Wake Up and Dream

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Dials twitched. Valves glowed. Things buzzed and hummed. Then the frail coil of glass and metal hovering before him started buzzing and humming as well. This, he was just about starting to realize, must have something to do with all that voodoo stuff about—what was the guy’s name again?—Lars Bechmeir’s new discovery that Howard Hughes had then gone and invested in so heavily.

  “All we want you to do,” Hiram P. Something-or-Other’s voice crackled, “is exactly what we already know you’re good at. We want you to try to act for us, Mr Gable. Is that alright?”

  Could have done without the try to, and there was nothing worse than being dropped into a situation for which you’d had no chance to prepare, but Clark swallowed, nodded. Then, after the first one-two-three count-in, there was a sudden increase in the angry buzzing and a smell of rubber burning, and Hiram and his mates were flapping around for several minutes as they struggled to fix some fault.

  These guys didn’t have the look of MGM employees, although they were some of the oddest ever hired guns. Clark tried asking them a few questions as he waited. He even got some replies. No, this equipment wasn’t even MGM property—this Bechmeir guy had already set up some kind of trust through which they were employed and all use of his patents had to be channeled. Neither was any of it owned by the Hughes Corporation, although Hughes had already shot and premiered that first feelie-movie to what you might call mixed reviews. The whole business sounded odd to Clark. It was probably just another flash in the pan like 3-D or Smellovision, although he understood that MGM had to try to keep track.

  “I want you to feel happy, Mr Gable. Just straightforward common-or-garden happiness. Any time you’re ready.”

  “Now?”

  “No, no. Sorry, no. Not now. You’ve got to tell us you’re ready. And then I’ll get this spool here turning—you wouldn’t believed how much magnetic wire costs by the foot—and then I’ll count one, two, three, like it’s the start of a song. And then you feel happiness. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Clark thought of himself as generally a pretty breezy kind of guy, at least off-set, but he knew he was better at doing brooding, dark performances. Until recently when he did happy as an actor, it had generally been because he was being especially nasty. Like raping the leading lady, or torturing the guy who’d come to rescue her.

  “What’s the, uh, premise?”

  Hiram and his colleagues exchanged glances. “It’s just, well, happiness. There isn’t a premise. Try using your imagination, is what we suggest.”

  No use doing what any actor would normally do, which was simply to act happy. Not with this icily humming twisting thing reaching down from the chickenwire ceiling to claw at the insides of his head like the underneath of the iceberg that did for the Titanic. No use changing the way he stood and moved, or using the smile and the eyes and the voice. For these were just effects, calculations. Sure, when you acted happy, you felt happy, but it was as different to regular happiness as kids playing baseball in a dusty backlot was to Walter P. Johnson winding up on the mound for the Nats. Poor Peg Entwistle had once explained Stanislavsky to him, but as far as he was concerned, acting was a craft, plain and simple, and he really didn’t buy all that acting-from-the-inside shit. Far as he was concerned, if it was inside, it might as well stay there.

  “You ready, Mr ah Gable?”

  “Sure.”

  Sunsets, maybe. Or cars. Yeah, cars. Or better still, sex. No, no, no, no. Not sex. That was some other emotion entirely. But what about kittens? Weren’t they supposed to make you feel happy? Yeah, kittens at Christmas. Or sex in a car filled with kittens at Christmas. Or how about…

  But the damn thing had broken down again. He could tell that just from the renewed smell of burning and the bellyache which now seemed to start right down in his groin. Eventually, though, after much fiddling from Hiram P. Bucktooth and his minions, they managed to get the thing working. It still felt odd. But odd wasn’t even the word. It was like he was being joined, stretched, swallowed. No. It wasn’t even that. It was like, in some way which had nothing to do with those guys on the other side of the window, he wasn’t alone. His fingertips tingled. His scrotum crawled. He looked left and right and glanced behind his back in case someone had somehow snuck in here without his noticing. He also felt, if he was totally honest, like he needed to take a shit.

  “Seem to be having more than our usual teething troubles with the equipment today. If you’ll just bear with us, Mister, ah… I’m sure we’ll get there…”

  Get there they did. Or somewhere. They made him do fear, which was all too fucking easy. And elation—although wasn’t that just happiness with extra gravy?—and all he reckoned he’d come up with was more of this sick displaced feeling, which was how he actually felt. Then there was another glitch, and more smoke. No way of telling from the reaction of the guys beyond the window with their off-kilter teeth and fashion sense how he was doing, but it was already pretty obvious he wasn’t doing that well. If Hiram P hadn’t called an end to things when he did, Clark was seriously concerned that he was either going to have an embarrassing personal accident, or faint.

  “Guess you’d like to see the results?”

  He shrugged.

