A Child across the Sky

by Jonathan Carroll

  There was nothing to say to that. We hustled across the street and into one of the parking lots. After a few minutes of looking here and there, she stopped in front of a vintage 1969 black Jaguar XKE. Phil's car. The only person I ever knew who bought a car because it looked like a German fountain pen.

  "The Montblanc is still around, huh? He always said he was going to buy something else."

  "It tickled him to look at it. He and Flea used to ride around town with the top down, Flea snorting and Phil listening to his Paolo Conte tapes.

  "I think he probably left the car to you, Weber. Don't be surprised if you get most of his things. You and Jackie." She unlocked the door on my side and stood very close, looking at me.

  "What about you?"

  "Let's wait to talk about that. I'm too nervous and edgy now. I'd like to get used to having you here before we get into any of the big stuff. Okay?"

  Before I could answer, she did something that took me completely by surprise. Putting her raw, wounded hands on either side of my head, she pulled me over for a big kiss on the mouth. Her lips stayed closed and the kiss was more like a hard, reassuring handshake, but it went on a long time and I was slightly out of breath when she let go.

  She looked pleased with herself. "You don't mind, do you?" Not waiting for an answer, she walked away and unlocked the other door. "I'm so happy you're here. Let's go get Finky Linky."

  I have been in the houses of two people who'd recently died. When Venasque had a stroke, I went to his house with Phil to get a suit in which to bury the old man. What was most disturbing there was the incompleteness of everything. A chair in the living room slightly askew, a half-full bottle of ketchup waiting in the refrigerator, a magazine in the bathroom open to an article on Don Johnson. I remember feeling compelled to close that magazine, straighten the chair so it was plumb with the rest of the room. Things left at hurried, sloppy angles, things that would have been straightened or used up or finished if the tenant had only had the chance to return and screw caps back on, sit on the can one last time, give five minutes to finishing the dumb article on his favorite TV star.

  Strayhorn's house was worse. After dropping Wyatt and Sasha off at her apartment, I took the car and drove to Phil's. I had to because, until I did, I'd be haunted by my imaginings. I had to see for myself where he'd shot himself (all I could picture was a blood-spattered copy of Rilke's poetry), the empty dog basket, a cupped dip in the blue couch where he'd sat for the last time.

  I also wanted to see what was in his medicine cabinet. Was there still laundry in the washing machine? What other things did he hold in his hand the last day of his life? What work had he done? Any record on the turntable? Final glimpses, details, a clue. Is that perverse? In an autopsy, the medical examiner tells you what the person had for a last meal. Disgusting or clinical, it meant something, if only: This is what was there at the end. Pathetic or impressive. X marks the spot. It stopped here. A sweater on a chair, birdseed on the kitchen counter, a new painting I'd never seen before. The end.

  I've been lying. When confronted with wonder we usually lie or shut up. We must. Impossible things demand silence for some time at least. I've said nothing about the impossible things that had been happening almost from the moment I'd heard of his death in New York. The videotape from him that never ended. Sasha's illness and miraculous pregnancy (if it were true). What Wyatt had told me on the plane about Phil and Pinsleepe, the Angel of Death. Or the coming to life of my tattoo.

  I've been lying because of what I found at Strayhorn's that afternoon. . . .

  This still jars me. Like admitting to some dark secret I've hidden all my life. But it wasn't my secret. Perhaps it's because I loved Phil Strayhorn and still don't want to admit, either to myself or the world, that what he did goes beyond any borders of curiosity or quest. What he did was unimaginably wrong. What he wanted to do was . . . understandable.

  I'm speaking in ellipses. Here is what happened.

  Pulling into the driveway, I remembered the day Phil and Sasha stood there with Bloodstone masks on, waving goodbye, Flea snoofing around in the bushes. I turned off the motor and sat awhile listening to the quiet: cheerful birds, the busy hiss of insects, a distant car driving off. There were all the blooming cactus we'd planted together when he first moved into the house. From the car I could look through one of the front windows and see some of the objects in the living room.

