A Child across the Sky

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Lenna's happy again. It's the old story. When she's down, she needs me and calls." He shrugged. "When she's happy again, I'm not needed, so she sends me away. Not consciously, but – look, we all know I'm her little Frankenstein monster. She can do what she wants with me. Even dream up that I like to eat fucking plum pits."

  "It's so wrong!"

  Sighing, he sat up and started pulling on his shirt. "It's wrong but it's life, sweet girl. Not much we can do about it, you know."

  "Yes, we can. We can do something."

  His back was to me. remembered the first time I'd ever seen him. His back was to me then too, the long red hair falling over his collar.

  When I didn't say anything more, he turned and looked at me over his shoulder, smiling.

  "We can do something? What can we do?"

  His eyes were gentle and loving, eyes I wanted to see for the rest of my life.

  "We can make her sad. We can make her need you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just what I said, Fiddy. When she's sad she needs you. We have to decide what would make her sad a long time. Maybe something to do with Michael. Or the children."

  His fingers stopped moving over the buttons. Thin, artistic fingers. Freckles.

  3

  Finky Linky drove me to the airport, which was nervous-making because there was always a good possibility he might drop dead at any moment.

  Finky Linky, alias Wyatt Leonard, one-time star of the funniest and most innovative children's show on television.

  "First there was Pinky,

  then there was Winky.

  Don't forget Pee Wee –

  But the king of them all is

  Finkyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

  Remember that? Remember Finky-Pinky-Rings? Or the Finky Linky Stinky Magic Carpet that no one on the show ever wanted to ride, despite its magic, because it smelled too much?

  Wyatt made it big so fast because he was smart and crazy and willing to do anything to make kids laugh. I have never known anyone who loved children as much as Wyatt Leonard.

  I met him a few years before he joined our Cancer Theater Group. A friend-of-a-friend of Cullen James, he was at the peak of his success when it was discovered he had leukemia. He accepted his fate so calmly. Perhaps because he never really believed it would get him or else, as he said, a million children's love buoyed him over death's fearsome sea.

  Six months after I began working with the group in New York, he showed up and asked if he could watch. It would be another year before we actually tried to put something on stage, because those early days were more group therapy sessions than anything else. A bitter young woman, bald from radiation treatments, pointed to her head and asked if he had a part for her on his show. He did. Remember Wig Woman with the pink dress and all those different hairdos? The first star that ever emerged from the New York Cancer Players. People associated with the show thought she was only a nut with a shaved head. Neither Wyatt nor she ever told them the truth until she died and Finky Linky did the show about death that won him an Emmy.

  When the constant medical treatment and hospitalization ate into his energy and resistance, he gave up the television show and became the hardest working member of our group.

  Phil was a great fan of the show and thrilled to hear I knew Wyatt, so I introduced them. A month later, Fast Forward Productions flew Finky Linky out to LA to do that bizarre bit in Midnight Too that had everyone laughing . . . and retching.

  After I read "Mr. Fiddlehead" that morning, I called Wyatt and asked him to take over rehearsals for our play. When he found out why I was leaving town, he told me to get someone else because he was going with me.

  "How come?"

  "I'll tell you on the plane. What time does it go? I'll drive us out."

  I've traveled with famous people before, and it's always interesting to watch how the man in the street reacts. With movie stars, you see the expected admiration and desire, but also many darker things – envy and hunger, real anger.

  With Wyatt it was entirely different. When he parked his car in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport, the attendant not only had him autograph his baseball cap but ran next door to the hot dog stand to tell the gang there. A stampede followed, all saying "Finky!" The show had been off the air for over a year, but he was still their funny hero and friend. First he had to give five people the secret handshake – touch the heart, touch the nose, blow a kiss, shake. Then autographs. One bedraggled man asked for a personal souvenir. Wyatt gave him the paperback book he had in his pocket, and the man asked him to sign it.

  "But I didn't write it!"

  "Yeah, but you owned it!"

