You slip into a bar near Penn Station. On the large-screen TV is a repeat of the Morning News. The daily CDC press conference is uninformative. As is that from Central Command. Protests continue outside the White House. The bartender rolls his eyes and says, “Fucking hippies.” No one trusts a man who will not wear a flag on his lapel or tie a yellow ribbon to the antenna of his car. You nod and drink your beer.
It’s late when you leave the bar, your footsteps uncertain, the sidewalk slick with ice. You haven’t seen a taxi in months. Ahead is a checkpoint and you brush your pockets, trying to remember if you’re holding. You imagine a patdown, the sound of a gloved hand on a plastic case. A copy of Fulci’s Zombie in your coat could get you six months, maybe a year with the right judge; don’t even think about the contents of your apartment. You’re next at the gate. The soldier shines a flashlight into your eyes and you say, “Jack Valenti.” No smile. “Forty-fifth President of the United States.” He doesn’t appreciate the joke, just waves you through, and you can’t help but feel that you have escaped something.
At your apartment you discover an envelope with the logo of Jay’s former employer, a comic book company, stuck beneath the door. Inside there is a note: Soon.
CANNIBALS, QUESTI, AND GUINEA PIGS
Your interest in film doesn’t normally take you beyond the racks marked Horror and Suspense, but at the moment there seems to be a shortage of inventory in both departments. This morning you are standing on the second floor of RKO Video on Broadway, where a patron is complaining to the cashier about the quality of her copy of Pretty Woman. You are looking for something, anything, with the word “dead” in its title. Nothing is to be found. You start looking instead for the word “living.”
He walks past you, blood-brown Armani coat flapping like wounded wings. “Mister . . .”
“Fulci,” you say, slipping a copy of Heaven Can Wait from the shelf in front of you.
He nods and smiles and follows you back to the checkout counter. The woman there looks like she would rather be at the dentist’s. It could be a mistake to rent this tape and leave some sort of record of where you were and when. You excuse your way to the front of the line and announce in a loud but tempered voice that you would like to special order Faces of Death, all three installments, and by the time that the kid has hold of you, pulling you back, people are talking and the woman at the counter has a telephone in her hand.
You run for the doorway and the lights suddenly are bright. A security guard looms in front of you; he doesn’t like what he sees. You toss him the video and his hands react. A perfect catch. You feel the kid pushing and you look back over your shoulder as you reach the exit. You are laughing a little too hard.
Outside you take opposite sides of Broadway, and when you watch the kid wander into an alley off Fifty-seventh, you step in after him and try on a smile.
“Got it, dude.” Now he is smiling, too. “All yours. Uncut Django Kill. From Argentina. Se habla? No más, mi muchacho. Inglés, my man, with subtitles.”
“How much?”
“Hundred dollar.”
“Get lost.”
“Pure stuff. Uncut. Got the scalping scene.”
“Right. Twenty-five.”
“I ain’t giving the stuff away.”
“I can’t do more than fifty.”
“It’s a steal. Fifty. You’re robbing me.”
You can’t believe you’re doing this. Finally you follow the kid farther down the alley. “I want a look.”
“Shit,” he says. “Who do you think you are, Siskel and Ebert? This is a steal, man. I’m telling you it’s good.”
You give him the fifty and then there is nothing to do but hustle it back to your apartment and give it a try. The tape is unmarked but for a torn handwritten label that reads GIULIO QUESTI. You want to believe that this means something. Images of dust and blood and molten gold are burning in your mind. You watch a few seconds of noise, and then a faded color spectrum appears. Finally you see a picture, so grainy that you need to squint. It’s not Django Kill, oh no, not at all. You think you can see something happening, something with a Japanese girl tied to a dingy bed, and there is a man in a samurai helmet standing over her, the lights turned blue and a longhandled knife that dips down into her torso and comes up wet. He cuts away her right hand, throws blood onto the walls. You seem to think that this video is called Guinea Pig. There is no story to it, just the girl kidnapped, bound, and slowly cut into pieces. Finally the psycho eats her eyeballs. You want to feel something, do something, say something, but it’s only eleven-thirty in the morning and everyone else in the world is dead or has a job.
NO CULTURE
Over coffee and toast you read the Daily News. Miami is gone, carpet-bombed back into swampland. The President is regretful but unshaken in his resolve. Food riots in Boston and Providence. A news team in Palm Springs got footage of what looks like a zombied Tom Cruise, his buttocks chewed away but otherwise intact. And there is another entry in the Still Dead. This makes five of them. Five who have died only once. Five who have not returned. They wait in that white room at the CDC, and the whole world waits for them.
At dawn you woke like a man accustomed to the hour, your vision clear and in focus. You are committed to the task that awaits you. You wanted to call Jay again, maybe tell him you see the storyboards, you see frame by frame, you see and see and see.
It is Saturday and your apartment is a dungeon from which you must escape. You decide to go to the movies. The only remaining theatres are in Times Square, but the Times Square you remember is gone. A Holiday Inn has supplanted the Pussycat empire on Broadway. What was the Peppermint Lounge is now Tower 45. You pass the Marriott Marquis and walk onto Forty-second Street. The UDC has done its work so very well. Ghosts of grindhouses past fade in and out like distant television signals. The Adonis, the XXXtasy Video Center, Peepland: all gone. Even the Funny Store has vanished beneath the weight of another office tower. Progress is our most important product, and progress has taken them, one by one.