  He was already fully convinced by now that nothing would ever come of this process. Too fiddly. Too messy. Too—well, just plain wrong. Nevertheless, he was mildly curious to see what they’d done as they took him into their temple of bakelite, glass and bad acne and wowed him with their talk of wavelengths, volts and amperes. Then they showed him a big glass bulb with a green ghost floating in it, and told him that was what he looked like to the receiver thing in there. They re-spooled the wire through the reading heads and reminded him again about how expensive this stuff was, and ran it back through crocodile clips out of some kind of amplifier into a dome-shaped grid that looked like a large, upturned sieve sat on rubber grommets right there before them on the desk. The sieve sparked and crackled. It gave off that thunderstorm and clean armpits smell with which the whole world would soon become familiar. And then it actually glowed, and to Clark it felt as if the devil himself had just shoved his coldest, biggest finger right up his ass.

  “You okay, Mister ah…? We’ve found that some performers have a particular sensitivity to their own emanations.”

  “Felt better.” He guessed he was probably swaying a little in the chair in which they’d sat him. And they probably thought by now he’d come straight from the speakeasy.

  “This, er, is, erm, happiness.”

  The field danced and glimmered. It wasn’t happiness, but it sure as hell was something.

  “Jeeze…”

  And then he found that he was reaching toward this fizzing pit of nonsense without even thinking about what he was doing. The weirdest thing of all was that the bloody stuff seemed to be reaching back to him—shaping itself to clasp his hand with wraith-like fingers before Hiram P grabbed him and hit the off switch and muttered about how he could have damn well gone and electrocuted himself. When Clark was finally led back along the corridors, he realized that he did need to visit the restroom—and pretty badly at that. As Miss Don’t-I-Know-You waited outside and preened her tits, he hunched over the studio porcelain and was copiously, copiously sick in spasming yelps.

  All in all, it was a pretty bad introduction to new technology that had become de rigeur in almost all the big studios within a year, even though the results were most often a mess. Clark’s contract was renewed and he did his best to soldier on through Windy August and The Raging King, but the technicians were confused, and the rentals and royalties which the canny Bechmeir Trust were demanding of MGM for the use of their equipment meant skyrocketing costs.

  None of the actors professed to like the new turn that their business was taking, and the demand in those early days was for nothing but crude emoting—all the nuance which had started to appear in the better talkies had instantly disappeared—but Clark seemed to have an especial antipathy. That
first feelie experience with Hiram bucktooth in that chicken shed seemed to have set a jinx which continued to follow him. He got used to sparks and hissings and directors’ curses and the smell of things burning. But he almost preferred those times to the ones when the iconoscopes actually worked. He didn’t like the way those cold glass eyes made him feel—which was ill, basically, but a with whole lot of other crap going on around the edges. It was as if he was being sucked away. No, it wasn’t even that. It was as if the real guy he was almost sure he was somehow wasn’t standing there any longer and had slipped away like the sliver of last night’s soap down a plughole into—what? Some other place, time, dimension? These weren’t the kind of thoughts that Clark was used to having, and he felt no more comfortable with them than he did with the iconoscope itself. When he tried to explain all of this to his fellow actors, quite a few of them went partway to agreeing with him, but then they’d shrug and tell him it was a knack like any other. That it took a bit of getting used to, for sure, but it was like booze, or getting your sealegs, or smoking locoweed, or any of the other fancy new pastimes which were then making their way into the industry, and it was really just a question of giving it your best.

  He’d never been much of a one for why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this-crap tantrums which were a regular part of any kind of dramatic production. But these things got to a guy, and acting of any kind was always an emotional process, and he soon reached the point where he was doing most of his best acting, as the saying went, after the director had called that’s a wrap. Things came to a head when he was asked to break down in tears fifteen whole separate fucking times until the technicians finally managed to get something resembling a signal down on wire. And even then they said they weren’t happy with it. Something about amplitude, the way the machine was picking him up. He’d been feeling it as well. That was the thing. He’d been sobbing like a fucking baby as if he was really mourning for something he didn’t even know he’d lost. By the fifteenth take the process of emotional collapse had gotten so absurdly easy that he could barely stop. And still it wasn’t right.

  But for him that was it. As far as he was concerned, this wasn’t acting, this was some new bullshit freaktent claptrap crock he was involved in, and Louis B and all the rest of them could shove it all the way to midnight up their tight Jewish asses. He wiped his face and blew his nose and left the set and drove to his suite at the Ambassador in his current MGM rented limo. There, he ate some complimentary chocolates and waited for the pleading phone call from the director which didn’t come. Mina, though, did plead with him—at least, when she heard about the incident a few hours later—but even she seemed to have sensed some kind of defeat. Clark hung around some more, which was something any actor had to be good at doing. He even tried calling the director himself the next day, only to be told that the plug had been pulled on the whole project and that it wasn’t his fault and these things were understandable and he wasn’t to fret. So he kicked his heels for a few days longer as he waited for a courier to bring his next script. But it was the hotel maître came to his door instead, to enquire in that gratingly polite way of all maîtres why his last two week’s bills for this suite, not to mention room service and the bar, hadn’t been paid. Quietly, but in that lingering way people do when they know they’re leaving somewhere they will most likely never see again, Clark gathered up the few things from the suite that he could actually call his own, and then a few others that strictly speaking weren’t. And he left. He thought for a while that this was the end of Clark Gable. He only realized later that what he’d really witnessed was the end of MGM.

