A Graveyard for Lunatics, Page 2

  The driver stared at the gravel drive beyond me, pounded by rain.

  “Anyone there?!” I yelled.

  “No!”

  “Thank God. Get out of here!”

  The engine died.

  We both moaned with despair.

  The engine started again, obedient to fright.

  It is not easy to back up at sixty miles an hour.

  We did.

  4

  I sat up half the night looking around at my ordinary living room with ordinary furniture in a small safe bungalow house on a normal street in a quiet part of the city. I drank three cups of hot cocoa but stayed cold as I threw images on the walls, shivering.

  People can’t die twice! I thought. That couldn’t have been James Charles Arbuthnot on that ladder, clawing the night wind. Bodies decay. Bodies vanish.

  I remembered a day in 1934 when J. C. Arbuthnot had got out of his limousine in front of the studio as I skated up, tripped, and fell into his arms. Laughing, he had balanced me, signed my book, pinched my cheek, and gone inside.

  And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass.

  I heard voices and saw headlines:

  J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED.

  “No!” I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. “It wasn’t him. It’s a lie!”

  Wait until dawn, a voice said.

  5

  Dawn was no help.

  The radio and TV news found no dead bodies.

  The newspaper was full of car crashes and dope raids. But no J. C. Arbuthnot.

  I wandered out of my house, back to my garage, full of toys, old science and invention magazines, no automobile, and my secondhand bike.

  I biked halfway to the studio before I realized I could not recall any intersection I had blindly sailed through. Stunned, I fell off the bike, trembling.

  A fiery red open-top roadster burned rubber and stopped parallel to me.

  The man at the wheel, wearing a cap put backward, gunned the throttle. He stared through the windshield, one eye bright blue and uncovered, the other masked by a monocle that had been hammered in place and gave off bursts of sun fire.

  “Hello, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch,” he cried, with a voice that lingered over German vowels.

  My bike almost fell from my grip. I had seen that profile stamped on some old coins when I was twelve. The man was either a resurrected Caesar or the German high pontiff of the Holy Roman Empire. My heart banged all of the air out of my lungs.

  “What?” shouted the driver. “Speak up!”

  “Hello,” I heard myself say, “you stupid goddamn son of a bitch you. You’re Fritz Wong, aren’t you? Born in Shanghai of a Chinese father and an Austrian mother, raised in Hong Kong, Bombay, London, and a dozen towns in Germany. Errand boy, then cutter then writer then cinematographer at UFA then director across the world. Fritz Wong, the magnificent director who made the great silent film The Cavalcanti Incantation. The guy who ruled Hollywood films from 1925 to 1927 and got thrown out for a scene in a film where you directed yourself as a Prussian general inhaling Gerta Froelich’s underwear. The international director who ran back to and then got out of Berlin ahead of Hitler, the director of Mad Love, Delirium, To the Moon and Back—”

  With each pronouncement, his head had turned a quarter of an inch, at the same time as his mouth had creased into a Punch-and-Judy smile. His monocle flashed a Morse code.

  Behind the monocle was the faintest lurking of an Orient eye. I imagined the left eye was Peking, the right Berlin, but no. It was the monocle’s magnification that focused the Orient. His brow and cheeks were a fortress of Teutonic arrogance, built to last two thousand years or until his contract was canceled.

  “What did you call me?” he asked, with immense politeness.

  “What you called me,” I said, faintly. “A stupid,” I whispered, “goddamn son of a bitch.”

  He nodded. He smiled. He banged the car door wide.

  “Get in!”

  “But you don’t—”

  “—know you? Do you think I run around giving lifts to just any dumb-ass bike rider? You think I haven’t seen you ducking around corners at the studio, pretending to be the White Rabbit at the commissary. You’re that”—he snapped his fingers—“bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Warlord of Mars—the illegitimate offspring of H. G. Wells, out of Jules Verne. Stow your bike. We’re late!”

  I tossed my bike in the back and was in the car only in time as it revved up to fifty.

  “Who can say?” shouted Fritz Wong, above the exhaust. “We are both insane, working where we work. But you are lucky, you still love it.”

  “Don’t you?” I asked.

  “Christ help me,” he muttered. “Yes!”

  I could not take my eyes off Fritz Wong as he leaned over the steering wheel to let the wind plow his face.

  “You are the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw!” he cried. “You want to get yourself killed? What’s wrong, you never learned to drive a car? What kind of bike is that? Is this your first screen job? How come you write that crap? Why not read Thomas Mann, Goethe!”

  “Thomas Mann and Goethe,” I said, quietly, “couldn’t write a screenplay worth a damn. Death in Venice, sure. Faust? you betcha. But a good screenplay? or a short story like one of mine, landing on the Moon and making you believe it? Hell, no. How come you drive with that monocle?”

  “None of your damn business! It’s better to be blind. If you look too closely at the driver ahead, you want to ram his ass! Let me see your face. You approve of me?”

  “I think you’re funny!”

  “Jesus! You are supposed to take everything that Wong the magnificent says as gospel. How come you don’t drive?”

