Wake Up and Dream

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “You know what I still don’t understand? How you found me. Sure, I advertise, but it’s mostly word of mouth. The normal business I do, anyway. Then you said something about hiring some kind of private dick to find me. I know a lot of those guys. And the way that letter arrived, and all the stuff you somehow found out about me. It requires certain skills. So I was wondering…”

  “You’re right. I did hire someone. But the whole deal was that they’re discreet.”

  “You’re not going to say?”

  “Would you want me to go around talking to everyone about what you’ve been up to?” “No, but—”

  “Exactly. But I did find out some things about you, as you say. Cuttings, mainly. Nothing but a name, and a face. But still, I’m curious. I mean, I don’t remember any of the silents and talkies you were in, and doubt if many people do. But you really were close, weren’t you? You nearly made it. So—what was it? What happened? You can’t just tell me it was just those teeth and the ears. If they bothered you that much, you’d have had them fixed.”

  Now she was probing, and in directions he didn’t want to go—especially not after seeing Peg in that feelie and all the memories that had been raked up since. So he ordered some more Champagne and told April Lamotte instead about what had got him into acting in the first place, and about what it was like to grow up in a down-at-heel boomtown like Hopedale, Pennsylvania (might as well put hope in the name, the locals said, because you wouldn’t find it anywhere else). Times when he was plain old Billy Gable, and the best he could have hoped for out of life was to follow his dad into the oil wildcatting trade or pull the molds off tires for the Firestone Rubber Company over in Akron. But he’d always felt there was something else out there, even though he didn’t know what it was or how the hell he was supposed to get to it. The closest he’d come as a kid was when his stepmom Jenny read him Great Classics of the World with that fine voice she had before the TB took hold. Most important of all, though, was seeing Bird of Paradise performed by the Akron Players at the music hall on Exchange Street. What hit Clark most was the way the stage made a doorway into a different world. For all that you could tell the princess wasn’t really Hawaiian and the stage boards creaked and the volcano in the background didn’t look much like a volcano, he was there with them. This was magic.

  He went to see the same play the next night, and again the night after. Then he waited outside in the back alley for the actors to emerge. Luana the Hawaiian princess now looked more like the sort of woman you’d find behind the counter of the local grocery store, but he already knew that there was something these people had that he wanted. When, sitting drinking with them around the corner in a bar, he asked if there might be any kind of work going, and they agreed that he might be of some help shifting scenes, he was already hooked.

  By now the main dishes had come and gone. So had the second bottle of Champagne, and April Lamotte had ordered a third before he could wonder whether it was a good idea. She seemed to have mellowed as she leaned across the table, working her hands around her neck and then up into the roots of her hair, even though she’d been filling up his glass more often than hers.

  “Everyone in this city is hooked. The people here…” She gestured, and leaned forward some more. “Or the bus station whores. Me. I mean, I wouldn’t be here, would I—not one of us would—if it wasn’t for the dream. Or nightmare. I sometimes wonder. I mean, even today… What the hell’s it all for?”

  He watched her blink away the glitter that had formed at the edges of her eyes. What the hell’s it all for? In this business, in this city, nothing ever changed. By this time in the evening, the same question would be asked at many of Chateau Bansar’s other lit tables, and in thousands of cheap lodging houses, and down at the bus station by the whores.

  “Not that Dan can help the way he is. He’s sweet. He’s brilliant. But, God, he’s hard work. No one knows what it’s like to live with a writer—I mean, it never gets into the stuff they write, does it? Or even the biographies… What about Mrs Shakespeare, eh? What about Mrs fucking Dickens? They sat at home, they took the shit, they peeled the potatoes and made the bed and put the meals on the table and told the kids playing out front to shut up because their genius husband’s writing. Or trying to write. Or quite possibly not writing at all…”

  The glitter came again. It spilled from her eye and soaked into the powder on her cheek. She rubbed it away. “This was supposed to be a celebration. I’m sorry.”

  He took her hand. “No. It’s okay.” She gave a louder sob. Her elbow knocked her glass, and Champagne glittered across the table.

