Then I landed.
There was a sickening thunder in my ears as the wedge of my jaw stove my clavicle girdle. A sharp crackling explosion as my eardrums exploded. Then white. A deep, pervasive, granular dun color, the true absence of light. There was the rasp of footsteps. I blinked. I was not on the ground. I was suspended in the white. I saw high-button boots. Crisp pant cuffs. A whisper of bergamot.
Ah, you silly girl, Volker said. You’ve wrecked your new toy. Now what fun will you have?
“But it’s not possible.”
Isn’t it? Even gods have limits.
“But I didn’t know.”
Consider yourself duly informed, my girl.
I unspooled. Crystalline thread played out across the numb universe.
“But I need to finish. How can I get back?” A billion open doors tried to suck me into their voids.
Finish? You have finished, my dear.
“My film, my story.”
You remember that? he asked with a curious crack in his voice.
“I must finish it.”
Then there is a way.
“What way? Please, I must know.”
Are you sure? You will give up ever really dying. You will never rest.
“Tell me.”
Will, he said.
“What?”
Will. Will yourself home.
And then wet ashes at the base of my tongue. The promise of pain. Of whole houses of pain. But it never came. Yellow tears fell into my eyes and clouded my vision. Mutter was crying. He held me tightly in his arms. My head lolled at an unspeakable angle, a dull pinkish dust congealed in a wound that circumnavigated my neck.
“We thought we might have lost you,” said the Trout from his full height.
“Did you get the shot?”
“Of course. A masterpiece. Can you move?”
My eyes rolled rudderless in their sockets. “Where are the others?” I asked.
“Fled,” the Trout said. “What horrors they might have witnessed in the trenches I suppose were nothing compared to your little tumble.”
“Will they tell?”
“And who would be fool enough to believe them?”
“Lay me on the ground, Mutter,” I said.
He spread me gently on the cracked cobbles. I looked up at the sky and sent a tiny explorer down the channel of my spine. There was wholeness, break, wholeness. A corporeal Morse code. Just a message. Just information. And how to mend it? Will, the ghost had said. How? Will. Simply think there are no bones to knit. There is no flesh to heal. That was the wisdom. That was the will. The will of being past any break.
There are no bones to knit.
There is no flesh to heal.
My body was mine again, and I sat up.
CHAPTER 14
I’d had no first day of school, no cold Christmas mornings bleary with anticipatory heat. No birthdays. I had no reference for the sickening flutter in my guts as I waited in the screening room. It was only when Zann finally arrived for a showing of my first assembly that I realized the sensation was not malignant.
The Trout arrived just as the lights dimmed, an affected scarf around his throat. We ran the film without titles. I warned the Trout this would be the case, telling him the title writer was backlogged and how ridiculous it would be to postpone the screening when words were really a formality after all. This was Volker’s logic, and I fear I had trouble sounding convincing, but he wanted complete silence for this first outing. Our nightmares have no soundtracks, he explained. Silence is the natural state of dreaming.
But there was sound in that little screening room. The leafy clatter of gears, the beetle-wing rustle of celluloid sprockets cupped then released. The dull hiss of the carbon arch that burned hot as the sun as it tossed each image a battlefield distance to the screen. Zann was rapt, his eyes wet but unblinking. Even Mutter seemed transfixed. I watched little of the film myself. I was too busy watching them. And in so doing I became acquainted with the ambivalence that would soon define my attitude toward my own finished work. The Trout sat behind us. But his deep silence testified to his total immersion. When the film ended we sat in the dark for a full seven minutes until I bothered to raise the lights.
“My God,” Zann managed to whisper. “What have you done?”
The Trout was on his feet at the first hint of criticism, knives out. How badly he wanted to please.
“I was thinking of Wagner’s Parsifal,” he almost wailed. “At least through some of the more pathetic moments—perhaps a bit of Die Fledermaus, to lighten things up.”
The Trout was talking music, talking treason.
“A little fluffing, a little parsing. We can change it.”
And my eyes hardened ineffectively in the dark. But Zann didn’t need my remonstrative looks. He already saw.
“I don’t think so,” Zann said slowly. “I wouldn’t touch it.”
“Well, when the titles are in it will flow a little better . . .” The Trout trailed off.
“No. No titles either.”
“No titles? How will the audience follow the . . . ?”
“Just as it is,” Zann pronounced calmly. “A true silent. The first of its kind.”
I billed myself as Maddy Ulm, I suppose in deference to the city where I first encountered Volker, first encountered what would become moving pictures. But the name meant nothing to me. To myself I was still nameless, too young and green to understand the associative power of labels. The Trout was credited as director, but Zann assured me I need not formally claim my contribution to the picture. He had been privy to the Trout’s bouts with ego and doubt, had seen me work, grave-deep with Mutter, had seen the red glow beneath the editing room door deep into the night. And he wasn’t entirely dismissive of the Trout’s efforts. He offered him a three-year acting contract with a two percent bump per year. But me he sat on his lap and stroked my cold knees and purred the words I so badly wanted to hear.
“You may be German cinema’s first true genius, my little dear,” he said. “How would that mantle sit on these frail shoulders?”
Quite nicely, I assured him.
THE PROJECT WAS DUBBED THE TOYMAKER AFTER MUCH HEATED DELIBERATION. It was a wink toward the irony we were sure our audiences would appreciate.
One morning, a month later, I walked onto the shooting floor and all the cameras stopped. The air became peppered with the discreet applause reserved only for the nearly great. I was led to the front of the stage and awarded my own tiny white director’s coat. It was cut to my child’s frame and presented by none other than Caligari’s creator, Robert Wiene. And what was the Trout’s reaction to this new appreciation? Was he grateful my efforts had made him a contract player? He quoted Nietzsche.
“ ‘You will never get the crowd to cry hosanna until you ride into town on an ass,’” he said, dressed in the foppish heels and pantaloons of a seventeenth-century cavalier. He was working as a third lead in one of Zann’s costume epics and seemed tired and miserable, but I was too excited to be moved by his philosophical bitchiness. I had my white coat. I was a Doktor of cinema. I had my future. But such laurels have a price.
I usually avoid mirrors. They reflect a defect only, an oft-recited lie that invariably distracts from the thorny truth that festers in the dark inside me. But that night, the night I received my coat, was different. I wanted to see myself. Just myself. To revel for a moment, an evening perhaps, in the badge of my achievement. That coat had much to answer for. It had to soothe every terror, balance every abandonment. It had to provide a new skin, a new reflection not bathed in ignorance and littleness. It had to cloak me in love.
The makeup room was the perfect place for this. It was banked with a row of mirrors. Sixteen reflections and one object. Me and my magnificent white coat. Yes, I had originally thought the coat an affectation, an unnecessary formality. I’d thought it was an impractical garment that belied the filth of real filmmaking. I did not realize it was an intoxication that commanded respe
ct. I was standing in my own light, my own warmth, the white coat snug at the waist, comfortable in the shoulders, looking, I hoped, directorial, regal. A force of presence and vision. When Volker appeared.
Lovely, my girl, he whispered. A vision of purity.
I was startled. I could never get used to his manifestations, not when they came this suddenly. He had appeared in the mirrors, but not beside or behind my reflections. Now, he was my reflection. When I moved, he ghosted my gesture, tethered to me as if stitched through our hearts.
You take direction well, he said. I was afraid you would be dull. But you’ve proven more responsive than your mother.
I didn’t know what to say. Should I have been grateful? My mounting dread made that feeling impossible.
“Thank you,” I said.
For what? I haven’t given you anything you won’t be paying for. Did you think me charitable, my dear?
I thought the use of body, my limbs, my voice, my movements, had been my part of the exchange. How could he have accomplished his vision otherwise?
I was only partly right. He swept into me like a sudden fever. My legs buckled and I was thrown to the floor. I felt him trickle through my hips, cold as mercury, and flow into the joints of my knees. Then pressure. I choked back my revulsion as I felt my knees violently pulled apart.
A singular vision is a lonely vision, my girl. An artist will starve on so sparse a diet as his own genius.
“Please,” I rasped. “Don’t do this.”
Struggling is a poor defense. It only makes the rose sweeter.
I leaped to my feet, but he tripped me to the ground. My head sounded hollowly on the floor.
Be still now.
“Stop.”
Have you thought you might enjoy it?
“Stop!”
I had a girl working for me once, not much older than you.
I felt the cold of him infuse my arm. It shot straight into the air, sprouting thoughts of its own. It then landed on a makeup table that was just within my reach from the ground and scrambled over the surface.
Pale as night flower, sweet has honey from the hive.
My fingers scrambled over slick pools of spilled powder, a greasy clot of face paint. Hairpins. Worn rouge brushes.
She swore she anticipated my attentions more than a whole bucketful of sweet custard. More than a whole head of candy floss.
I felt my fingers settle on a long smooth object. It was round at one end. Hard and tapered at the other. A hand mirror. My arm came down violently on the edge of the table. The oval of the glass shattered into tiny ponds that kicked with reflections of the corners of the room, the tables, my own terrified face.
That’s right. It doesn’t need to be huge, my girl. Anyone with experience will tell you that. Just durable.
In my hand was just the tapered handle. I felt it navigate toward me, off the edge of the table, into the line of my sight, past my face, past my chest and waist, until it disappeared beneath my skirt.
It’s stamina that counts in this game, I heard him whisper in my skull. Long languid strokes. For an eternity.
CHAPTER 15
Der Kietz has no translation. Kietz is a stubborn word, much like jazz, irreducible from its national argot. It is a word that will readily melt in a spoon or gin glass but not on foreign tongues. And like jazz, it speaks of whole worlds fed by dusky appetites as black and viscous as opium tar. But the Kietz is not of music. It is of flesh. Ten thousand thighs in ten thousand flavors spread in rented rooms or on the chill of civic brick. Entire meticulous matchstick trusses of hope erected, crossed, and ultimately crushed by rouged women and girls who survived by reclining and receiving for the fatherland. In typical Prussian logic, prostitution was technically legal. But verbal solicitation by sex workers was not. The solution was simple. Whores had to look like whores. There were Chontes and Demi-castors, Fohses and Minettes. Ratty “pharmacies” of surly twelve-year-olds with nicotine-stained teeth and proficient fingers who were “prescribed” and thus known as “medicine” to their clients who discreetly referred to hair tint as the “color of the pill.” Pregnant Munzis, whose allure lasted only until their labor pains, worked the strictly delineated Münzstrasse that abutted the territory of Amazonian boot whores who advertised their specialized perversions by the color of their knee-high laces.
Not all were so brash. Standing quietly near the boarded kiosks of the main drag, in what could have easily been mistaken for a criminal lineup, worked several Kontroll-Girls all with their weekly venereal health reports hanging around their necks. Shivering silently under the bulk of their practical coats, they were the cautious vice of middle-class husbands and optimistic clerks who didn’t mind sacrificing a little lascivious illusion for the privilege of peeing the next week without screaming.
The north Berlin night belonged to women. And under the sodium lights that lined the Alexanderplatz, lights that threw jaundice, not gold, great flocks of them wheeled and preened. Caged in shedding furs and souring paint, waiting, breathing slowly, they fought for crumbs from the pockets of old men and crippled boys. It was late fall. I had been working second unit during the day and researching my next project at night. Volker was very clear as to the subject of our next endeavor and had taken it upon himself to educate me. There were many girls on the Platz that night, hair shorn hard to the jaw, reedy shoulders slendered from hunger. They clutched half-empty purses, their black gums flashing between brief bursts of laughter. Most worked in pairs, similarly dressed, tossing price/duration ratios veiled in the droll repartee they were known for, the Berliner Schnauze, as it was called.
But these did not interest Volker. He wanted a country girl, shabby now with use but still cradling green pastures somewhere behind her eyes. A girl the audience would believe had been forced into the life through the burden of dreams. Away from the lights the girls were quieter. Volker entered them like ill-fitting suits, his features and masculine limbs ghosting through their troubled features as the chill of him made their flesh ripple. And then he would slip from them silently and shake his head and flit to the next. I was propositioned a couple of times myself, and each time, Volker would send a fierce chill into the prospective john, halting would-be negotiations. We were calling the night a loss when my shoe caught the lip of a cobblestone and sent me flailing to the ground.