  We were both yelling against the wind that battered our eyes and mouths.

  “Writers can’t afford cars! And I saw five people killed, torn apart, when I was fifteen. A car hit a telephone pole.”

  Fritz glanced over at my pale look of remembrance.

  “It was like a war, yes? You’re not so dumb. I hear you’ve been given a new project with Roy Holdstrom? Special effects? Brilliant. I hate to admit.”

  “We’ve been friends since high school. I used to watch him build his miniature dinosaurs in his garage. We promised to grow old and make monsters together.”

  “No,” shouted Fritz Wong against the wind, “you are working for monsters. Manny Leiber? The Gila monster’s dream of a spider. Watch out! There’s the menagerie!”

  He nodded at the autograph collectors on the sidewalk across the street from the studio gates.

  I glanced over. Instantly, my soul flashed out of my body and ran back. It was 1934 and I was mulched in among the ravening crowd, waving pads and pens, rushing about at première nights under the klieg lights or pursuing Marlene Dietrich into her hairdresser’s or running after Cary Grant at the Friday-night Legion Stadium boxing matches, waiting outside restaurants for Jean Harlow to have one more three-hour lunch or Claudette Colbert to come laughing out at midnight.

  My eyes touched over the crazy mob there and I saw once again the bulldog, Pekingese, pale, myopic faces of nameless friends lost in the past, waiting outside the great Spanish Prado Museum facade of Maximus where the thirty-foot-high intricately scrolled iron gates opened and clanged shut on the impossibly famous. I saw myself lost in that nest of gape-mouthed hungry birds waiting to be fed on brief encounters, flash photographs, ink-signed pads. And as the sun vanished and the moon rose in memory, I saw myself roller-skating nine miles home on the empty sidewalks, dreaming I would someday be the world’s greatest author or a hack writer at Fly by Night Pictures.

  “The menagerie?” I murmured. “Is that what you call them?”

  “And here,” said Fritz Wong, “is their zoo!”

  And we jounced in the studio entrance down alleys full of arriving people, extras and executives. Fritz Wong rammed his car
into a NO PARKING zone.

  I got out and said, “What’s the difference between a menagerie and a zoo?”

  “In here, the zoo, we are kept behind bars by money. Out there, those menagerie goofs are locked in silly dreams.”

  “I was one of them once, and dreamed of coming over the studio wall.”

  “Stupid. Now you’ll never escape.”

  “Yes, I will. I’ve finished another book of stories, and a play. My name will be remembered!”

  Fritz’s monocle glinted. “You shouldn’t tell this to me. I might lose my contempt.”

  “If I know Fritz Wong, it’ll be back in about thirty seconds.”

  Fritz watched as I lifted my bike from the car.

  “You are almost German, I think.”

  I climbed on my bike. “I’m insulted.”

  “Do you speak to all people this way?”

  “No, only to Frederick the Great, whose manners I deplore but whose films I love.”

  Fritz Wong unscrewed the monocle from his eye and dropped it in his shirt pocket. It was as if he had let a coin fall to start some inner machine.

  “I’ve been watching you for some days,” he intoned. “In fits of insanity, I read your stories. You are not lacking talent, which I could polish. I am working, God help me, on a hopeless film about Christ, Herod Antipas, and all those knucklehead saints. The film started nine million dollars back with a dipso director who couldn’t handle kindergarten traffic. I have been elected to bury the corpse. What kind of Christian are you?”

  “Fallen away.”

  “Good! Don’t be surprised if I get you fired from your dumb dinosaur epic. If you could help me embalm this Christ horror film, it’s a step up for you. The Lazarus principle! If you work on a dead turkey and pry it out of the film vaults, you earn points. Let me watch and read you a few more days. Appear at the commissary at one sharp today. Eat what I eat, speak when spoken to, yes? you talented little bastard.”

  “Yes, Unterseeboot Kapitän, you big bastard, sir.”

  As I biked off, he gave me a shove. But it was not a shove to hurt, only the quietest old philosopher’s push, to help me go.

  I did not look back.

  I feared to see him looking back.

  6

  “Good God!” I said. “He made me forget!”

  Last night. The cold rain. The high wall. The body.

  I parked my bike outside Stage 13.

  A studio policeman, passing, said, “You got a permit to park there? That’s Sam Shoenbroder’s slot. Call the front office.”

  “Permit!” I yelled. “Holy Jumping Jesus! For a bike?”

  I slammed the bike through the big double airlock door into darkness.

  “Roy?!” I shouted. Silence.

  I looked around in the fine darkness at Roy Holdstrom’s toy junkyard.

  I had one just like it, smaller, in my garage.

  Strewn across Stage 13 were toys from Roy’s third year, books from his fifth, magic sets from when he was eight, electrical experiment chemistry sets from when he was nine and ten, comic collections from Sunday cartoon strips when he was eleven, and duplicate models of Kong when he turned thirteen in 1933 and saw the great ape fifty times in two weeks.