  Looking up, he saw that a waiter was already hovering at the edge of their alcove, looking dumbly concerned. Taking April a little closer in his arms, he told him to get them some fresh napkins, and the bill.

  TWELVE

  IT WAS FULLY NIGHT NOW, and the waiting Delahaye’s engine was already running, and the inky blue sky shone in rivulets along its long cream flanks. Clark took off the tortoiseshell glasses and gave them a wipe with his DL monogrammed handkerchief as if to get rid of some kind of blurriness. But what he felt was clear-headed. Anyone would, having glimpsed the size of that bill.

  “Why don’t you drive?” Less tearful now, April Lamotte let go of his arm. “Like I said, Dan, it’s your car.”

  The pull of the engine. The way the suspension rode. He was doing fifty just on the curving driveway out of Chateau Bansar.

  “Which way?”

  “No hurry. Your car’s down by Los Felice isn’t it, so why not try Mulholland? We can drive up through the mountains and cut down through Ventura.” She laid her hand over his on the gearstick as they waited at the turn. “It’s the kind of night for a drive.”

  The smog had blown away in a light wind from off the ocean. The city spilled below them like a box of glittering jewels.

  He’d forgotten. He really had. He’d been living and working in this city—at least, the fringes of it—for all these years, and he’d been like someone asleep. Fairyland didn’t stop with those last views in the rearview of Chateau Bansar’s turrets. Up here, driving a car like this above Hollywood, you felt you were traveling pretty much as high and as far as it was possible to get in this world.

  He re-found Cahuenga and lost most of the traffic by turning east along the wide detour of Mulholland Drive. The dials twitched. His hands turned easy on the wheel. The Delahaye took the switchtails like a salmon taking the rapids on its way to spawn.

  Glimpses east across Cahuenga Ravine toward Griffith Park. That big sign. HOLLYWOODLAND. Grey in the darkness. There’d been talk all these last ten years of getting it demolished but it was still there. He eased the big car on. Nothing but darkness ahead of them now. Nothing but stars above. A couple of times, he caught headlights in the rear-view. He braked slightly, curious as to what kind of automobile it was that was managing to keep up. But the lights hung back.

  “You like the Delahaye?”

  “Yeah. Who wouldn’t? Mind if I take these things off now?” Without waiting for a response, he tucked the glasses into his top jacket pocket.

  “You sure as hell don’t drive like Dan.” “How does he drive?”

  “Like a writer. The only risks he takes are in his head.”

  He took another bend. The mountains were dark, the city a glittering sprawl.

  “Let’s stop somewhere.” She’d slid closer to him. Her hand was on his thigh. “There’s an overlook. You see that turn ahead?”

  He took it fast in a spew of dust. The tires rumbled to a halt just before the thin wooden fence that guarded the precipice.

  “That’s better isn’t it?” She reached over him and turned off the engine and the lights. Silence fell. The city lay spread below them. He could smell summer thyme and Chanel Cuir de Russie and hot rubber. She didn’t pull back when he reached his arm around her shoulder and touched her hair.

  The overlook was empty. Just them and the Delahaye and this night-lit city. Although, a
s his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, there looked to be the shape of some other car parked right off in a corner against the dusty edge of the land. But there were no lights, no movement. The only sound came from their breathing, and the cicadas, and the murmur of Los Angeles which rose up from the mountain-cupped bowl.

  “I brought this.” Briefly, she pulled away from him to rummage in her purse. Something metallic glinted. He caught the tang of bourbon as she unscrewed the cap.

  He chuckled. “I’d never had you down as the type.” She chuckled as well.

  The bourbon was sweet and hard. He wiped his lips, swallowed back the oddly metallic after-tang, handed the flask back to her. She touched it to her lips, then gave it back. The cold metal still held the warm print of her hand.

  “So,” Clark murmured as bourbon fizzed with Champagne in his blood. “What happens next?”

  “Tonight? Or with me and Dan?”

  He let the question slide. His fingers had been toying with April Lamotte’s hair. Now, they touched the jeweled lobe of her ear. Part of him was still doing its best to keep some detachment. She was, after all, a client, and he still hadn’t gotten that main check.

