Wake Up and Dream

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “None that I’m hearing.”

  “Then you’re the lucky one, and the Theobolds certainly weren’t. He was a successful doctor—a pioneering brain surgeon. Basically, they were found starved to death in their own home in ’38. Bad enough, right? But all their friends had thought they were in Europe and someone had kept them chained up in there for months. They hadn’t just starved. They’d been forced to eat… Well, the coroner’s report rather implied it was each other.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Is, isn’t it? But there’s a pattern. All of these people went to the premiere of Broken Looking Glass. And now they’re dead successful. Or simply dead. And the ones that are dead either killed themselves, or had something far worse and nastier happen.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone else ever seen this going on?”

  “Because there is nothing going on unless you check against this guestlist. Far as I can tell, these people aren’t particularly associated in any other way. Guys like Frooney and Srodzinski and Halon, they might have known each the way the rich always do, but as far as anyone knows, their deaths were just regular common-or-garden LA murders and suicides, and whoever takes any notice of those? And when it comes to those big showpiece murders, well, they do tend to happen in LA rather more than most places.” She was looking at him with that sideways tilt to her head and an expression which was somehow both knowing and wary. “But there is one other name I want you to see…”

  She held the guestlist out to him. It was badly crumpled. It must have been the actual typed sheet which had been used to check people in on the night.

  “You see?”

  Before he could say whether he saw or not, she was pointing toward the bottom of the list, where the name A. Lamotte (Miss) was just visible.

  “This is big, Clark. This is important. This is a massive opportunity to put LA Truth on the publishing map…” Barbara Eshel was pacing the room now, flushed and excited. She’d already wrenched the two invites for Kisberg’s party out of his hands.

  “But—”

  “We’ve got to go. It’s an open secret Kisberg’s going to announce himself as the Liberty League presidential candidate tomorrow, and here’s our chance to get into his house. He’s on the board of the Bechmeir Trust, for godsake, and he was on that guestlist of ten years ago before anyone even knew who the hell he was. Can’t you see what a chance this is, Clark? Can’t you see how it all adds up?”

  “Look at us.”

  “Obviously, we can’t go as we are—but didn’t you say that Erewhon has walk-in wardrobes stuffed with expensive clothes?”

  He put the cup with the remains of his cold coffee down on the table beside his chair. His eyes traveled back to the list. Barbara was right—there were some names he recognized, for all the little attention he paid to the news.

  “We’ll be seriously late,” he muttered.

  She flapped her arms and laughed. “Don’t you know how fashionable that is?”

  THIRTY SEVEN

  “THIS IS SOME PLACE.”

  There were no obvious signs of forced entry at Erewhon, or of LAPD scene of crime notices or further violence or blood. Automatic lights flared on when they entered the hall.

  “Just stand over there by the staircase. I want the reader to get a real sense of this place’s scale. And put those glasses back on.” Barbara Eshel screwed a new flashbulb into the Graflex camera which had taken up most of her handbag.

  Pop. Flash.

  “If you like, we can just say it’s an old picture of Daniel Lamotte before everything went wrong. Depends how the story works out, but we’ll certainly need something, a visual angle—especially if I can get a feature in one of the better magazines.”

  “I thought you said you were doing this for a piece in LA Truth?”

  She lowered the Graflex to twist the winder around. “Yeah, but the more I think about this, and the more we find out—this story’s got breakthrough written right through it like a stick of Long Island rock.”

  Flashbulbs hissed and flickered. She wandered off, cursing in surprise at the size and splendor of the rooms.

  The same fine furniture, pale carpets and dark curtains swam into view beneath the recessed lights when they went upstairs to find clothes. The phone still sat on the glasstop table beside the bed in the room April and Daniel Lamotte had shared. So did the ashtray, still filled with all those ground-out pastel-colored butts. He could even see the dent on the bed where she’d sat and waited two nights ago for the call saying her husband was dead.