The new theatres on Forty-second Street are sedate and shadowless waiting rooms, places of pleasant dreams, not nightmares. The first is showing Disney cartoons, the next Jesus of Nazareth. You wonder what they will do about Lazarus. There is no choice but the third one, which does not admit children. You are hopeful, but there is no doubting the fear.
With two cans of beer hidden in your coat, you move away from the ticket booth and find a seat in the middle of the theater. The lights dim. An animated usherette tells you not to smoke and to use the trash receptacles as you exit. The following preview has been approved for all audiences by the Motion Picture Association of America. The Absent-Minded Professor. Your knees are shaky. You sip at the first beer. You stand and walk back up the aisle. This will not work.
Finally the previews are at an end. You sneak another drink of beer and take a seat on the aisle, just in case. The following motion picture has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America. This is a London Film Production. There is a clock tower, Big Ben; the time is eleven. The music is so very strange, plucking strings, a zither. The film is called The Third Man. Written by Graham Greene. Directed by Carol Reed. It is set in Vienna, after the Second World War. Some man named Holly Martins, a writer, comes to visit his friend Harry Lime, but Harry Lime is dead. There is no color. The faces look out at you in black-and-white. Nothing is happening. The actors are just talking and talking, walking and walking.
You clutch at the armrests and wait for the next surge to hit you. It comes just as you begin to understand. Harry Lime is back from the dead. He was never dead, not really. It was a joke of some kind. “We should have dug deeper than a grave.” As the audience murmurs, you stand up, knowing that Harry Lime is alive, yes alive, even to the very end, when the bullets find him. You think about the squibs that could explode from beneath his clothing, sending clots of blood across the grey walls of the sewers, and you hear yourself groan with the knowledge of
what is missing, what is gone, what was never there.
People are turning in their seats to look at you. They are saying Sit down! and What does he want? An usher in a suit is hurrying down the aisle. At least he is in color. Another usher is coming from the other side. You move along the row of seats, bumping knees and outstretched hands. The beer falls onto the carpet, another unseen stain. You do not resist as one of the ushers takes your arm.
In the lobby you see nothing but the poster for the film, and then the night waiting outside. There, in black-and-white, is the knowledge of the way that we have chosen to be entertained, like a book read once too often, leaving a trail of images and emotions so familiar that there is nothing left to see or feel. You know the future, and it is now; it always will be now.
BLOOD AND SYMPATHY
Later you return to the scene of your crimes. You wonder at the silence, whether it is absolute or only the hour. There are no signs that the magazine has been closed down. Still you feel strange stepping out of the elevator and into an unlit corridor. That the hour is past midnight doesn’t help.
Tony’s door is closed and dark. There’s a light on in the Department of Victual Falsification. Elaine is at her desk. She looks up when you come in, but she does not seem surprised. You tell her that you’ve come to get your things. “Don’t bother,” she tells you. Then: “I’ve been waiting here all day for you.” Waiting for what? “You could have called.” That is when you notice that your desk is clear. The photo on the wall looks down on nothing. You don’t need to look to know that the drawers are empty.
“We had more trouble here this morning,” Elaine says. “A search warrant.” Now you realize that she is holding a pistol in her left hand. “Tony says it’s over. Done. Finished.” The pistol looks like it might be loaded. “What do you think?”
You want to tell her the truth. Instead you say: “I think it’s only just begun.”
She’s smiling. The pistol is back in her purse. “I thought you might want these.” Four plastic cases. “My secret stash.”
You hold up the first of the videos, factory fresh and labeled: Revenge of the Dead. It is Pupi Avati’s Zeder. You deep-breathe and feel your nostrils go like ice.
“Elaine.” She raises her eyebrows. Now you are committed. In the elevator, you ask her where she wants to go.
“How about your place?”
You walk and walk and at Fifth Avenue, just past the Flatiron Building, Elaine takes your hand and leads you into a Chinese carryout, where she orders dim sum for you both. From the restaurant you walk toward Union Square. Each step takes you closer to your apartment, to the place where Miranda lived. Where Miranda died. This was your neighborhood. That boarded-up storefront was your grocer, the next your video store. Now the vista has gone upside down, and nothing will ever be the same.
“Best bonfire in the city,” Elaine says, pointing to Union Square. A trio of National Guardsmen in urban camouflage huddle with their cigarettes. They watch over a graveyard of concrete and ash, circled with rolls of barbed wire. The fragrance reminds you of the mornings after Black Wednesday, when you woke to the smell of the corpses burning, the perfumed ghost of Miranda sleeping beside you. It seems a lifetime ago, but still you can see her sleeping, the flicker of flames across the face that wasn’t there.
Soon Elaine is lying next to you in that same room, her dark hair a shadow on the pillow. The only light is from the small bedside television. After Zeder you watch the uncut Apocalypse Domani, and after that she opens your shirt, her hand against your chest. You watch the tv screen go blank, then grey, and in the moments before you try, but fail, to make love, she says: “When there are no more films, we’ll have to make our own.”
