Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  A countertruth.

  “I’m almost afraid to tell you,” he tells Saul, “why I had you fly out here all the way from New York in the first place. I hope you won’t get mad at me for saying this, but the number one reason I had you come out here was because I missed you. I really did. I know a lot of people in LA, it’s true, but all the people I know here are so …”

  He is lying through his teeth, with his teeth, with his eyes, his gestures.

  All become lies.

  In its own way, it’s a spectacular show.

  A constant Darwinian devouring of deeds by counterdeeds that are themselves devoured.

  This perpetual nullification provides the endless supply of energy for his dynamic personality.

  So Saul thinks, looking at Cromwell.

  From Modern Man to Postmodern Man.

  From Postmodern Man to this.

  The Millennium Man.

  The last man you’ll ever need to know.

  4

  The banter goes on.

  Cromwell tells him this. He tells him that. Saul banters back as best as he can.

  Each, according to the other, is looking good. Not just good but great.

  They touch on various topics in no particular order. On politics. On the changing demographic landscape. The unusual changes in the weather worldwide. On trends in theater. There is a new Canadian ballet company that Cromwell can’t say enough about.

  “Astonishing,” he calls it.

  “They’re reinventing the vocabulary of dance,” he says.

  “The situation in the Balkans seems unstable,” one of them says.

  The other concurs.

  It’s hard to know who’s saying what when nothing at all is being said over and over again. Zerospeak.

  The temperature in Cromwell’s office seems to be dropping as they banter on.

  Not plummeting or anything like that but definitely going down.

  Or so it seems to Saul.

  Or maybe it’s just me, he thinks.

  It’s hard to tell if he’s feeling what he’s feeling or if he just seems to be feeling it.

  The distinction between the two is blurred.

  He crosses and recrosses his legs, folds, unfolds, and refolds his arms across his chest as a way of keeping his circulation going.

  His armpits are clammy with sweat, and his fingers, when he tucks them inside those armpits, feel or seem to feel icy cold.

  The metronomic ritual of his zerospeak banter with Cromwell is so mindless, so effortless, that he’s free, while they banter on, to think his own thoughts.

  Saul thinks. He ponders. He wonders why he has come to LA to see Cromwell.

  He didn’t have to come. It wasn’t even Cromwell who called him to fly out to LA for a meeting. It was his new black Brad who called.

  Saul could have said no.

  But he didn’t.

  Curiosity got the better of him.

  If Cromwell wanted him to fly out to LA, it could mean only one thing. That in Cromwell’s opinion there was still something left in Saul worth fucking.

  And it was this possibility, Saul now thinks, that brought him out here.

  By his own reckoning, Saul had come to the conclusion that he had been fucked out of everything already.

  Cromwell’s invitation gave him hope that he was wrong in his self-assessment. That there was still something left inside him unfucked and intact.

  Saul came here to find out what it was.

  So in a way, he thinks, my presence here is an act of faith.

  If the good can no longer see any good in me, if I can no longer see any good in myself, then the only thing left is to see what good the evil see in me.

  5

  And on it goes, the banter.

  It doesn’t matter who says what, since there is no point in any of it except to pick up your cue when it’s your turn.

  One says one thing.

  The other says something else.

  It could just as easily be the other way around.

  At some arbitrary point, Cromwell reaches inside one of his desk drawers and pulls out a large yellow manila envelope and places it casually on top of the desk.

  Here we go, Saul thinks.

  The yellow manila envelope is larger than standard size. Longer, wider. And judging by its thickness, Saul, a connoisseur of yellow manila envelopes, figures that it contains between three hundred and fifty and four hundred pages.

  Whatever is inside it is meant for him, but he doesn’t know what it could be.

  It’s too thick for a screenplay.

  Just the sight of the yellow manila envelope causes Saul’s mind to reel, it triggers a yellow manila envelope loop inside his mind.

  The many, many yellow manila envelopes of his life.

  He has to blink rapidly several times to keep from getting dizzy. To make the loop stop.

  Cromwell in the meantime is telling him things he already knows.

  About Prairie Schooner.

  “We open this weekend,” Cromwell is telling him.

  “We’re going to be on almost two thousand screens,” he tells him.

  This is all common knowledge. Old news. Saul knows all about the distribution pattern for Prairie Schooner.

  Cromwell knows he knows. The only reason he’s telling Saul something he already knows is to numb him before he fucks him.

  Saul is wise to Cromwell, which is no defense.

  “I think we’re going to be a huge hit,” Cromwell tells him. “A huge, huge hit.”

  (His prediction will prove to be accurate. Prairie Schooner will turn out to be the biggest commercial hit of 1991.)

  “And not just in terms of box office, either,” Cromwell says. “No. I think we have a huge artistic hit on our hands as well. The critics are going to love it.”

  (This prediction will also prove to be accurate. Prairie Schooner will turn out to be the biggest critical hit of 1991 as well.)

  “Speaking of critics,” Cromwell says, and lifts up some photocopied pages from the desktop. The pages are stapled together at the top, and Saul can see portions of the printed matter on the pages highlighted with a yellow marker.