  “You know,” Barbara was saying, “this woman’s not so very far from my clothes size. Might even be the same. But who the hell needs all of this stuff? Such a waste of money…” Nevertheless, she was lifting lots of it out; whole shifting, rustling piles of dresses and suits and skirts. “And by the way, Clark—do you really think they’d be able to afford this lifestyle on a feelie writer’s money alone? Okay, he wrote some successful screenplays, but this? Thought you said you knew this industry?”

  The guest suite he went to get changed in wasn’t much of a come-down. Even though the boiler was off and the water was cold, the shower felt sweeter than anything he was used to. And not a cockroach in sight.

  I could get used to this, part of him was saying as he sat on the edge of the bed and toweled himself. The walnut furnishings. The carpets. The mirrors. That car outside. The cost of a working man’s monthly wages for a bottle of cologne. And that young woman in the room along the corridor—who was probably naked in the shower right now—I could get used to her, as well.

  But nothing would settle. Not this weird new life he was living, nor the old one he seemed to have lost. Even now, it took an effort of will to look at himself in the long dressing table mirror, and the face he saw bought no particular relief.

  He shook his head. Inspected the fine assortment of another man’s clothes he’d gathered. Shirt collar pinned by solid gold. A suit of that deeper shade of black you never saw in any regular clothes shop, and only rarely in night skies. Shoes snug as a ballerina’s pumps. A silk paisley necktie so beautifully painted it was a work of art. He already knew the look and fit all of it would be perfect.

  He went downstairs after he’d gotten dressed and waited for a while in the hall for Barbara Eshel to come down. He smoked a Lucky Strike. He stared at the phone in the alcove. He wandered the long corridor after he’d finished his cigarette. The wraith was still turned off. He stopped and studied it. Then he felt around until he found a toggle switch around the back of the plinth.

  Nothing at first but a soft swishing, like silk over flesh. He guessed that that was the looped recording wire passing and re-passing over the recording heads. Then came a humming, and a faintly cattish smell of warm valves and shellac as the amplifiers started to do their work. There was something floating now between the charged plates like a stream of sunlit dust, and the air seemed to have chilled as if a door somewhere had been opened. The plasm shimmer of the Bechmeir field was unmistakable now, a dance of light, and beautiful to behold.

  The wraith floated before him, and it seemed that his mind was playing tricks, although he knew that what he was experiencing was, by definition, a trick of the mind. What had April Lamotte said about this feelie recording—that Daniel Lamotte had got some studio to mix in the auras of all his favorite actors, then put it on a loop? He could see what she meant. For wasn’t that Peg Entwistle’s queenly aura he was now feeling, and wasn’t this one that guy with the ragged gait for whom things always went wrong? It really was like the distillation of some endless night at the feelies, and he could understand why Daniel Lamotte had got the thing made, and also why it had come to taunt him. But there was something else as well. An undertow that dragged oddly at the spirit—something bleak and powerful and strange…

  He turned the thing off with a shudder, and watched it fade and drain away. Hearing something further down the corridor, he turned and saw that lights were on in the room where he’d talked with A
pril Lamotte. A changed Barbara Eshel was standing beside the long couch.

  “What kept you so long, Clark?” she asked.

  Every time he thought he’d got some sort of handle on this woman, she went and did something like this. How, for example, could she have got herself dressed and downstairs so much more quickly than he had? And then, manage to look like she did?

  “You don’t brush up too bad,” she said as she studied him. “For a failed actor, that is.”

  “Neither do you. For a twobit newshound.”

  “This…” she gestured—she’d chosen a long, dark dress which shimmered with turquoise blues—“… was about the only thing in April Lamotte’s entire wardrobe that anyone move around in like a normal human being.” It was loose and long from the hips down, low and tight at the bust. She hadn’t done much to her hair, but whatever she’d done had transformed her. Or maybe it was the earrings or the silver choker. “I mean, what is the point of having some glossy fabric wrapped so tight around your thighs and ass that you can barely walk?”

  “I think I can explain that.”

  “Don’t bother! I already feel like some ridiculous society whore. And I’m someone who used to stand outside Liberty League rallies waving banners until the LAPD started beating us up.”