SOMETIMES A VOGUE NATION
You wake up with a severed head on your chest. Its lips are moving but you can’t hear the words. After a few seconds you realize that the head isn’t talking, it is chewing. A hand rises into view, clutching a fistful of entrails. The clock on the VCR blinks a continuous 12:00. That would be noon, judging by the sunlight that zigzags through the blinds. The last thing you remember was that Elaine was sleeping while you watched the final moments of Deodato’s L’ultima cannibali. The tribesmen had split Mei Mei Lay open from groin to breastbone, dug out her organs, and sewn her back up for cooking. You have the feeling that you may have missed something good.
You remove the little television from your chest just as Doctor Butcher begins to rev up his band saw. The shot is static, almost matter-of-fact. The stage blood, when it comes, is orangish, surreal. You would have given the scene depth, momentum; not simply shock, but true anguish. There is a note on the nightstand, a few lines in black ink; you read it and smile a thank-you to Elaine. You are on your second cup of coffee and the final moments of Doctor Butcher, M.D. when the telephone rings. It’s Joe D’Amato. He wants to take you sightseeing, probably tonight or tomorrow, sometime after ten. He’ll call again. You tell him you’ll be waiting.
Then you hit the streets, in search of a sandwich and today’s Daily News. You wonder what Jay will do for lighting and whether you will need your tripod. At your favorite Greek diner you order chicken salad and more coffee. When you spread the newspaper across the counter, you learn that the first of the Still Dead, a thirty-three-year-old black male from suburban Chicago, otherwise unidentified, came back last night and was trepanned with a surgical power saw. Life is still imitating art. Doctor Butcher would have been proud.
Across a few more streets and down an alley is the backdoor to Forbidden Planet. You keep your head down, feel like you look guilty, and shove your hands deep into your pockets. Money talks and bullshit walks. You need an extra battery for your camera, and maybe somebody at the Planet will be selling.
“Got what you want,” someone says, though it’s hard to hear over the noise of a boom box, an incessant orgy of doom thrash metal. The kids lean into the walls and don’t look at you. They wear their biker jackets, black t-shirts and jeans like uniforms.
“Say man.” A skinheaded nymphet in torn fishnets twists down the volume, raises her pastewhite face to you. “You know where we could get some stuff?”
“Stuff?” You want to keep walking, get this over with as quickly as you can. Who knows who might be watching?
“You know.” Her eyes, black circles scored at their far corners with silver, dart around, mock fugitive. She sucks at her cigarette, blows back smoke and the word of the hour. “Some good G-O-R-E?”
“No can do.” Your hands seem caught in your pockets. These are your readers. Your public. They sent you letters, sometimes. But you never thought of them when you wrote not really. You thought about something else, something –
“Like New York Ripper?”
“No.” But you can’t walk away. You are –
“Eaten Alive, maybe? Man from Deep River? Some cannibal – ”
“Listen, I – ”
“I do,” she says, and for the first time she is alive truly alive. She bites at her purple lips, finally works up a smile. “Like we know where we can score something but we don’t got the dollars. You wanna go in with us, maybe?”
You look at them, and they look back at you, expectant; line of lost moviegoers, waiting for what you can show them. You tell yourself that you are not this desperate. You are looking for a battery. That’s all. At last you shrug and start to walk away. She turns the music back up, and now that rotten Johnny Lydon is ranting away:
This is what you want
This is what you get
This is what you want
This is what you get. . . .
You feel them pulling at you, pulling you back. But it’s not them, not really. You want so desperately to see. You came here in search of something, something you thought you wanted, but now you aren’t sure. You wonder if you ever were sure. You want to give in to it, let it take you away again to that place where you never need to be sure.
Whether you want to or not, you think about Miranda. You try to
remember the way she was before Black Wednesday, before the night she died, before the dead came back and the apartment walls went red with blood. And before everything was whitewashed back into this thing they call reality.
THE NIGHT SHIFTS
You are hungry and you are thirsty; you need to see something, but you’re not sure what. Nothing hidden on your bookshelf is enough anymore.
You walk down into SoHo, past all the empty restaurants and art galleries, a showplace of spraypaint and shattered glass. When you cross Prince Street, a walkie-talkie crackles at you from the darkness. A cough and clipped voices. Soldiers are on the street corners. All of the city seems armed and ready. Like the morning after Black Wednesday.
At first you could not believe that Miranda was dead. Now you find it hard to believe that she was ever really alive. That you were married. Shared wine and loud music and laughter. That there ever was anything but this.
You decided long ago not to think about that day. It was months after the first reports came in from the Pennsylvania countryside. About the dead that came back to life.
The dead that walked. The dead that ate the living. You had your doubts about the stories, even when it was Dan Rather who told them. After all, this was the stuff of horror movies.
Before it happened you had never thought about Miranda’s death. You were too young, too happy, to think about it. You spent no time in anticipation of it because death was something that would not happen, could not happen, at least until you yourself were old and tired and ready.
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