  “These are some advance reviews from the weekly magazines. They’re not out yet, but they will be soon. Here.” He hands them to Saul. “These are for you. You can take them with you and read them at your leisure back in your hotel, but check out the first few pages. The highlighted portions.”

  Saul obeys.

  He reads the highlighted portions while Cromwell reads him.

  He is called a genius. On page after page, in paragraph after highlighted paragraph, he reads the word “genius” attached to his name.

  “Only a film-savvy genius like Saul Karoo could have taken …”

  He is neither surprised nor pleased, nor displeased, nor proud, nor ashamed, that he is anointed a genius for what he did to the Old Man’s work.

  For reasons he can’t explain and has no time to dwell upon, it simply seems inevitable that he should be considered a genius.

  Everyone has become sick and tired of authentic geniuses. But a hack being an artist is fresh and new.

  He looks up to see Cromwell looking back at him.

  6

  “Speaking of movies,” Cromwell says in an apologetic way, as if admitting to a failure on his part to come up with a smoother transition to the business before them.

  His apologetic intonation is totally countermanded by the little smile he’s smiling, which says: Sometimes it’s fun to be smooth and subtle in my transitions, at other times it’s fun to be brutal. I feel like being brutal just now. I hope you don’t mind, Doc.

  He is sitting on top of the desk, his feet are off the floor, his hands are gripping the desktop. One of his hands, Saul observes, seems to be gripping the desktop harder than the other, causing one of his shoulders to dip lower than the other, creating a sense of distortion in the whole room.

  “Speaking of movies,” he says to Saul,
and without looking, as if he knows the exact location of the yellow manila envelope behind him, he reaches back and brings it forward.

  The smile he is smiling now spreads, causing the dimples in the corner of his mouth to deepen and curve.

  Saul is so focused on every detail he sees that he is becoming disoriented by the details themselves. By the shape of Cromwell’s fingers curled around the manila envelope. He never noticed before what long fingers Cromwell has. Long and soft and supple and seemingly boneless, like half-erect sexual organs.

  “Speaking of movies,” Cromwell says, holding up the yellow manila envelope, “have I got something here for you.”

  He puts the envelope down next to him and places his hand upon it. He pats it a couple of times, as if to indicate there is something of great meaning for Saul inside it.

  And then he starts to speak.

  7

  “What’s different about this project from all the others on which we’ve collaborated,” Cromwell, perched atop his desk, goes on to say, “is that you’ll be involved in it from the word go. You won’t be called in to rewrite somebody else’s script, because this time you will be the one who writes it.

  “I know, I know.” Cromwell gestures with his hands, as if deflecting Saul’s objections in advance. “I know the role you like to play. Know it well. You like to pretend that you’re nothing more than a high-priced hack who’s happy the way he is. Who neither wants to write nor thinks he’s capable of ever writing something of his own. It’s a good act and you’ve done it well, but it’s not worthy of you, and it hasn’t fooled me for a second.

  “Nor,” he says, winking at Saul, “is it likely to ever fool anyone else again.

  “Those reviews”—he gestures to the pages in Saul’s lap—“that’s just the beginning. When our movie opens this weekend, there are going to be many more reviews just like those. Even better. You’re in for it in the next couple of weeks. You’re going to be publicly exposed all around the country for being the brilliant artist that you are.”

  Saul knows that he’s not an artist, brilliant or otherwise, but a part of him says, What do I know?

  It’s not that Cromwell’s flattery is convincing him, but it’s because there is an absence of all conviction in Saul himself.

  Saul knows everything except what to do with what he knows.

  8

  “I have here a manuscript of a book,” Cromwell tells him, lifting up his hand and then letting it fall on the yellow manila envelope next to him.

  “A wonderful book,” he says.

  “It’s a love story,” he says.

  “I think this book will be a national bestseller as soon as it comes out.”

  (He would be proven correct yet again. This book would sell over five hundred thousand copies in the first six months alone.)

  “It’s being rushed into print. It should be out in the fall of this year. The publishers are very high on it. Very high indeed.

  “It’s mine,” he says. “I own it. I bought the movie rights to it with you in mind.

  “It’s a great story,” he says.

  “Not just a great love story, but a great story, period.

  “I suppose,” he says, letting his hand glide over the envelope, “you could call it a tragedy. A love tragedy. But then all the great love stories are. Or at least all the great love stories I’ve loved are tragedies.

  “What it is,” he says, “is an in-depth, book-length expansion of a magazine story …”

  9

  Saul felt the sickening shock of what Cromwell was talking about. What the story was and what the book was.

  A grimace, as of pain, appeared on Saul’s face.

  Ignoring him completely, Cromwell went on.

  “It’s a great story,” he said. “I couldn’t put it down. Even though I knew ahead of time how it was all going to turn out in the end, I was still hooked. I really was.”

  Pausing, as if impressed that he had been so enraptured by something he had read, Cromwell then went on to tell Saul a little about the story itself.

  The nature of the plot.

  The characters who are caught up in it.

  “It’s a love triangle, is what it is,” Cromwell told him.

