McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  The days turned into weeks. Monk stalked the film’s secret door on foot, sleeping less and then not at all. He grew more delirious with fatigue as he also grew more frantic; some irrevocable moment was at hand. Racking his brain to no avail, he sought a single perfect image of the door amid the walls of the movie’s warehouse, among the bodies of the movie’s characters. Soon he was chopping up the film viciously, as though the frame he was looking for was hidden not only from him but from the film itself, as though it might only be found somewhere within the film’s flesh. Little pieces of black celluloid littered the floor like the ash and granite of toppled towers, up and down the stairs beneath a thousand stills of the door from a thousand other films, each growing closer. Isn’t this dream mine to edit as I choose? Monk wondered. To cut as I choose? To flop right profiles with lefts and left profiles with rights, to reverse the utopian and anarchic ends of the boulevard as I choose? Outside he was certain he heard approach a Monumentalist Age, somewhere within the collision between an age of reckoning and an age of chaos. Mere blockbusterism! he howled to himself: what is it before the true monuments of the epoch come? Stumbling through the dark of his house, he ran his hands along the walls to follow up the stairs the trail of enlarged stills—I have eyes in my fingers—only to feel bare walls instead, and to find all the stills of the door gone. The door at the base of the spiraling steeple where James Stewart’s eyes glint with rage at Kim Novak. The door in the Hollywood cottage where a stormy Bogart loves and loses a terrified Gloria Grahame. The door in a far medieval corridor as Vincent Price’s depraved masquerade ball swirls by and Plague laps at the outer palace walls. The door beneath the stone bridge that crosses a château moat where Brigitte Lahaie, nude beneath a black cloak, holds a bloody scythe. The door in the Venice archway just beyond Janet Leigh’s window, as Orson Welles leers over her in her sleep, pulling gloves onto fat hands. The door that is anonymous among all the doors of a labyrinthine complex where Eddie Constantine pursues Anna Karina into the future. The door in the corner of a balcony where, taking refuge from a party, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in each other’s embrace are made of nothing but light and shards of the Void, the most beautiful couple in the history of movies, he the male version of her, she the female version of him. Down through the history of the movies, Monk will ponder at the end, what Wanderer has left these clues for him, in the form of the Movie of the Future, hidden one frame at a time in every movie ever made? Who has invaded every movie ever made in order to leave a single image among the twenty-four frames every second? What does it mean that there are the same number of frames per second as there are hours in a day? What does it mean that every second of a film is a day in the life of a secret film that someone has been waiting for Monk to find? In the final hours before dawn, Monk startles himself out of sleep, sits up from the library floor to the vision in his eyes, and stumbles to his feet to find all the images of the door on his walls gone except the last, now finally revealed itself to him, at the top of the stair within his reach. It is there, in a wall that is the color of a woman’s body.

  Or did whoever made this secret film of the future mean to show him a way out, or a way in? Outside, something in the hills casts a shadow. In his entryway, he still sees just well enough to make out someone’s silhouette. “Zazi?” But he can’t even be sure he has said it out loud.

  Monk takes the knob in his hand. The door swings into a black gust. He’s disconcerted to note that what in all the movies has always swung from left to right now swings from right to left. Momentarily he hesitates—somewhere nearby, at the foot of the hills and the coordinates of chaos, there seeps up from the ground a deluge—then steps through.

  LISEY and THE MADMAN

  by STEPHEN KING

  For Nan Graham

  I

  THE SPOUSES OF WELL-KNOWN WRITERS are almost invisible; no one knows better than Lisey Landon, who has given only one actual interview in her life. This was for the well-known women’s magazine that publishes the column “Yes, I’m Married to Him!” She spent roughly half of its five-hundred-word length explaining that her name (actually short for Lisa) rhymes with “CeeCee.” Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Her sister Amanda, who can be mean, said that the accompanying photograph made Lisey look fat.

  There was another photograph, one that first appeared in the Nashville American and then in newspapers around the world, mostly under the headline HEROIC GRADUATE STUDENT SAVES FAMOUS WRITER, or variations thereof. This one shows a man in his early twenties holding the handle of a shovel that looks almost small enough to be a toy. The young fellow is peering at it, and by his foozled expression the viewer might infer he has no idea at all of what he’s looking at. It could be an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for nickels. It could be a whang-dang-doodle, a cloche hat made out of coyote fur, or a phylactery testifying to the pompatus of love. A man in what looks like a faux highway patrolman’s uniform (no gun, but you got your Sam Browne belt running across the chest and a good-sized badge, as well) is shaking the dazed young man’s free hand. The cop—he has to be a cop of some kind, gun or not—has a huge oh-thank-God grin on his kisser, the kind that says, Son, you will never have to buy yourself another drink in a bar where I am, as long as we both shall live, so help me God, amen. In the background, mostly out of focus, are staring people with dismayed what-the-hell-just-happened expressions on their faces.

  And although thousands, perhaps even millions, of people have seen this photo, which has over the years become almost as famous as the one of the mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his belly, no one has ever noticed that the writer’s wife is also in it.