  Something moved in there.

  I sat up straight in my seat.

  Something showed for a moment in the window and then disappeared just as quickly. A head? A child hopping across the line of vision of the window? I couldn't tell. No child belonged in the house of a man – days dead.

  There it was again. Jumping. It was a child: short hair, yellow shirt, waving hands in the air as it bounced past.

  I got out of the car and found the keys to the house and burglar alarm on Sasha's key ring. Walking down the short path, I watched for the head but saw nothing.

  "Hey, you!"

  I turned and saw Mr. Piel approaching, Phil's next-door neighbor.

  "How are you, Mr. Piel?"

  "Gregston? Well, I'm glad it's you and not some more of them ghoul groupies. You should see what we've been getting up here since the news got out. Real fuck-brains. Bloodstone fan clubs. Some fat guy even stole the arm off the mailbox! Leave the dead alone, I say.

  "It's bad, bad news, Weber. He was a good fella. I liked him. His movies were shit, but the guy was nice and didn't make noise. I don't know why he killed the goddamned dog, though. A real cute thing. He could've given it to my wife. She cried for a day when she heard that."

  "Has anyone been inside since the police were here?"

  "Nah, cops closed it off for their investigation, and I've been keeping a close eye on things since. Nobody would've gotten in there that I didn't know about. Naturally, Sasha's been in and out, but no one else, after the cops."

  "There's no one in there now?"

  "No one I know of. You going in?"

  "Yes."

  "You got a key? Where'd you get it?"

  "Yes, Mr. Piel, I have a key. Am I keeping you from anything?"

  "You telling me I should take a hike?" He crossed his arms over a thin chest. He'd worked as a key grip once, but his real calling in life was professional busybody. One minute you liked his feistiness; the next you wanted to punch him out.

  "My best friend blew his brains out in there, Mr. Piel. I'm about to go in and look at his blood on the furniture. I'm not in the mood to be civil. Thanks for watching the house."

  He turned and started to walk away. "Some people don't know how to be grateful. I should let them tear the house down. What do I care?"

  Ignoring him, I went to the door and did the necessary twists and turns to deactivate the alarm. I was curious about who or what was inside, not afraid. Too much had happened to cause any more fear. An explanation of some kind was near, and I was hungry to know it.

  Opening the door, I heard a too-familiar tune.

  "Whistle and hop

  and blow your top,

  it's the Finky Linky Show!

  Your feet are long

  and your math is wrong

  but your head is sure to growwwwww –"

  I walked into the living room just as the child came hopping in from the kitchen, singing along with the theme song.

  At first I thought it was about a seven-year-old boy, the dark hair was cut so short, but the singing voice was the high and delicate bell of a little girl.

  Barefoot, she skipped around the room in a pair of blue jean overalls and a black T-shirt. The longer I looked at her, the more I realized she was a real beauty, not just a cute little kid. This one had all the makings.

  The beauty part slid away when I saw how misshapen her stomach was. Under the overalls it looked as if she were hiding a basketball. She kept looking at me until she knew I was staring at her stomach. Then she stopped in the middle of the floor and took off the jeans and s
hirt. She was pregnant.

  It was obscene and comical. She stood with her hands at her sides and smiled at me. I couldn't take my eyes off her form. There was nothing sexual or prurient about the stares, either. It was too outrageous to be sexy, something Eric Fischl or Paul Cadmus might have included in one of their paintings. Or Bosch.

  Bosch! The Garden of Earthly Delights. After Midnight first appeared, Phil said in interviews he'd gotten most of his visual inspiration from that painting. At Harvard he'd kept a large print of it over his desk. I could remember only certain details, but looking at this little pregnant girl I was somehow sure she was in the painting too. That chilled me more than anything else.

  Chill two came when she spoke. It came out a deep, hoarse, chocolate mousse of a voice: Lauren Bacall's in To Have and Have Not, sexy and available. A voice that had smoked thousands of cigarettes and would stay out all night with you.