  Things happened fast in LA—that was something he should have made proper note of when he was on the way up in this business. There were all sorts of reasons he could have given as to why he’d fallen from grace so rapidly, but in his heart of hearts he knew that the real fall from grace had been somewhere inside him. And now he’d got so far down what had briefly seemed like a golden way that he couldn’t bring himself to tread the boards again, and the directors and producers were already wary of anyone with a taint of the old talkies about them, especially a nearly-star whose few headlining appearances had all nosedived.

  It was one of those things you could look at in a hundred different ways, and not one of them would make the slightest difference, as Clark had long ago discovered. Sure, he could blame Mina, or the studio. Sure, he could—and he did—blame himself. He could even blame that idiot director, or lousy luck with the choice of scripts, or some wooden performances by his leading ladies, or not enough kissing of the right kind of ass. Or maybe he should have tried harder and been more patient with technology which everyone agreed was a hard enough bullet to bite. But none of that mattered, and Clark took the view that most things in life really weren’t that complex when you took them apart and wiped the grease off them and laid them out. When people asked Clark what had gone wrong, which had happened less and less over the years and barely at all now, he preferred the simplest answer because he reckoned it was also the truest. There had always been that way the camera seemed to like some actors more than others, and it was the same with iconoscopes.

  He told people that he hadn’t liked the feelies much, and that the feelies hadn’t liked him.

  FORTY THREE

  IT WAS COMING ON NINE next morning by the time he’d fully woken up. Pipes were hissing, radios were playing and a singer was practicing her scales as he lumbered along the corridors in search of a washroom. The place he found was in much the sort of state he’d have expected. Hopeful damp-furred notices about tenants showing respect for others. The ledge of a dusty window lined with rusting tins of Drano and jars of Sal Hepatica Laxative. Someone’s socks and underthings left to marinate in the corroded lion’s claw bath. A day or so longer here, and he’d be doing the same. But he knew it couldn’t last. He cleaned his teeth using his finger and someone else’s tin of Pepsodent. He cleared a space on the mirror glass with a wet hand and thought how odd the guy on the other side of it now looked without his glasses.

  Barbara had fixed him coffee and a bowl of Cream of Wheat by the time he’d dressed. He sat down in her room and lit a Lucky Strike and thought again of Peg’s worried face—and the way she had fled from him last night—as this pretty Jewish broad, who was scarcely old enough to be a woman, went on and on about some huge Goddamn conspiracy. Not that he didn’t doubt that she was right, but couldn’t she see that they were an ant’s squeak away from becoming its next casualties?

  The room soon hazed with his cigarette smoke and Barbara went to the window and pulled back the sash. She stood there for a while as the sunlit haze drifted around her like an aura. Then she turned and picked up something strange and dark.

  “And there was something else I found.”

  He almost cringed when it she flapped it toward him.

  “Although you might need a mirror to look…”

  It was that piece of carbon paper with that same word stamped through into it on about fifteen hundred times.

  “Yes. I know. It says Thrasis. I saw it a while back.”

  “And you didn’t think to mention it?”

  “Jesus, Barbara! How much crap have we had flying around here?”

  “That word is there repeatedly on that weird toilet sheet draft that you found stuffed in the wastecan at that pine lodge.” She was looking at him more intently now. “Or did you know that as well?”

  “Not exactly. But I can’t say I’m totally surprised. You see, Howard Hughes said it to me. Like it was some kind of full stop on everything. Like he couldn’t help saying it even though it was the last thing on earth he ever wanted to say.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me that either?”

  “Take me out and shoot me, Barbara. It’s a word written down backwards that someone has also said to me. What the hell else can I say?”

  “Only it isn’t a word.” She nodded toward her bookshelves, which were lined with encyclopedias and dictionaries. “I’ve j
ust looked it up. It isn’t listed. But it’s somehow important, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. For a moment, he heard a weird hissing sound, and sensed a faint return of the presence he had glimpsed before. “I guess it probably is.”

  FORTY FOUR

  BUT THERE WERE STILL SO MANY QUESTIONS.

  Crowded in with Barbara in the phone booth on the street, he tried calling the Nero Agency again. Still no pick up. If Abe really was the guy April Lamotte had hired to find a lookalike for her husband, they’d have to find another way of working it out. He used the same dime to get put through to the communal hall in Doges Apartments, and the phone rang for almost as long as the Nero call before Glory picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s Clark. Just thought I’d ring to check if anything’s up.”

  “Up?”

  “Any mail? Visitors? That kind of thing.”

  “The guy about repossessing your car no show again if that what you mean.”

  “Great. And, er, mail?”

  “I look…” Footsteps. A long pause. Footsteps again. “Final demand for the IRS. Bill for the landlord. What look like a bill—”

  “Just bills, then?” He could tell Barbara was laughing even though he could only see the back of her head. “Nothing else?”

  “No, but you hiding or somesuch thing? Where you been?”

  “Just busy on a case. Might take another day or so.”

  “I hope she worth it.”

  “I really do wish it was that kind of case, Glory.”