  Yes. Indeed she is. A part of her, anyway.

  On the far right-hand side. Not quite halfway up.

  If you look closely (a magnifying glass helps in this regard), you’ll see half a shoe. Half a brown loafer. Half a cordovan loafer, to be exact, with a quarter-heel. Eighteen years later Lisey Landon can still remember how comfortable those shoes were, and how fast she moved in them that day. Faster than the award-winning photographer, certainly, and she’d not seen the dazed campus cop or the dazed young man—Tony, his name had been—at all. Not then, she hadn’t. But she had earlier, and certainly later, in this picture, and how it had made her laugh. How it makes her laugh still. Because the spouses of well-known writers are almost always invisible.

  But I got a shoe in there, she sometimes thinks. I poked in a loafer. I did that much. Didn’t I, Scott?

  Her position was always behind him at those ceremonial things; behind him and slightly to the right, with her hands demurely clasped before her. She remembers that very well.

  She remembers it all very well, probably better than the rest of them. Probably better than any of them.

  II

  Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott’s right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching her husband balance on one foot, the other on the silly little shovel which is half-buried in loose dirt that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is hot, maddeningly humid, almost sickeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes matters worse. Unlike the dignitaries in attendance for the groundbreaking, the lookieloo-come-’n’-see folk are not dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd’s forefront in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dolled up in her hot-weather best, is stressful: worrying that she’ll soon be sweating big dark circles in the light-brown linen top she’s wearing over the blue rayon shell blouse. She’s got on a great bra for hot weather and still it’s biting into the undersides of her boobs. Happy days, babyluv.

  Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back—he needs it cut badly, sh
e knows that he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a dolled-up hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song—blows in the occasional hot puff of breeze. He’s being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He’s flanked on the left by a fellow named Tony Eddington, who is going to write up all this happy crappy for the something-or-other (campus newspaper? surely the campus newspaper goes on hiatus at least during the month of August, if not for the entire summer?), and on the right by their stand-in host, an English department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel, one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly so soon but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt like oral readings of insurance policy clauses to Lisey.

  Making matters worse in this case is the fact that Roger Dashmiel does not like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it’s easy, because most men do like him), and it’s given her something upon which to focus her unease. For she is uneasy—profoundly so. She has tried to tell herself that it is no more than the humidity and the gathering clouds in the west presaging strong afternoon thunderstorms or maybe even tornadoes: a low-barometer thing, only that and nothing more. But the barometer wasn’t low in Maine when she got out of bed this morning at quarter to seven; it had been a beautiful summer morning already, with the newly risen sun sparkling on a trillion points of dew in the field between the house and the barn which housed Scott’s study. What her father, old Dandy Debusher, would have called “a real ham ’n’ egger of a day.” Yet the instant her feet touched the oak on her side of the bed and her thoughts turned to the trip to Nashville—leave for the Portland Jetport at eight, fly out on Delta at nine thirty—her heart dipped with dread and her morning-empty stomach, usually sweet, foamed with unmotivated fear. She’d greeted these sensations with surprised dismay, because she ordinarily liked to travel, especially with Scott: the two of them sitting companionably side by side, he with his book open, she with hers. Sometimes he’d read her a bit of his and sometimes she’d vice him a little versa. Sometimes she’d feel him and look up and find his eyes—his solemn regard. As though she were a mystery to him still. Yes, and sometimes there would be turbulence, and she liked that, too. It was like the rides at the Topsham Fair when she and her sisters had been young. Scott never minded the turbulence, either. She remembered one particularly crazy approach into Denver—strong winds, thunderheads, little prop-job commuter-plane all over the sky— and how she’d looked over to see him actually pogo-ing up and down in his seat like a little kid who needs to go to the bathroom, with this crazy grin on his face. No, the rides that scared Scott were the smooth downbound ones he took in the middle of his wakeful nights. Sometimes he talked (lucidly—smiling, even) about things you could see only if you looked through the fingerprints on a water glass. It scared her to hear him talk like that. Because it was crazy, and because she sort of knew what he meant and didn’t want to.

  So it wasn’t low barometer that had been bothering her—not then—and it certainly hadn’t been the prospect of getting on one more airplane or eating one more airline snack (these days she brought their own, anyway, usually homemade trail mix). And then, in the bathroom, reaching for the light over the sink—something she had done without incident or accident day in and out for the entire eight years they’d lived here, which came to approximately three thousand days, less time spent on the road—she smacked the toothglass with the back of her hand and sent it tumbling to the floor, where it shattered into approximately one million stupid pieces.

  “Shit fire, save your smuckin’ matches!” she cried, lips drawn back from her teeth, frightened and irritated to find herself so: for she did not believe in omens, not she, not Lisey Landon the writer’s wife; not little Lisey Debusher, either. Omens were for the shanty Irish.

  Scott, who had just come back into the bedroom with two cups of coffee and a plate of buttered toast on a tray, stopped dead. “Whadja break, babyluv?”