  He used all the real names (Leila, Billy, and Saul) and when he pronounced them, he did it in the proprietary way of someone who had read the book and was now talking to someone who hadn’t.

  Telling Saul all about Leila and Billy and Saul.

  Sitting on top of his desk, his demeanor both businesslike and congenial, his legs dangling, the shoe of one foot rubbing against the shoe of the other as he talked, Cromwell went on to tell Saul all about it, as if Saul himself had not experienced a single moment of the events described.

  Saul sat there, trying to summon some appropriate response to what Cromwell was doing to his life.

  What he needed was outrage. But he seemed to be out of outrage. Most of it had been used up, spent here and there as the price of passage through his portion of the twentieth century.

  The little he had left was so diluted that he ran the risk of appearing ridiculous if he tried to use it.

  Even the shock he had experienced when he realized the kind of book they were discussing was slowly slipping away from him and giving way to the numbness normally associated with postshock syndrome.

  From shock to postshock in a matter of minutes.

  What efficiency, Saul thought. What economy. One on the heels of the other.

  They formed a loop, shock and postshock, and the loop started spinning around in his mind. The faster it spun, the less distinction he could detect between the two.

  It wasn’t long before he was looking back at the moment he was in, as if it were in the past already.

  As if time itself were on a loop, spinning around within the enclosed space and time of the year 1991.

  10

  Cromwell went on with the telling of the story of Leila and Billy and Saul.

  He analyzed the relationships between Billy and Leila, Saul and Billy, Leila and Saul.

  He delved into the nuances of character of each one of them.

  He seemed to be saying that Saul might have a personal connection to the story being discussed but hadn’t written the book that Cromwell had bought. Cromwell was therefore talking about something he owned to somebody who didn’t.

  Saul sat listening and not listening to Cromwell’s enthusiastic exegesis of Billy and Leila and Saul.

  His hands and feet were growing numb with cold.

  His lower back hurt as if something there was breaking in half.

  And, despite all his efforts at holding it in, something fluid and warm was escaping through his anus.

  The incontinence of his aging body shamed him.

  I’ll be wearing diapers soon, he thought. A motherless old man wearing diapers.

  The story that Cromwell was telling him (of Leila, Billy, and Saul) reminded him at times of events from his own life, stirred memories of Billy and Leila and himself.

  The story he had lived and the story to which he was now listening were two different versions, but the fact that Saul had personally experienced one of them did not make that version the authoritative one.

  In the atmosphere of Cromwell’s office, it was becoming more and more unimportant which version of the two was authentic.

  At some point, the whole point became which one worked better as a story.

  In the book version, Leila was a brilliantly gifted actress just needing a big break.

  Saul remembered a Leila with an enormous talent for living and none for acting.

  The Old Man’s film, in the book version, was a mess. Saul remembered a masterpiece.

  By the end of the book, Saul was redeemed by the pain he suffered from the loss of the two people he had loved.

  The real Saul, however, wasn’t sure that he had ever loved anyone and therefore he saw no possibility of redemption for himself.

  And yet he could not
deny that he was slowly but surely coming to prefer the Cromwell version of the story. The Cromwell version hung together better, so much better, than the version he had lived.

  Does the story work? That was the question.

  His didn’t. Cromwell’s did.

  In the book the redemption of Saul was banal, but Saul had to admit that he was not immune to the beauty of banality. Especially not if it eased the pain of being who he was.

  Every now and then it occurred to him as he listened to Cromwell that Cromwell was fucking him out of something precious and irreplaceable.

  A kind of colossal Oneness was slowly conflating everything in Saul’s weary mind, and Cromwell seemed to be saying that the Oneness was the way to go.

  “I’m the One,” he seemed to be telling Saul.

  “You’ll have to admit,” he seemed to be telling him, “that you no longer work as a human being. What counts is what works.”

  The monolithic Oneness in Cromwell, Saul had to admit, not only worked but gave every indication of working better than anything else on earth.

  And the name of the Oneness was Nothingness.

  Like a long-sought solution to a puzzle that had been so obvious that any child could have figured it out long ago, Saul finally realized who it was he was dealing with in the person of Jay Cromwell.

  It was Nothingness.

  Nothingness itself.

  It was Nothingness he saw looking at him through Cromwell’s hazel-blue eyes.

  It had been there all along. Cromwell was not a man who hid anything. He left it to others to hide, to make what they wished of the Nothingness they saw.

  The time, Saul thought, all that time I wasted trying to figure out the motives of this man. Who he was. Why he did what he did. What his purpose was in fucking people out of what was left of their short lives on this planet.

  For nothing, that was why.

  For nothing at all.

  And what did Cromwell get out of it? Nothing.

  Saul was sitting in a modest office in Burbank Studios, but sitting on top of a desk across from him was no longer a man but a process. It was like watching countercreation in the process of turning events, lives, stories, language itself, into Nothingness. It was like witnessing the Big Bang in reverse.

  No, it was not death that Saul saw in Cromwell, for even death was an event. This was the beginning of the death of events themselves. This was a process that nullified both life and death and the distinction between the two.