  "This is what you want." She went to a side table, picked up a book, brought it to me. "It was the one he was reading before he shot himself." I wanted to look at her and at the book at the same time.

  She offered it open to a specific page. I reached out hesitantly and took it: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. There were red stains over the white page. "The Second Elegy." The girl walked to the television set and switched it off. Turning to me, she spoke slowly and clearly.

  "Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,

  I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,

  knowing about you. . . .

  But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars

  took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating

  higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?"

  "You're Pinsleepe, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  I didn't know what more to say. She was Pinsleepe the angel. The angel that had come to Phil before he died and told him to stop making the Midnight films because they were evil.

  "Was he really reading about angels before he did it?"

  Her nakedness was smooth and angular. Women have curves, little girls angles. Even pregnant little girls. She stood there smiling.

  "I think so. I'd come over to make him a sandwich for lunch. When I got here, he was sitting on the patio with that book turned to that page."

  "Sasha told me she came over to make him lunch!"

  "She did. We did."

  "I don't understand."

  The girl took my hand and led me to the couch. "Do you remember a night in Vienna when you and Sasha went out to the –"

  "Look, get to the point! I don't understand any of this, see? My best friend killed himself. Called me up to talk about thumbs, then killed himself. That doesn't make sense, does it? I've heard stories about him for two days. Tattoos coming alive. Videotapes! One of them had my mother dying on it. Now you . . . Christ! Just tell me what the fuck is going on!"

  She picked up a pink pillow and put it over her hairless lap. "My name is Pinsleepe. I came because he was in trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "With God."

  "Look, I believe in angels. Truth! But you're not what I believed. Understand? They don't have to come out of the sky, or – I've dreamt of them all my life. I looked everywhere for them: in friends, and on the street like lost coins. I even knew a woman once. . . .

  "You're an angel, Pinsleepe? Then show me. Fly. Or do a miracle. Angels can –"

  She held up a hand for quiet, then lowered it to her distended belly. Beneath those small fingers it began to grow transparent. Healthy skin color faded in a moment to skin of glass. Inside, and easy to see, curled in on itself but showing enough face to make out, was a fetus with long brown hair: a tiny unborn Sasha Makrianes.

  "Sasha and I are pregnant with each other, Weber. Whoever gives birth first, lives. Only the baby dies."

  "Why? What does Sasha have to do with Phil? She doesn't even know where the baby came from! Is it his?"

  "No. It came with her cancer. Both are wrong and unnatural things, but so was Phil's death. Both are a result of his suicide.

  "I came to tell him that. To tell him the films and his whole life had gone too far. There is a human balance, and there are extremes. It's different for everyone, but then you reach your limit.

  "If you go beyond that, the greed explodes like a bomb in all directions. Look what happened to those children in Florida. Then what happened to Matthew Portland. The same thing is happening to Sasha. It's all Phil's fault. If he'd stopped after the first warning, I think it would have been all right. But he didn't. He did those other things and then he killed himself. Maybe he thought that was the only way he could stop his greed. But I kept telling him he was responsible for what he did. Always. Now that he's dead, someone else has to be."

  two

  "So what do you want?"

  "Nothing but thunder."

  MICHAEL ONDAATJE, In the Skin of a Lion

  1

  I remember exactly where I began writing "Mr. Fiddlehead." Only it had a different title then: "Pinsleepe."

  That's right. That's something Weber will probably never know, and she'll certainly never tell him: The film was to be a slice of my childhood, like a slice of pizza when you're a kid and can't afford a whole pie. I had been using little bits all along in the Midnight films, but "Pinsleepe" was going to be the biggest. I got the idea when I was working on the video for Vitamin D.

  One night at dinner with Victor Dixon, lead guitarist of the group, we ended up talking about our childhoods. Victor told me he knew a woman who'd spent her adult life illustrating her childhood because it had been so traumatic.

  I asked if he thought much about his own. His answer put "Pinsleepe " in my hand.

  "Yeah, kind of, man. I was one of those lonely little kids, you know? So I made up this secret friend, the Bimbergooner, who kept me company? Sort of a combination of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Tom Terrific, and Finky Linky. I've spent my whole damned life looking for someone like Bimbergooner to be my friend."

