“Here’s the thing—I will neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a machine. Not over the phone. But I will say that if you are interested in discussing this topic further, you are welcome to come and see me here in Little Rock.”
“I—”
“Hold on, there’s a catch. Don’t speak too soon. The deal is, I am in the middle of a study, and in order to complete this study I need more participants. So if you come, if I am to meet with you and talk about my work, you’d have to agree to participate in my study.”
“Okay, but what sort of study is it, exactly?”
“I assume you are familiar with my research?”
“I’ve read your book, if that’s what you mean.”
“Let’s just say my study is in keeping with my book.”
“Does the study involve your reunion machine?”
“As I said, I will neither—”
“Confirm nor deny. I get it. I understand. I just want to be clear on what I’m agreeing to if I come out there. My wife would also be with me.”
“Your wife, fine. She’s invited, too. You can both come and see me. Same deal for her.”
“Is it dangerous, whatever it is you’d be subjecting us to?”
“Hmm. I don’t know how to answer that. For legal reasons, I mean.”
“I got your number through a psychic. He wrote it down for me with the help of a spirit guide. Also, I have a recording that you made a long time ago. It’s from a restaurant in the town where I live. The Dog on Fire—do you remember it?”
“Yes, of course. The Dog on Fire. She was one of the first cases I investigated. The very first, actually. I had a friend, an acquaintance, who was very familiar with that house, and we were on the stairs together one afternoon when she felt something. A presence, I guess you could call it. She was a much older woman, almost a hundred years old, in fact. She burst into tears. Scared me to death. I’d never seen anything like it. Anyway, I was absolutely intrigued. It was really what got me thinking about ghosts in the context of daisy theory. How funny you have that recording! A small world, is it not? Anyway, Mr. Byrd, as I said, I don’t have much time to talk. I have a lot of other calls to return. Come to Little Rock—or don’t. It’s your decision.”
“Oh, we’ll come. We’ll be there.”
“Wonderful. That’s wonderful news. I don’t think you’ll regret it, either one of you. Tell me, do you have a pen handy? Because you’ll need to write this next part down.”
WENDELL ANDREW LENNOX
DOUBLE-CHINNED, OVER-DOUSED WITH COLOGNE—Wendell sits at a stoplight in his ’98 Olds, cherry red with Tri-Tone leather interior. He’s wearing a straw fedora to keep his bald head from burning and peeling.
He’s on his way to Bucky Nesbitt’s funeral. It was Bucky who stuck by him in the bad years, who took him to Mexico City and helped him sell black market scripts—Hell Boys, No Home on the Range, Skeleton Man, and all the other cowboy-horror schlock Wendell churned out on his Corolla, blasted on rum. Bucky was like a father to Wendell, and now the poor man is dead. He will be missed!
Tonight there will be a party, and people will tell the most wonderful Bucky stories. Everyone’s got a Bucky story. The time Bucky threw up egg salad on Gary Cooper. The time Bucky, martini glass in hand, stepped right off a pontoon boat as it was skidding across the Great Salt Lake. If a well-lived life is measured by its crazy stories, then Bucky wins, hands down.
As far as Wendell can see, the avenue is lined with long, tan buildings—ugly, headache-inducing, no panache at all. Christmas lights dangle from the palm trees. The air is still, windless. He slaps his palm against the side of the car. Bucky was sick for almost a year. When did everyone get so old? Since when was it time to die?
One day, when Wendell gets sick, who will hold the water glass to his lips? Who will change his shitty sheets? Who will be there with him to squeeze his hand? He’s never been married, never had kids. The closest he ever came to any of that was with Clara.
—
A LETTER ARRIVES at his apartment all the way from Shula, North Carolina. He’s been away from home for almost two years. He misses it more than he expected, but he can’t go back there, not until he’s made something of himself. He sprawls out across his bed to read the letter, expecting the usual news from his mother, but this one, he sees now, is from his brother. Robert has married Clara!
—
ON THE AFTERNOON he meets Clara for the first time, Wendell and his brother have been out making furniture deliveries all day. They are still young boys, seventeen and nineteen, respectively—black-haired, bowlegged, unmistakably siblings. Robert is thick-necked with a large nose, his eyes deep-set beneath his brow. Wendell is the handsomer of the two, the more personable, but he is also easily distracted and a little lazy. He knows this about himself. They are arguing about the order of their deliveries, about the most efficient route. Wendell is the one who knocks on the door, and Mr. Hopstead answers, a ruddy-faced man with an upturned nose and a toothy smile.
“Yes,” he says, “it will go right through here and into the living room, there against the wall.”
The brothers measure the door and then strategize. They remove the door from its hinges and prop it up against the stoop railing.
Sofa hoisted, Wendell enters the house first, hands behind him, the sofa barely squeezing through the door frame. As he moves toward the living room he sees that a young girl is watching him from the kitchen with a cool, amused look on her face. Who is this! He forgets where he’s going for a moment. The sofa leg nicks the wall, and Robert yells at him to watch where he’s going. Seeing the girl, Robert turns red and wishes he hadn’t raised his voice. The brothers pivot and guide the sofa into place against the wall. The girl—Clara—is observing them both with her arms crossed. Wendell winks at her, and she smiles.
Meanwhile, Robert fusses with the papers for Mr. Hopstead to sign.
—
CLARA STICKS OUT HER TONGUE at a mannequin in a store window while Wendell preens in front of the glass. This is the future as he sees it today, on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday: he and Clara together forever, strolling and window-gazing their way through life.
—
WENDELL WAKES UP with a hangover in his canopy bed. Another birthday, his thirty-eighth. The neighboring pillowcase is smeared with concealer and lipstick. Last night he brought home Valerie Green, the starlet, the fantasy of every man in America, and he fucked her twice. She’s left him a note on the bureau across the room. You’re the best, is all it says. He should feel like he’s on top of the world, shouldn’t he? Why doesn’t he?
—
LEAVES FLING THEMSELVES from their branches and land on the ground just ahead of them, as if desperate for the chance to be stepped on by her. When a dog twists loose from his owner’s grip and comes barreling toward them, Clara drops to one knee to pet him. She seizes the dog by its mane, her fingers deep in its brown fur, as it heaves its dripping tongue at her face. She loves animals, all animals, cats, squirrels, slugs, but especially dogs. She’s still a girl—only fifteen, in fact—her brown hair parted down the middle, not quite stylishly, her green eyes so large and curious.
Wendell watches her with something like awe and fear. Every particle in his body feels overly charged, ready to burst. He doesn’t have a ring. The idea of a ring is only occurring to him now as the question leaps from his lips. She springs up from the ground to hug him and kiss his cheek. Did he miss her answer—or is this it, this burst of affection? The dog galumphs back to its owner, and Clara slides her small hand into Wendell’s outer pocket as they finish their stroll through the park, in the direction of downtown.
Unsure what else to do, he buys them movie tickets at the Grand, and they sit near the back, in those plush seats, sacrosanct in the darkness, the silvery lights. She allows him to kiss the nape of her neck. After the movie he le
ads her two blocks over to his father’s store and unlocks the back door. They lie down together on a sofa in the middle of the showroom. Lights off, he unbuttons her blouse and gets his hands on her breasts for the first time, but after a few minutes, she slides away with a nervous smile. She won’t sleep with him, she says, not until they’re officially married, which is fine with Wendell, really, because he’s never been with a girl anyway. Probably there are girls sleeping with boys somewhere in America, but this is how it’s done here in Shula, with girls like Clara.
—
HE’S HOLED UP in a hotel room in Mexico City. The fans are on full blast, but he’s sweated through his white linen shirt. He strips down, takes a swig of rum, and goes back to typing. He’s past deadline for a script that will pay next to nothing but at least it’s work. He should be grateful.
Bucky said he was going out for cigarettes, but he’s been gone for hours. If only Wendell can finish this script, tonight he and Bucky will go out and celebrate with a trip to the whorehouse. The movie is called The Skeleton Man, and it’s about a seventeenth-century conquistador who’s raised from the dead with a mysterious elixir and who falls in unrequited love with the gravedigger’s daughter. Wendell has reached the penultimate scene, the one in which the gravedigger’s daughter, Maria, must lure the terrifying Skeleton Man back into the graveyard.
The door busts open and there’s Bucky, already drunk as hell.
“Hola, muchacho,” Bucky says, cigarette dangling from his mouth, a wild, pernicious look in his eye.
Why oh why did he ever agree to follow Bucky to Mexico?
—
BECAUSE THE STUDIOS STOPPED CALLING. Because they wouldn’t work with him anymore.
Wendell is in his manager’s office, staring out the window at a piece of paper being nudged up and down the street by the breeze. Nobody’s buying—but why? His manager, behind the desk, smiles nervously. “Either you’re in a dry spell, or your name’s mud.”
But that doesn’t make any sense! Wendell has never been a communist; he’s never been to any meetings; his scripts are entirely apolitical; he hasn’t been called to testify. His name can’t be mud if he hasn’t stepped in any!
“Just give it some time,” his manager says. “It’ll all work out. I’m sure of it.”
“Somebody’s named me for no good reason,” Wendell says. “It’s the only explanation.”
—
BUT NOBODY NAMED HIM. This he learns years later when a reporter who’s researching the McCarthy era comes to visit Wendell’s condo in Miami to talk about those days. They sit together on the balcony, smoking cigarettes and looking down at the pool, where the geriatric ladies in swim caps are doing their daily aerobics. The water weights. The laughter. The back fat. Wendell leans forward in his wheelchair and grabs the balcony rail. His health is poor. He’s diabetic and despite his protective shoes somehow he managed to injure his left foot last year. The doctors removed the leg up to his knee. The loss of mobility has only exacerbated the weight problem. Even before the surgery, he was over two hundred pounds, and now—
Now he’s a fat fuck. A fat fuck in a wheelchair staring down at a bunch of old biddies who probably wouldn’t even give him the time of day.
The reporter tells him that believe it or not Wendell was never actually named.
“I’ve had a look at all the documents, and I can tell you what happened if you really want to know.”
Wendell says he does.
Unfortunately, it was all a big mix-up. There was another Wendell Lennox, a union organizer in Ohio, and this other Wendell gave a couple of quotes once to a newspaper there and then had to sit in front of the committee. The studios saw the name, thought it was Wendell Lennox the scriptwriter, and that was that. He was damaged goods. It had nothing to do with anything Wendell had ever written or done. Just plain bad luck.
—
ON THE SET of The Skeleton Man, Wendell is loading up his plate at the catering table when he bumps into Maria Jurado, a black-haired beauty with a devilish smile. Maria is playing the heroine, the gravedigger’s daughter, also named Maria, with whom the Skeleton Man falls dangerously in love. He convinces her to eat dinner with him that night, and they spend most of the meal gossiping and laughing about the rest of the cast. Then she asks him for any advice he might have about her career. She’s so young, intoxicatingly young.
Wendell can imagine loving this woman, caring for her. He’d buy her—what? A villa. They’d live outside Mexico City and make babies together. She’d be his muse. He’d write scripts for her. None of this horror schlock. Real parts. He’d write an art film. Something surreal and strange. In the Buñuel mode. Maybe, with his help, with her name on the right films, Maria could even build up enough cachet to make the jump to Hollywood. All of this is flitting through his brain as they sip their wine, but at the end of the night, when he invites her back to his hotel room, she kisses him on the cheek, no trace of desire or lust at all in those lovely lips. There is something familial in the way she kisses him goodnight. This is the way a daughter kisses her father on his deathbed, he thinks. Wendell is almost fifty. He’s close to bald, and since coming to Mexico last year, he has, admittedly, put on a little weight. He feels past his prime.
The next day, on set, he watches Maria—as Maria—lure the Skeleton Man back into the graveyard, where she will trap him in his coffin. The monster will spend the rest of eternity in that coffin. It occurs to Wendell that he approached the script all wrong. A better version might have sympathized more closely with the poor Skeleton Man, the former conquistador who—it should be noted—did not ask to be reanimated by the mysterious elixir accidentally spilled upon his grave. He didn’t ask for any of this. If he could help it, he wouldn’t be such a lusty corpse. The woman he desires does not desire him because he is hideous and ancient. As if that’s not bad enough, presumably, once resealed in his coffin, he will not be able to rest again. The script does not mention this explicitly but logic suggests it’s so. Now that he has been awakened by the elixir, it would seem the Skeleton Man’s fate is to lie there, fully conscious, moldering, unloved, forever.
He was loved once. Truly loved. In his own time, surely he was.
—
AT CLARA’S HOUSE for dinner with her family, Wendell goes out back to take a piss in the yard. Before venturing inside again, to the chaos of the home-cooked meal, of Clara’s big-muscled older brothers, their sweaty-browed stares, he stands behind the billowing sheets on the laundry line and lights a cigarette. He hears a noise on the other side of the fence. A scraping sound. A small head appears at the top. It’s Clara’s kid sister, May. She’s ten years old, a pipsqueak with light freckles across her cheeks and nose. He offers her a drag off his cigarette, and she coughs it all up, hilariously, and then runs off down the street. Wendell goes back inside, eventually. Clara’s been looking all over for him. She kisses him quickly, in the hallway, so that her parents won’t see.
—
BUT HE DOESN’T MARRY HER. He moves away. She marries Robert. There’s a fire, and Robert dies and Clara survives, but barely. She suffers! She’s disfigured and wastes away in a hospital, and Wendell never goes to her—but why? He’s a coward, he supposes. Besides, what would he even say? He sends a card. Some flowers. Nobody forced her to marry Robert. That was her decision! He sends her more flowers. He hates himself. One day the phone rings: Clara has died. He doesn’t attend the funeral; he sends more flowers, another card, this one to her family. Thinking of you, he writes.
—
EVENTUALLY—MANY YEARS LATER—he visits the house on Graham Street. Though in need of repair, it is larger and lovelier than he expected it would be. Wendell knocks on the door. A woman with dark curly hair answers, and he explains that he used to know someone who lived here, a long time ago, and if she wouldn’t mind, if it’s not too inconvenient, could he look around for a few minutes? She seems unc
ertain but nods. Soon he’s sitting on this woman’s couch, fanning himself with his fedora, as the woman goes into the kitchen to fix him an iced water.
He is in New York with some regularity, but Shula is outside his usual orbit. It’s been at least thirty years since he walked the old neighborhoods where he used to deliver couches and chairs for his father. Nobody here recognizes him anymore. No one knows to be impressed. If only he could wear a uniform, the way military generals do, with little bars and insignias and stars indicating and enumerating all his many accomplishments, the screenplays, the conquests, the adventures abroad, but as it is, he is anonymous, just another old fart in search of his past.
This is the first time he’s ever visited this house—he’s avoided it until now—though he’s certain it must have looked much different back when Robert and Clara lived here. The television set in the corner, that’s new obviously, and so is the green rug and those red curtains across the window. He stands up from the couch to examine the walls for signs of damage, but the restoration was done many years ago, and he sees no evidence of the fire.
The woman returns with his iced water. Her jean shorts sag in the back. She’s got a small butt, scrawny pale legs, a craggy face. She’s wearing sandals, and her toes are so stubby—little pink sausages bright red at the tips. Wendell doesn’t even bother to flirt, not because he finds her unattractive but because he fears she wouldn’t reciprocate, because she wouldn’t want to entertain the possibility of him.
—
WENDELL FLICKS HIS CIGARETTE against the bedsheet that’s hanging on the laundry line in Clara’s backyard. It leaves a small black spot against the white but doesn’t burn. Distantly he can hear May calling out for the dog. When he goes inside, Clara kisses him, quickly. Mr. Hopstead, coming around the corner, almost catches them. He drags Wendell into the parlor for a little chat. Agitated, antsy, Mr. Hopstead stands by the fireplace with his hands behind his back, swaying foot to foot.
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