  THIRTY EIGHT

  THE SKY ROILED AND FLICKERED as they drove down from the canyons towards Beverly Hills. The Beverly Wiltshire, and the Electric Fountain. Billboards and billboards and billboards. JUDAS THE FEELIE WHO WANTS TO LOOK OLD WARM WINE ENEMAS DO YOU INHALE HOT DOGS BUY SELL DINE DIE THE LAST THE BEST THE LATEST NEW NEW NEW FRESH NEW YOUNG

  The building beyond the raised chromium portcullis of Herbert Kisberg’s gatehouse was so large and yet floated so delicately on floodlit tiers of lawn that it scarcely seemed to be made of stone at all.

  “You’re not going to tell people you’re my dead wife, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you’re with me, Barbara. The way you look—anyone who heard about what’s happened is going to think it’s a bit quick to start a new romance.”

  “First of all, this is Hollywood and they wouldn’t think that at all. Secondly, they’d care even less. But thirdly, Clark, I’ll simply tell people I’m who I really am.”

  “You mean—”

  “I’ll say, Hi, I’m a writer. And they’ll ask if I’ve had anything produced. And when I tell them I’m not that kind of writer, they’ll walk away.”

  Some of the security goons wore dinner suits, and some wore Liberty League trooper uniforms, but they were all big and broad; nothing like the Gladmont guy, but the sort you’d get to play background heavies in a feelie. They didn’t even ask to see Clark’s invitation cards, let alone ask them about who they were, although Barbara looked like she wanted to talk to them anyway until Clark drew her on. They followed a grass pathway between flaming sconces and a vast slew of expensive cars toward marquees, piping music, flags and marching soldiers. The flashing cannon and falling horses of an entire battle scene which was being enacted in a wide auditorium beneath the terraced lakes before the house.

  “Dan, Dan, Dan. You did make it after all…” Resplendent in tartan necktie, coat and trews, Timmy Townsend came bounding up. “So, so great to see you.” Clark looked around for Barbara as Timmy pumped his hand, but she’d already vanished into the preening crowds.

  “I thought I should make the effort.”

  “And here you are.” Timmy took a snorting breath—half laughter, half disbelief. “And that news about your wife…” He looked jolly even when he made a serious effort to look sad. “So, so terrible. You must let my secretary know when and where the funeral is. Promise? Terrible business. And how about you, Dan? How are you feeling? Do you think you can face the next day and the next deadline and crack on?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I think I can.”

  “That’s…” The look of sorrowful concern had once again lost its battle with the bonhomie which dominated Timmy’s broad face. “… good.”

  “Can I ask you something, Timmy—I mean about my wife. You must have dealt with her, to sort out the Wake Up and Dream contract?”

  “Just a couple of phone calls, I think.” The executive’s lower lip bulged in the manner of someone who wasn’t usually called on to reflect much upon the past. “After you’d sent the treatment in, and my secretary had shoved it across my desk, and of course I saw your name and I sat down and I read it and it was the most—”

  “So I sent Wake Up and Dream in, and then April got in touch?”

  “Well, Dan, I’d have to get my secretary to check. The way I remember, there was this brilliant treatment, and the next thing I know April’s calling me to ask if I’ve got it, read it, and what did I think?”

  “So I sent it in, not April, and from my Bunker Hill address? And then she chased it up, and brokered the deal?”

  “That’s the way I recollect it.”

  “Sorry to go on about this Tim. But I’m like you—I’m a big picture man, and my recollection’s sometimes a little hazy when it comes to nuts and bolts. And of course I can’t ask April now.”

  “A wonderful, wonderful woman.” Drums rattled. Cannon flared.

  “Sure. But what did you reckon to her as an agent? I mean, what was she like when she sorted the deal?”

  From puzzlement, Timmy Townsend’s expression was now shifting to alarm. “A deal’s a deal, you know, old fella. Doesn’t matter who’s alive or dead. And this really isn’t the time to be worrying about this sort of thing, Danny boy. You’re bound to be shook up. I mean, I had no idea—”

  “You’re right. And neither did I. But I was just, I don’t know, curious about the sort of approach she took…”

  Timmy Townsend laid a hand on his shoulder. His smile had returned. “Your wife was a decent person, Dan. Not some money-grabbing, over-ambitious, super-bitch—feel like you have to put on armored gloves before you shake hands with them, their talons are that fucking sharp—which, entre nous, is a kind of agent I’m having to deal with more and more these days. April Lamotte was not just a loss to you, Dan, but a loss to the whole industry, and to us all. I can honestly say that dealing with her was like a breath of fresh air.”

  Understanding. Sensible. A breath of fresh air … In other words, good though it was, she’d just taken what was on offer at first base. That didn’t sound like the work of any kind of agent, let alone April Lamotte.

  “But you must let me show you some people…”

  Even feelie executives had to be good at something, and this was surely Timmy Townsend’s star turn. The hand across the shoulder, the warm smile, the friendly hey, the promise of a quick chat saved for later, the peck on the cheek, the fuck-off turn of the head, the avoiding or beckoning wave, the flirtatious pat on the ass.

  He’d been to parties pretty close to this back in the old days, and not much seemed to have changed, apart from the hems rising higher and the cut of the necklines swooping lower. But the whole industry had moved on—if was the same industry at all. People like Thalberg, Goldwin, the Meyers, the Wallaces, and the studios they’d founded had all been gobbled up, and gone. Now, it was Senserama, and Arc-Plasm, and TLL, and even the Paramount part of Paramount-Shindo was just a name that the Japs had used so people wouldn’t think they were Japs. Most of the big players back in Clark’s day had been Jews, of course. Not that the Hebes were now being treated over here the way they were said to be back in Europe—not even in cutting edge California. No siree. Far from it. They could hold down jobs and open bank accounts and run businesses just like anyone else, as long as they were properly registered and didn’t exceed the designated quota for their scientifically categorized ethnic group. Just like the Mexicans, Chinese and blacks, they could sometimes even use the same bus benches, schools, drinking fountains and public toilets as the white Caucasians; it was all just a question of sharing out limited resources in the fairest possible way. Get over it, get on with it, or leave our fucking
country was the underlying message. This, after all, was the Land of the Free.

  Just like at the studio, part of him was still waiting for someone to shake their head after he’d introduced himself and say—no you’re not Daniel Lamotte, but, if you took off those science professor glasses, wouldn’t you look a fair bit like that guy who nearly used to be famous called Clark Gable…? He needn’t have worried. These people weren’t like Mary at Edna’s Eats, or some of his sadder clients, or the people who still occasionally gazed at him oddly on the street. Here, everything which had or would ever happen was changed and refracted through the dazzling prism of the eternal now. As he was introduced and moved on, he soon realized that the vague don’t I know you? expression with which he was most often greeted—and the warm nod which followed when Timmy explained who he was—was simply the standard way people at a party like this dealt with anyone they didn’t recognize. Obviously, you wouldn’t be here at all if you were nobody. Then Timmy, who could work this kind of thing the way Karajan had worked his orchestra in the recent Berlin Philharmonic tour, would come in with the terrible fact of his recent loss. Dan was fine, Dan was coping; Dan was the sort of writer who took this sort of thing and turned it into box-office gold—that was the message they all got from his warm tone. Women hugged him and murmured soft things into his ear. Men looked tearful and held on extra long as they shook his hand. He was given cards by lawyers, new agency proposals—just give me a call soon as you’re settled; better still, I’ll call you—someone even offered him the use of his yacht. He felt like he was the star of every crowd for the moments he was standing there with them, and knew that he’d be forgotten as anything more than some or other writer whose wife had taken a wrong turn into thin air the moment he was gone.

  He remembered again that yellowed guestlist; the names, the people—dead successful, or simply dead. And here was the guy who now ran the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, and hadn’t he been one of them? And hadn’t this guy in the red frock just been Father Gerald of something, and now he was Bishop of Los Angeles? And this fat Liberty League apparatchik who was apparently the California Supreme Court judge who’d sentenced more prisoners to execution than any other—hadn’t he been on the list as well?