  "It was a girl?"

  "I don't know, I think so. Or at least she was a boy but had all the good qualities of a girl. Something like that."

  I laughed too hard. He looked at me strangely. "I'm laughing because I had Pinsleepe," I said. "She sounds exactly like your Bimbergooner, only Pinsleepe was definitely a girl. Know why? Because my dream friend would have no hesitation about pulling her pants down and showing 'it' to me whenever I wanted. Naturally I was dying to know what 'it' looked like, but my sister would never show me. I made Pinsleepe a girl so she'd not only be my friend but would have the right plumbing to satisfy my curiosity."

  Victor snorted. "Shit. I wish I'd thought of that! I don't think I even knew what my dick looked like then, much less what I would be putting it into some day."

  He went on talking about his imaginary friend, but I was already spinning with a new idea and inspiration.

  I'd make a film about Pinsleepe! But a Pinsleepe who comes back twenty years later to visit her old friend and creator.

  What would we do if that happened? How would we handle the return of our childhood? Or a mysterious part that showed up in the flesh and wanted to stay awhile to see what things had changed in the old neighborhood?

  I'd grown so weary of Bloodstone and his meager world that I knew I had to do something entirely different or go nuts. I'd done the small part in Weber's film, but I needed much more than that exotic hors d'oeuvre. Here, appearing full-blown out of the ether, was a gift from heaven!

  The problem was, no one on earth wanted to do it, including my partner, Matthew. "I'll give you two words, Phil, and they say it all: Woody Allen." He sat back, as proud as if he'd just proven Einstein wrong.

  "What do you mean, Woody Allen? How is that supposed to finish this argument?"

  "Every time Woody Allen makes a film that's not funny, it goes right in the toilet: financially, critically, everything. Why? Because people go to Woody Allen movies to see funny.
The same way they go to your movies to see Bloodstone make them wee-wee their pants. Look what happened to Coca-Cola when they tried to change their formula.

  "Classic Strayhom works, Phil. Don't start fucking around with a new formula."

  "What would you do if I insisted on making this film?"

  "Sell my collection of Fabulous Fifties furniture to get the dough, jerkoff. You know that. But it doesn't mean I won't put my Uzi in your eye when we go broke!

  "I'm kidding. Do it. Who cares? What are you going to call it again, 'Pin Lips'? Jesus."

  "PINSLEEPE. I'll make you an offer, Matthew. I'll write Midnight Four for you and we'll do that first. Then my film. Deal?"

  "Yeah, a deal! I didn't think I was going to be able to persuade you to put on that makeup again for two years, old Puke Puss. Nice name, huh? That's what they called you in the last issue of Fangoria magazine."

  I made notes on Pinsleepe and my shared secret world in between drafts of Midnight Kills. It took the longest time remembering exactly what she looked like. A really clear picture emerged only months later in Yugoslavia while we were negotiating shooting rights there for part of our next Bloodstone extravaganza.

  I remember making a sketch of her on a paper napkin at an outdoor restaurant in Dubrovnik. We were eating cevapcici and drinking a good Yugoslavian pivo. When I was done, I slipped the napkin into my wallet and kept it until I died. I don't know why.

  Bloodstone. Going back to him and the Midnight world began as an ordeal. Not that it was difficult writing a fourth film: I knew the geography of the place by heart, and where to go, once there.

  What repelled me was the necessity of going there at all I resented most the fact I couldn't leave that part of my life behind like a hick town I'd grown up in but left after graduating from school there.

  Halfway through an okay and thoroughly mediocre script, I threw the whole thing out and began again with a new goal: If, as I hoped, Midnight Kills would be the last of "those" films for a very long time, why not work as hard as I could trying to create the best of the bunch? A honor film as hot and sinister as radioactivity, full of enough tricks and traps to keep people guessing and really scared till the end. That would be worth doing until I had the chance to get down to serious work on "Pinsleepe."