“Easy now, little dear,” a voice said above me. The voice was not Volker’s. “Where is such a little darling rushing off to in such a hurry?”
I looked up from the ground as a firm hand settled on my shoulder. He was a tall man with white brows and close-cropped blond hair that bristled defiantly in the cold. His sleeves were rolled and there I saw two crude tattoos, both of women kneeling, one with a halo, the other in garters thumbing a stack of cash. The saint and the harlot. His forearms bellied like great tunas as he lifted me to my feet, and when he smiled I saw two neat rows of gold teeth, each set with a tiny centered diamond.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling Volker expand like methane within me. I moved to leave, but the tattooed man stopped me with his lucre grin.
“Wait, now,” he said. “We’ve only just met. Let me at least be neighborly and buy you a little something.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t you like sweets?”
“Not especially.”
He reached into his pocket and removed a small pale green cylinder of cellophane-wrapped candy.
“Not even a nice piece of taffy and a little chat?”
“No, thank you.”
“But you soiled your pretty little dress when you fell,” he said, popping the candy into his mouth. He chewed slowly as he held the soiled edge of my skirt in thickly callused fingers. “Let me at least buy you a new one. With some shoes and a new pair of stockings? I could make life quite pleasant for a pretty little girl like you.”
Volker had had enough. He rose like swamp gas from my guts. I could feel his misty jaws spread to my lips, his tongue filling mine with the du
sty taste of the grave. It was a horrible sensation, like suffocating on one’s own breath. And I was made to speak.
“Look, friend,” I began in a voice studded with a ghostly bass. “Keep your cheap trinkets for the half-silks that don’t know no better. I ain’t sellin’, follow? I’m buyin’.”
The blond pimp stroked the sides of his mouth as a chuckle shook his chest.
“Buyin’? For you?”
“That’s right.” I could feel Volker spread my feet in a defiant stance. The blond pimp shot a hard crack of laughter into the night that billowed in the cold.
“Cut the shit, kid.”
“You got a stable, or do I take my money elsewhere?” Volker asked.
“Easy, now, easy,” the pimp said. “I got what you need. Let’s just hope you got what I need.”
I reached into the pocket of my dress and pulled out a roll of marks. The pimp reached for the money, but Volker flashed his death head through my features in a new unsettling trick, spiraling me into a sudden and sickening blindness. And the pimp pulled back suddenly, his eyes growing young with instant fear.
“I require something of discernment,” Volker purred. “Not this shopworn cunny you wrap in paper and hawk by the pound. Something fresh and real and alive.”
The pimp regarded me thoughtfully with his colorless eyes and then said, perhaps a bit too theatrically, “You need Tanzi. She is a very great artist.” And here something like respect softened the predatory edge in his eyes. “You, my dear, need Tanzi Fluke.” But he couldn’t show her to us tonight. The club where she worked refused minors. I would have to come back as someone else.
Heading home that night we passed a poster hanger’s cart. A few stiff brushes hung from the push handle like captive mustaches, but the cart itself had been abandoned. I saw the poster hanger, a few paces down the block, bent over the wet back of a poster as wide as his reach. He lathered it with economic strokes, then flung it. It stuck in starchy suction upon the modulated surface of the brick. He had hung several posters already. All the same. Der Spielzeugmacher, the posters read in a blocky expressionist print. Under these words, with heavy blacks and halftone, was the figure of Death, the twin scythes of his iliac crest cutting potently if sexlessly into the image of a beautiful young woman in his arms. The woman wore a gossamer shroud. Death wore only his shoes. And ghosted behind this, taking up the entire field of the image, a cadaverous face with lifeless eyes. Eyes that could be watching this grim couple but watched us instead. And there above the brow, a metallic plate, flat at the crown, riveted to the flesh. Mutter. It was Mutter’s face.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 9