  “This city isn’t good for any of us,” she said. ”It sucks us in. Look what it’s done to Dan.” She shifted slightly and laid her head across his shoulder. He breathed the scent of her hair. The flask was nearly empty and still in his hand. For its closeness, her body felt coiled and tense. “People, when they first came here from back east to make movies, they said it was because of the quality of the light. But what they didn’t talk about was the quality of the darkness. I mean whatever’s lurking underneath…”

  He blinked. His eyes stung. He thought again of that sign they’d passed, and of all the things he’d done, and hadn’t done. April Lamotte was right about LA. He felt it as something huge and black and ravenous, pouring up toward him in a hissing roar.

  She was still talking. “… so I reckoned that if we can get this new feelie finished, maybe it’ll be time for Dan and I to leave. I mean, he’s always said he just wants to write. And there are other, better, places you can write than LA. In fact, I can’t think of any worse…

  “We could escape, we could cut our losses and shed the ghosts and live someplace else. And better, and cleaner, and more cheaply. Dan and I used to talk about re-locating to England. About writing real books there—proper novels that said something true. Of course, that’ll only work when the Germans have taken over, and Dan doesn’t like the Nazis much. So maybe we could try Argentina. It’s like this country was a hundred years ago when everything was new and fresh. We could sell Erewhon and get a ranch. He could write and I could… You okay?”

  He nodded, swallowed. He’d heard people talk about escaping this city too many times before. It was as big a dream as the one which brought them here in the first place. Bigger, if anything, because it never came true. The dry roaring in his ears wouldn’t go away. “Think so.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have given you that flask.” She pried it from his hand. “I can drive back. There’s no hurry, is there?”

  The dim outlines of the car’s interior—the dials, the wood, the chrome, the switches, her stockinged legs, the leather bench—all seemed to blur. Then she reached forward across him toward the dashboard. Keys tinkled, the starter whirred, and the engine—a choir of pistons, a stroked tiger—resumed its easy purr. Then she fiddled with something else and a leather top slowly buzzed over them like a black wing, shutting out the stars.

  “A little privacy,” she murmured in the humming warmth after the hood had completed its journey with a series of sharp clicks. “And it was getting cold.” He felt her fingers trace the buttons of his shirt. “For all the many things Dan’s been for me, he’s never been much of a husband in the physical sense…” The interior of the car was far darker now, but the closure of the top and the engine’s throb hadn’t shut off the hissing in his ears. He blinked again as her fingers found a space between the buttons. “You don’t wear an undershirt?” Her breath had quickened.

  “Never have.”

  Her burgundy suit was black now, and he saw the paleness of her flesh widen as she worked the top of it down from her shoulders and her arms. It was tailored in such a way that, underneath, she didn’t need to wear a bra.

  She leaned around him. Almost straddling him now as she removed his glasses. Her scent came to him in a dizzy wave. “You sure you’re okay?“

  Her breasts were full, and he longed to touch them, but the way she was sitting over him, and the dark weight of whatever else now seemed to be oppressing him, made it hard for him to move his arms. Her hands were on him, stroking the inner and outer sides of his suit jacket and down into his pants’ pockets, but with a purpose that didn’t feel entirely sexual. When her fingers went to his throat and touched him there as if to feel his pulse, he was reminded that she had once been a nurse.

  “How are you feeling?”

  He was vaguely aware that April Lamotte was sliding away from him and re-buttoning herself up. Of shifts and rattles as she collected things.

  “You okay? Clark? Dan? Mr Gable? Can you hear me?”

  He opened his mouth. His throat was filled with something dry and sandy that wouldn’t cough up. Her fingers touched his eyes. He tried to blink, bat her away, but his limbs seemed lost. He felt the rock of the springs, heard the door slam. Heard another door opening, closing. Decided that it was probably the trunk. The Delahaye’s vee eight engine was a warm, dull pulse like the pounding of his heart, which changed slightly as a dark oval, some kind of hose, was wedged into the corner of the window beside him.

  There was movement. Footsteps. The indistinct sound of another car starting, a flash of headlights. Then, as he tried to claw himself toward consciousness and scrabbled for a key which wouldn’t budge, then window and door buttons which did nothing, he was only aware that he was inside a car, and that its motor was running, and that he was entirely alone.