  My paws itched. Here were dime-store magnetos, gyroscopes, tin trains, magic sets that caused kids to grind their teeth and dream of shoplifting. My own face lay there, a life mask cast when Roy Vaselined my face and smothered me with plaster of paris. And all about, a dozen castings of Roy’s own great hawk profile, plus skulls and full-dress skeletons tossed in corners or seated in lawn chairs; anything to make Roy feel at home in a stage so big you could have shoved the Titanic through the spaceport doors with room left over for Old Ironsides.

  Across one entire wall Roy had pasted billboard-sized ads and posters from The Lost World, Kong, and Son of Kong, as well as Dracula and Frankenstein. In orange crates at the center of this Woolworth dime-store garage sale were sculptures of Karloff and Lugosi. On his desk were three original ball-and-socket dinosaurs, given as gifts by the makers of The Lost World, the rubber flesh of the ancient beasts long melted to drop off the metal bones.

  Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer’s trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion-year slumbers.

  It was into this junkyard, this trash heap of mechanical avarice, greed for toys, and love for great ravening monsters, guillotined heads, and unraveled tarbaby King Tut bodies, that I picked my way.

  Everywhere were vast low-lying tents of plastic covering creations that only in time would Roy reveal. I didn’t dare look.

  Out in the middle of it all a barebone skeleton held a note, frozen, on the air. It read:

  CARL DENHAM!

  That was the name of the producer of King Kong.

  THE CITIES OF THE WORLD, FRESHLY CREATED, LIE HERE UNDER TARPAULINS WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED. DO NOT TOUCH. COME FIND ME.

  THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG. YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. TURN LEFT AT CARPENTERS’ SHEDS, SECOND OUTDOOR SET ON THE RIGHT. YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE WAITING THERE! COME SEE! ROY.

  I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes!

  I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples.

  For Roy was right.

  You can go home again.

  A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring.

  I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see.

  I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock.

  My dad’s old 1929 Buick was parked in the dust on the brick street, waiting to head west in 1933. It stood, rusting quietly, its headlights dented, its radiator cap flaked, its radiator honeycomb-papered over with trapped moths and blue and yellow butterfly wings, a mosaic caught from a flow of lost summers.

  I leaned in to stroke my hand, trembling, over the prickly nap of the back-seat cushions, where my brother and I had knocked elbows and yelled at each other as we traveled across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and…

  It wasn’t my dad’s car. But it was.

  I let my eyes drift up to find the ninth greatest wonder of the world:

  My grandma and grandpa’s house, with its porch and its porch swing and geraniums in pink pots along the rail, and ferns like green sprinkler founts all around, and a vast lawn like the fur of a green cat, with clover and dandelions studding it in such profusion that you longed to tear off your shoes and run the whole damned tapestry barefoot. And—

  A high cupola window where I had slept to wake and look out over a green land and a green world.

  In the summer porch swing, sailing back and forth, gently, his long-fingered hands in his lap, was my dearest friend …

  Roy Holdstrom.

  He glided quietly, lost as I was lost in some midsummer a long time back.

  Roy saw me and lifted his long cranelike arms to gesture right and left, to the lawn, the trees, to himself, to me.

  “My God,” he called, “aren’t we—lucky?”

  7

  Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching.

&nb
sp; I walked up the porch steps remembering one special night when Roy had taken me to a performance of Siegfried at the Shrine Auditorium. “Who’s singing?” I had asked. “To hell with singing!” cried Roy. “We go for the Dragon!” Well, the music was a triumph. But the Dragon? Kill the tenor. Douse the lights.

  Our seats were so far over that—oh God!—I could see only the Dragon Fafner’s left nostril! Roy saw nothing but the great flame-thrown smokes that jetted from the unseen beast’s nose to scorch Siegfried.

  “Damn!” whispered Roy.

  And Fafner was dead, the magic sword deep in his heart. Siegfried yelled in triumph. Roy leaped to his feet, cursing the stage, and ran out.

  I found him in the lobby muttering to himself.

  “Some Fafner! Christ! My God! Did you see?!”

  As we stormed out into the night, Siegfried was still screaming about life, love, and butchery.

  “Poor bastards, that audience,” said Roy. “Trapped for two more hours with no Fafner!”

  And here he was now, swinging quietly in a glider swing on a front porch lost in time but brought back up through the years.

  “Hey!” he called, happily. “What’d I tell you? My grandparents’ house!”

  “No, mine!”

  “Both!”

  Roy laughed, truly happy, and held out a big fat copy of You Can’t Go Home Again.

  “He was wrong,” said Roy, quietly.

  “Yes,” I said, “here we are, by God!”

  I stopped. For just beyond this meadowland of sets, I saw the high graveyard/studio wall. The ghost of a body on a ladder was there, but I wasn’t ready to mention it yet. Instead, I said: “How you doing with your Beast? You found him yet?”

  “Heck, where’s your Beast?”

  That’s the way it had been for many days now.

  Roy and I had been called in to blueprint and build beasts, to make meteors fall from outer space and humanoid critters rise from dark lagoons, dripping clichés of tar from dime-store teeth.

  They had hired Roy first, because he was technically advanced. His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His brontosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet.