eve Harlow and then sinks to the ground, weeping. Here comes the fire. The fire is coming. Dolly in on camera, superhero no more but only a pietà of Finzie unmasked in Eve’s rambunctious embrace. Freeze frame. Freeze it until—

  —Until the end of everlasting fire.

  * * *

  And his works the world to come.

  The Twentieth Century Murder Case

  I TAKE THE INVESTIGATION TO THE STREETS. Footwork is laborious, mindless, dull, but there is no other approach which in the long run pays equal dividends. Particularly in stubborn, intractable cases of this nature. The twentieth century lies gasping in the intensive-care ward, four-fifths slain and in very poor condition. Cheyne-Stokes syndrome has set in. Flayed to within an inch of its poor life, then shot in the temple, the century twitches under resuscitative devices, inattentive to the solicitous concern of attending personnel. It does not look like the twentieth century is going to pull through, and who did it? Who brought this innocent victim to such a terrible condition? The case has been handed to me. My credentials are splendid; my record among the best. Still, here is a case to make even such as me quail. There is hardly a shortage of suspects, a dearth of motive, and yet the unusual cruelty of the assault—

  I cancel such speculations. I am of a mordant and introspective turn of mind which is not bad for my profession but deadly to straight-forward investigation. At the offices of Cambridge, Hawley & Smoot, advertising agents, I show my identification to a hierarchy of secretaries and assistants, refuse to take no for an answer, refuse to take yes for an answer, refuse any answers at all until I am finally in the presence of Hawley himself, senior partner and sole survivor of the original trio who with little but faith and an insight started this agency from a ground-floor cubbyhole in 1946. He is an enormously fat man, pulverized by decades of business lunches and success, expensively hopeless affairs and terror of coronary bypass. “I didn’t do it,” he says, when I present myself. The twentieth century assault case is very big news, as would have been expected, and is on the front pages of all the newspapers; he does not have to ask my business. “I had no reason. It’s the only century I ever knew; I was born in 1909; I’ll never get out of it alive. Why would I want to kill the twentieth century?”

  “If it dies you’ll get out of it alive,” I point out shrewdly.

  He turns his palms up. “I tell you, I have no reason,” he says. “I always had the kindest thoughts. Television, intercontinental flight, the double dry martini, the Cadillac, the sun visor. The telephone, the turbo-hydramatic transmission. Cheap contraception. What would I have against the century that gave me these blessings?”

  “You leached the heart out of it,” I point out mildly; “for decades you infested it with lies, institutionalized lying, misdirection, used the technology granted to dehumanize, to sell people goods they did not need at prices they could not afford for purposes they could not fathom. Having scraped away at its soul, mad with power, you went for its heart. Overcome with guilt, inflamed by megalomania, you cornered it in an alley and put the knife in.”

  His jaw drops but his eye is steady. “I’m afraid that’s not so, lieutenant. That’s simply not so. Even though you might disagree with our methods or market practices—and I point out to you the theory of the greatest good for the greatest number—I am not a murderer nor are any of my associates. We are businessmen. Besides,” he concludes, “the century may pull through. Latest reports indicate that it has survived the initial crisis.”

  “Even if it lives,” I say, “brain damage is irreversible. It will never walk or talk or laugh or cry again; all but clinically it will be dead.” I push back my chair, stand. “You are to keep me apprised of your whereabouts at all times,” I say, handing him my card. “You are not to leave the city without permission.”

  “I will not be intimidated,” Hawley says. “My attorney will be in touch with you.”

  “It would be a very good idea to contact your attorney,” I say and leave the office quickly. It is always best to terminate interviews rapidly, to leave them off balance, to leave an ambiguous threat hanging. This is one of the first principles of investigation. Truly, I am the very best at what I do, and yet I have never had a case like this. No one in the division has any experience with an atrocity of this dimension. I whisk down in the elevator fifty flights, come out on the gray streets filled with those who keep vigil, and get into my illegally parked car. A pretzel vendor recognizes me, nods. “I’m glad you’re on the case, lieutenant,” he says; “you’re the best. You’ll get him, won’t you?