  THIRTEEN

  THE DARKNESS STAYED WITH HIM for what seemed like a long time. Then, vaguely, as he slumped down and forward, he was aware that the car radio had come on. Glowing dials through the choking haze, and the soothing strings of the Fred Waring Orchestra and the down-home southern drawl of Wallis Beekins on NBC with stories, interviews and good old gossip live and living from the Land of the Stars … The words and the city spread below him vanished through spasms of pain into a black, stinking tunnel.

  Funny, really, to have come so far, and yet to have got nowhere. The same empty nowhere that everyone ended up, he supposed. He was floating further out from the blackness now, and the intense burning in his lungs and throat was lessening. Just a guy in a car on some midnight overlook slowly dying from lack of oxygen. He could see himself with a curious detachment. Could see the pumping black hosepipe jammed hard through the window which his paralyzed limbs were too feeble to remove. He was a slumped body, starting to judder now, the lips graying, the eyes rolling in some final spasm, that someone would find in the morning when all life was gone, and briefly wonder about why and how. But not that much…

  The weirdest thing was, he knew he wasn’t alone. Something else was there with him inside the car. It squirmed up and out of the foul black air like a swimmer surfacing, and formed changing arms, and a face that wouldn’t stay still. With terrible eyes flecked with engine fire, with clouds of the exhaust roaring from its oily mouth, it leaned forward to regard him. The thing seemed to be made entirely of smoke. His tongue thickened in his throat, rooting for empty air as he tried to cry out, but it was useless, hopeless…

  The thing, the shape, the presence, wouldn’t leave him. Perhaps it was death itself. And he knew it was close now. So close that he could feel it touching him. He saw his own hands lying lost and remote far down through the darkness, and felt stronger hands which burned and throbbed enclosing them. Their grip was remorselessly strong, and outflowing arms followed, drawing him into an ever-deepening embrace. And
through it all there was a terrible pressure, an endless roaring.

  He was past struggling. He was beyond help. But the thing of fumes really was holding him, lifting him, jerking his limbs like a puppet. He felt his head crack the steering wheel, felt his teeth snap sharp against his tongue. He saw his own hand twist out in front of him, saw it ablaze with rags of dark. Then his arm was wrenched sideways, and a sharp pain, bizarre in its ordinariness, slammed through him from his elbow. The pain flared again when the same movement repeated, but this time was followed by a glittering crash, and an extraordinary rush of air.

  He grayed out for a moment. He gasped, gagged, his belly a writhing knot, as the fumes rushed out. But he was breathing. He was breathing, and the window beside him was broken and the black pipe which had been belching death had flopped away across the gravel and he was Clark fucking Gable and he was alive and his throat burned and his left elbow hurt like hell.

  The engine was still running. He fumbled again at the key, wiggling the damn thing to and fro. Still wouldn’t budge. Everything in this car was clever, electric; far too clever for him. He felt down around the ignition slot. Something small and rough had been wedged in there with the key. He picked and fumbled with numb fingers until it finally gave. Half a matchstick. Nothing more. He turned the key again. The Delahaye’s vee eight subsided with a small, polite cough. The radio dial glowed. The soothing night sounds of the Fred Waring Orchestra playing A Cigarette, Music and You still poured out from the expensive Motorola speakers. He fumbled the door handle through a grit of broken glass. This time, it opened easily.

  He stumbled from the car, fell to his knees in a spill of glass. He stayed hunched on all fours for some time, coughing and retching until the effort got too much and he slumped flat. Then, some unknowable time after, he came back to proper consciousness and—slowly, warily—used the Delahaye’s open door to drag himself back up. He leaned swayingly against the car and looked around the dark overlook. Some kind of presence had been here with him. He was sure of it—as sure as he was that it wasn’t some last spasm of his dying body that had broken that door pane. He listened. All he could hear was Wallis Beekins’ soft burr from the radio, the chirp of the cicadas and his own thudding heart. He held up his hands, but the faintness and blurring came only from his dried and weary eyes. They were streaked with nothing but dirt and blood.