  “Nothing that came out of the dog’s ass,” Lisey said savagely, and was then sort of astounded with herself. That was one of Granny Debusher’s sayings, and Granny D certainly had believed in omens, but that old Irish highpockets had gone on the cooling board when Lisey was only four. Was it even possible Lisey could remember her? It seemed so, for as she stood there, looking down at the stupid shards of toothglass, the actual articulation of the omen came to her, came in Granny D’s tobacco-strapped voice . . . and comes back now, as she stands watching her husband be a good sport in his lightest-weight summer sport coat (which he will soon be sweating through under the arms nevertheless): Broken glass in the morning, broken hearts at night. That was Granny D’s scripture, all right, handed down and remembered by at least one little girl before Granny D pitched down dead in the chicken yard with an apronful of feed and a sack of Bull Durham tied up inside her sleeve.

  It isn’t the heat, it isn’t the trip, and it isn’t Dashmiel, who ended up doing the meet ’n’ greet job only because the head of the English department, with whom Scott had corresponded, is in the hospital following an emergency gall-bladder removal the day before. It is a broken . . . smucking . . . toothglass at ten minutes to seven in the morning combined with the saying of a long-dead Irish granny. And the joke of it is, Scott will later point out, it’s just enough to put her on edge, just enough to get her either strapped or at least semistrapped.

  Sometimes, he will tell her not long hence, speaking from a hospital bed (ah, but he could so easily have been on the cooling board himself, all his wakeful, too-thoughtful nights over) in his new high whistling and effortful voice, sometimes just enough is just enough. As the saying is.

  And she knew exactly what he meant.

  III

  Roger Dashmiel has his share of headaches today, Lisey knows that. It doesn’t make her like him any better, but sure, she knows. If there was ever an actual script for the ceremony, Professor Hegstrom (he of the emergency gall-bladder attack) has been too muddled to tell Dashmiel what or where it is. Dashmiel has consequently been left with little more than a time of day and a cast of characters featuring a writer to whom he has taken an instant dislike. When the little party of dignitaries left Inman Hall, temporary home of the library sciences staff, for the short but exceedingly warm walk to the site of the forthcoming Shipman Library, Dashmiel told Scott they’d have to more or less play it by ear. Scott shrugged goodnaturedly and nodded. He was absolutely comfortable with that. For Scott Landon, ear was a way of life.

  “Ah’ll introduce you,” Dashmiel said as they walked toward the baked and shimmering plot of land where the new library would stand. The photographer in charge of immortalizing all of this danced restlessly back and forth, hither and yon, snapping and snapping, busy as a gnat. Lisey could see a rectangle of fresh brown earth not far ahead, about nine feet by five, she judged, and pickup-trucked in that morning by the just-starting-to-fade look of it. No one had thought to put up an awning, and already the surface of the fresh dirt had acquired a grayish glaze.

  “Somebody better do it,” Scott said.

  Dashmiel had frowned as if wounded by some undeserved canard. Then, with a sigh, he pressed on. “Applause follows introduction—”

  “As day follows night,” Scott murmured.

  “—and then yew’ll say a woid or tew,” Dashmiel finished. Beyond the baked tract of land awaiting the library, a freshly paved parking lot shimmered in the sunlight, all smooth tar and staring yellow lines. Lisey saw fantastic ripples of nonexistent water on its far side.

  “My pleasure,” Scott said.

  The unvarying good nature of his responses seemed to worry Dashmiel rather than reassure him. “Ah hope yew won’t want to say tew much at the groundbreakin’,” he told Scott rather severely as they approached the roped-off area. This had been kept clear, but there was a crowd big enough to stretch almost to the parking lot waiting beyond it. An even larger one had trailed Dashmi
el and the Landons from Inman Hall. Soon the two would merge, and Lisey—who ordinarily did not mind crowds any more than she minded turbulence at twenty thousand feet—didn’t like this, either. It occurred to her that so many people on a day this hot might suck all the air out of the air. Totally dopey idea, but—

  “It’s mahty hot, even for Naishveel in August, wouldn’t you say so, Toneh?”

  Tony Eddington—who would be rahtin’ all this up for something called the U-Tenn Review—nodded obligingly but said nothing. His only comment so far had been to identify the tirelessly dancing photographer as Stefan Queensland, U-Tenn Nashville, class of ’83, currently of the Nashville American. “Hope y’all will h’ep him out if y’can,” Tony Eddington had said softly to Scott as they began their walk over here. Eddington was carrying a little wire notebook in which he had so far written absolutely nothing, so far as Lisey could see.

  “Yew’ll finish yoah remarks,” Dashmiel said, “and there’ll be anothuh round of applause. Then, Mistuh Landon—”

  “Scott.”

  Dashmiel had flashed a rictus grin, there for just a moment, then gone. “Then, Scott, yew’ll go on and toin that all-impawtant foist shovelful of oith.” Toin? Foist? Oith? Lisey mused, and then it came to her that Dashmiel was saying turn that all-important first shovelful of earth in his only semibelievable Louisiana drawl. “Followin’ that, we’ll proceed on across yonduh parkin’ lot to Nelson Hall—which is mercifully air-conditioned, Ah might add.”