  The same thing happened in the terminal building and right onto the plane: greetings, handshakes, pure love for an old and missed pal.

  After we took off, a stewardess came up and said she'd once won a wet T-shirt contest wearing a Finky Linky shirt. Wyatt looked long at her chest, smiled, and said in his Finky voice, "That was a lucky shirt!"

  She went away smiling. I asked him why he'd come. The plane was still climbing, and before he answered we broke through the clouds into the pure blue of thousands of feet high.

  "We were lovers once."

  "You and Phil?"

  He looked at me and touched my hand a moment. "He wasn't gay, Weber. Only wanted to know what it was like. Remember when I went out there to do Midnight Too with him? We were together a couple of days. Nothing special, just warm for me and new for him. He didn't like it very much, but I wasn't surprised."

  Although I knew he was gay because we'd discussed it, Wyatt appeared straight. There'd been a bad scene in our group once when a woman fell in love with him and he didn't reciprocate. He told me sickness had replaced gender anyway in his life, that when you get cancer and they're sticking things in you or cutting them out, it's hard feeling sexy.

  "Are you shocked, Weber?"

  "Sure. It's interesting, too. You think you know your friends but you don't."

  "Maybe I shouldn't have told you, especially now."

  "No, I'm glad you did, Wyatt. One of the reasons I'm going to California is to find out why Phil shot himself. Until yesterday, I didn't think that was him either. Would you mind telling me about what happened between you two?"

  "He thought I was funny, and I thought he was a genius. A mutual admiration society. We talked on the set; then we went out for something to eat after. You know the end. The strange thing was, I didn't come on to him at all. I told him I was gay and no big deal. He kept asking questions about it, so I answered them. I don't believe that deep in his heart, every hetero man is secretly gay and only waiting for the right moment to jump out and admit it to the world. Some are and some aren't. Phil wasn't gay, only curious. Curious about everything. That's why he was such an interesting man."

  "If he wasn't gay, why were you together two days? Wouldn't one night have been enough?"

  "Not for Phil. He wanted to know as much as he could."

  To be as successful with children as Wyatt had been, you had to have the wonder and openness of a child. When I told him the story of the day before, including the experience with the magical videotapes that played back my history and fast-forwarded to Sasha's future, he only shook his head and grunted. He asked if Phil had sent anything else. I took "Mr. Fiddlehead" out of my bag and handed it to him.

  "What's this?"

  "A short story. Sasha said it was going to be his next project."

  "I can read it?"

  "Are there more things you're not telling me?"

  He looked at the story in his hand. "Let me read this first." He took the famous Finky glasses out of his pocket and put them on. The tough-looking pig on the motorcycle with the wheels holding the glass? Those.

  While he read, I looked out the window and thought about Phil, then about my mother. Wyatt chuckled a couple of times. Once he looked up and said, "Phil must have written this. I can hear him telling it. You're obviously Mr. Fiddlehead."

  "Why? My re
d hair and green eyes?"

  "Partly. Let me finish."

  Phil dead. Phil sleeping with Wyatt. Phil writing "Mr. Fiddlehead." The plane bumped up and down and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light came on.

  "I don't understand the end."

  "What's not to understand?"

  "What does it mean?" He started reading from the manuscript. "'Thin artistic fingers. Freckles. Fiddy and I were in a dazzle and knew it. He turned out the light again. Blood was rushing into my head, and I hoped I wasn't glowing in the dark. I started to hate him. I felt like blaming him for something that hadn't happened yet.'"

  I took that manuscript from Wyatt and looked at it. The new sentences he'd read were on the page: words that hadn't been there when I'd originally read the story a few hours before.

  "The story I read ended with the word 'freckles.' These last lines are new since then."

  "Did Phil ever tell you about Pinsleepe?"

  "Wyatt, did you hear what I said? This story's grown since this morning!"

  "I heard. Do you know about Pinsleepe?"

  I shook my head. The world was too much with me, and how.

  A week before he died, Phil came to New York. Usually when he came it was an Indianapolis 500 of speeding around to all his favorite places and people. He didn't like the city but he loved what was in it, so his trips were manic, albeit infrequent. He liked his friends to get together: to have big rowdy dinners in restaurants where sensational or peculiar people told long stories that held the table in thrall.

  The last time was different. He contacted only two people, Danny James and Wyatt Leonard. The rest of his friends and fans – the rare book dealers, a dinosaur specialist at Columbia, the vegetable chef at Benihana, me – knew nothing of this visit.

  From what Wyatt and Danny pieced together, he stayed at the Pierre Hotel and spent most of his time traveling in and out of town, destination unknown. Both were surprised when he called and said he was there, shocked when they saw him. Danny thought he looked very ill, Wyatt that he was deranged.

  "You know that crazy look people get when they're caught in a flash photograph? That was Phil's expression the whole time we were together. He was very relaxed and soft-spoken, but his eyes had the hysterical look of someone who's just seen death. Or a glimpse of ourselves in some hideous future situation. We walked around, went out to dinner, and talked for hours, but the look stayed. It scared me."

  "Did you ask him what was wrong?"

  "Finky Linky wants a drinky. Does Weber want a drinky too? Yes, I asked what was wrong. We were sitting in the Four Seasons eating lobster. He asked if I ever read W. H. Auden. Yes, I read Auden. Then did I know the line, 'We are lived by powers we pretend to understand'? He was taking these incredibly long, slow-motion bites, all very elegant and calm, but his eyes were those of a man about to be shot. W. H. Auden. I said, 'That doesn't answer my question, Phil. What's the matter with you?'"

  Pinsleepe was the matter.

  There's an old Jewish legend that says before it's born, a child knows all the secrets of the universe. But as it's being born, an angel touches it on the mouth to make it forget. According to Wyatt Leonard, Phil believed before he died he had rediscovered those secrets, but not from within – from the Angel Pinsleepe.

  "Once he started describing her and what had happened, I couldn't stop him. It was like he'd been waiting for someone to talk to about her.

  "I know about 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' That's where Pinsleepe first showed up. Phil told me he'd had the idea for the story a long time ago and once in a while thought about writing it as a script. When he was in Yugoslavia filming, he began it because he was bored down there. He wrote two pages, but then there was a problem with the Yugoslav authorities or something, so he put the script down and forgot about it.

  "Cut to California, a few months later. He's going through the papers he worked on in Yugoslavia and comes across five pages of a short story entitled 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' He remembered writing two pages of a film script with the same name. He reads these five pages and gets scared. It's the same plot he had in mind for his movie, only this is a short story, and what's there is more than what he'd written.

  "He tells me all this between leisurely bites of lobster and glances from these high octane speed-freak eyes.

  "Finding the short story was bad enough, but then he had his first vision. You know what it was? Flea getting killed. He saw her running out into the road and not being hit by a car but shot by some loony, joyriding in the canyon. In this vision, he knew what day it would happen, what time, even the make of the car and the face of the crazy. He also knew this was no bullshit and he'd better heed the warning. So the time it was to happen, he locked Flea in, went out of the house, and waited in the driveway. Along comes the white Toyota with the Woody Woodpecker decal on the side. The driver slowed in front of Phil's house and looked at him. Phil said the guy had such a strange expression it looked like he knew he'd somehow been cheated out of his dog to kill."

  The visions went on and so did the short story. Phil told no one, although Sasha began to complain about the way he was behaving. When I retraced the chronology, I realized she'd called me a couple of times then and casually mentioned how grumpy and strange he'd been since returning from Yugoslavia.

  "This was before Matthew Portland died?"

  "A long time before, Weber. Phil said Pinsleepe was coming to him every day by that time. He also said he actually was told the Portland thing would happen, but he wouldn't do anything about it."

  "Tell me more about the angel."

  Lunch was served. A stewardess named Andrea brought our trays and asked us to sign her autograph book. Wyatt quickly drew a picture of Finky Linky, Andrea, and me all holding hands while we flew across the sky together.

  "What's this?"

  "I don't know. Meat? Cake?" We poked at the same brown object on our trays.

  "Maybe it's the napkin. The videos he sent you and Sasha are pretty good evidence something exists; whether it's an angel or not, who knows?"

  "Why'd he think it was an angel?"

  "Because it came to tell him to stop making the Midnight films."

  The first Midnight began as a kind of desperate joke. Eight years ago, Phil Strayhorn was an inch away from bottoming out. He'd had no luck cracking the Hollywood egg and was down to doing free-lance research on anything for anyone, just to pay his bills. Because he was a plain-looking man with little acting experience, he was only another person on line at casting calls. Along the way, he'd tried working in development at a studio but was neither social nor cunning enough to be successful at it. He loved acting and loved movies, but he'd reached a point where there was no way any of it was working out for him.

  Someone doing a book on the occult asked him to research Zoroastrianism. Tunneling through the subject, he discovered The Book of Arda Viraz, an autobiography by a Persian priest who purportedly survived death and came back to talk about what was "over there."

  On the other side, among other tasks, Viraz had had to cross the "Bridge of the Separator," where he (and all other souls) met his conscience for a reassessment of all he'd done in life.

  Fascinated by the idea, Phil dug deeper and found similarities in Islamic tradition. There, the story goes that on the day of judgment one must undergo "the trial of crossing al-Sirat, a bridge that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword, and, in some versions, set with hooks and thorns; the righteous cross easily to the Garden, but the wicked find the bridge slippery and dark and, after expending thousands of years attempting to cross, fall into the Fire below."

  I didn't see him much in those days because I was about to go to Europe to film Babyskin and was caught up in my own solipsism. It was probably better, though, because our relationship was strained. Since graduating from college, I'd published a collection of poetry and made a film that was well reviewed. I was on my way, and however much he loved me and cheered my success, I knew it was hard for him to watch someone else get all the A's. Especi
ally Phil, who'd been at the head of the class all his life.

  When I returned from Europe several months later, he picked me up at the airport. Pulling the car away from the LAX curb, he handed me a script.

  "What's this?"

  "A script I wrote. You won't like it because it's a horror movie, but please read it and tell me if it's any good. If it has any potential."

  "A horror film? 'Midnight.' What's it about?"

  "Meeting our conscience on a bridge."

  Something glitched in the universe. We never find out why, but it's implied early in the film it was mankind's fault. Wars, greed, sniffing around in certain dangerous corners of science. . . . Whatever, things on a cosmic level fell apart and the ceremony of innocence met Bloodstone. Whatever happened caused part of death to cross the mortal line into life in the form of Bloodstone. He could simply be an angry little sliver of death or part of our conscience come to meet us on the Bridge of the Separator . . . if we were dead, but we aren't. He could even be Death itself, helplessly forced to live in our east of Eden. All that matters is Bloodstone is angry – angry to be here, angry to be in a hated foreign land. Phil always smiled and called him the xenophobe.

  The degree of violence and imagination in the things Strayhorn's fiend did were both obscene and startling. Reading the script for the first time, I couldn't believe what he was doing, page after page. But Bloodstone did them repeatedly in the most inventive and ghoulish ways. I called it car-crash art – you don't want to look, but you have to.

  I called Matthew Portland, a producer who was always looking for scripts full of boobs, blood, and interesting gore. He asked for the story over the phone. Instead of telling him, I read the now-famous scene of Bloodstone, the infant, and the magnifying glass.

  "That's the most repellent thing I've ever heard. Who wrote it?"

  The three of us went to lunch. After they shook hands for the first time, Portland said he liked the script but it needed work. We all knew it was a perfect script, but every producer says that at the first meeting. Phil smiled and quietly said Matthew's last film, Hide and Sick, was a steaming pile of shit. The other smiled back and said he knew that, but it'd paid the bills.