  “We all loved the century very much,” the vendor says, wiping away a tear from an ashen cheek. “Even though he treated most of us so inequitably, we knew that he had a good heart. We felt that he was on our side. Secretly, if you know what I mean. Most of us plain folk loved him.”

  Touched I say, “I know what you mean.”

  “Any chance he may live?”

  I shrug. A small crowd which has gathered stares at me quietly. “It may,” I say, “but it will never be the same.”

  “You get the dirty swine who did this to my century, lieutenant,” the vendor says. He gestures. The crowd applauds thinly. I start the engine of the specially equipped, heavy-duty Plymouth and spin off into traffic. Truly, the mourning of the plain folk has moved me and made me even more determined to solve the case, and yet one hardly knows where to begin. Everywhere there are suspects, of motive there is a plethora.

  Impulsively, I take the car north on the Harlem River Drive, merging at last with the Cross County Expressway; into the wealthy northern suburbs I speed. At Scarsdale I cut east, turn into a town even more shielded and exclusive, pull up to the gates of an enormous estate, show my credentials to the armed guard. The process is slow and rife with bureaucracy and threats, but eventually I am led into the presence of Howard Waffles, Senior, chairman of the board of Wonder Waffles. “You poisoned the century slowly,” I say after the brief preliminaries, moving directly to the assault. “Foul synthetics, deadly additives, tenderizers, pollutants, cancer-causing particles, diseased meat, franchised out at a million intersections through the nation. You filled the bloodstream of the century with evil, and then you would want to destroy the evidence. The corpus delicti; the century itself.”

  “Nonsense,” says Howard Waffles, Senior, a sprightly old man with the company insignia jutting through his lapel. “I’m in business to feed, not to slaughter.”

  “You never told the truth. You sold poison and called it enriched, budget-minded health.”

  “You’ll have to talk to my advertising agents, Cambridge, Hawley, and that young fella Smoot, about that,” Howard Waffles, Senior, says. “I was just a man with a plan; I left the specifics of merchandising up to them. But, uh-uh, sonny, uh-uh, lieutenant. Murder wasn’t my attitude. The century’s been too good to me. It gave me four hundred million dollars; why would I want to lead it into a dark alley and hit it over the head? Or shoot it in the temple, as I’ve read.”

  “Maybe because you’re an old man and you knew the century would out-live you. It was jealousy; a crime of passion. Passionate rage.”

  Howard Waffles, Senior, belches and laughs thinly; a ripe odor of franchised Wonder Waffles onion rings d
rifts toward me. “Sorry, lieutenant,” he says, “I’m an old man; I can’t be bullied. I didn’t do anything to the century and you know it.”

  “You poisoned it—”

  “I gave cheap food to the mobile millions.” Howard Waffles, Senior, takes up my card, which has been lying on the desk before him, and puts it in a pocket. “I’ll thank you to leave now, lieutenant,” he says. “I find your methods crude and insulting. And you can’t scare an old man; the nights are all the fear he can handle.”

  There is nothing to do but leave. Although it is very hard for me to admit this, I know when I have been bested. If I had the unusual force, the dynamism and certitude of a Howard Waffles, Senior, or of a Hawley for that matter, I would probably not be attached to homicide or to any part of civil service, for that matter. I would be in business for myself. As it is, I have to get along as best I can.

  I am ushered out of the estate. Half-way down the cross-county parkway my radio beeps for my attention and I learn the worst. The century has expired. It is definitely, then, a murder case. Emotion overwhelms me briefly and I am forced to pull the car over to the side of the road. It is for me, truly as it is for Hawley, the only century I will ever know. It was four-fifths dead and poisoned past endurance, but it was still around for all of us; it was something that we could take as much for granted as the air we breathe, and now it is gone, and what is there for us to say? How will we live? Where will we go? My tears come spontaneously, mingled with an awesome determination: I will find the assailant. I cannot bring back the century but I can avenge him.