Rod Sellings plus Leiber’s Haunting Classic ‘The Man Who Never Grew Young’ Hustler vs. Hack: ‘Crusoe in New York’ by Ron Goulart T.l ‘A Passage for Trumpet’ Rod Serling’s Complete TV Script Ihv V •- Robert Sheckley: Books Gahan Wilson: Movies & New Cartoons iil -1 o jU -l; T~T”>- i r* i" 14369 03 /// f/f t c o N T E r Wf ROD SERLING’S IWIUGHT ZONE" ONE FEATURES In the Twilight Zone Other Dimensions: Books Other Dimensions: Screen Other Dimensions: Music TZ Interview: Fritz Leiber Some ‘Thing’ Wicked This Way Comes! Screen Preview: ‘Stab’ Show-by-Show Guide to TV’s ‘Twilight Zone’: Part Twelve TZ Classic Teleplay: ‘A Passage for Trumpet’ FICTION The Man Who Never Grew Youn The New Man Return of the Screw Crusoe in New York The Bite Incident on Park Bench 37 Three Bananas Slee Breakthrough March 1982 Robert Sheckley 7 Gahan Wilson 10 Jack Sullivan 13 Raul M. Summon 16 Ed Naha 46 James Vernier e 51 Marc Scott Zicree 84 Rod Serlinq 90 Fritz Leiber 23 Barbara Owens 27 Kevin Cook 34 Ron Goulart 40 Elizabeth Morton 56 Robert E. Vardeman 59 Steve Rasnic Tern 74 Richard Stooker 79 Pleasant dreams Last weekend I found myself playing reluctant host to a stray dog that a friend of mine ( Twilight Zone’s embattled proofreader, as it happens) had rescued from the streets. The animal was at that randy adolescent age when all a dog wants to do is rip apart slippers and masturbate on people’s legs, but he was pleasant enough once he fell asleep. He appeared to spend a lot of time dreaming; his limbs would twitch, his body would stir, and I’d hear him growl softly— at what, God only knows. Perhaps he was merely playing back the events of the day, but I couldn’t help thinking that, like other sleepers, he was taking part in wholly imaginary scenes: tales of make-believe. When it comes to dreaming, I suspect that we’re all, dog and man alike, creative geniuses— in effect writing, several times a night, love stories, suspense thrillers, and slapstick comedies. Moreover, we’re all fantasy writers, since, for most of us, dreams provide the only experience we’ll ever have of the supernatural, complete with strange landscapes, terrifying monsters, and bizarre metamorphoses. Some. of Lovecraft’s best horror stories, for example, like “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” are little more than dream-transcriptions, and his sleep was haunted by beings he called “night-gaunts”— “black, horned, and slender, with mem- branous wings”— which “in dreams . . . were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed,” taking the by-day-unadventurous Lovecraft on fabulous voyages. (Similarly, my canine guest may have dreamt of chasing pigeons high above Manhattan’s rooftops.) The painter Fuseli reportedly stuffed himself with undercooked meat before going to bed in the hope of producing nightmares to inspire him, while Coleridge claimed his poem “Kubla Khan” came to him word-for-word in a dream, and that he’d have written hundreds of lines more if he hadn’t been interrupted in the process by “a person on business from Porlock.” (Australian poet A. D. Hope, in his bitter “Persons from Porlock,” sees Coleridge’s intruder as an agent of the bourgeoisie, sent out deliberately to thwart such divine visions.) “We are somewhat more than Morton Owens Wilson Goulart ourselves in sleep,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne, seventeenth-century physician, “and the Slumber of the Body seems to be but the waking of the Soul.” Even in more modern times, some have clung to this belief; I once came across a remarkable letter of A. Conan Doyle’s, written in 1922, in which he wrote of having “several times had prophetic dreams exact in detail. In sleep the soul is freed and has enlarged knowledge. This it endeavors to pass on to the body, but it seldom succeeds. When it does it is just at the moment between sleeping and waking.” But wait. There’s a darker side. “It has been established by our investigations,” write psychologists Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, in The Individual and His Dreams, “that dreams of misfortune outnumber dreams of good fortune. Many more bad things than good things happen to the dreamer in his dreams. We have never found an exception to this rule.” And darker still: if the soul really leaves the body during sleep, might it not, in its nocturnal wanderings, fall prey to accident or enemy attack, like the hero of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknovm Kadath? These random reflections are prompted by Sleep by STEVE RASNIC TEM, a cautionary tale Vardeman Stooker Zicree Sammon & Leiber 4 Photo credits: Cook/Verser Engle hard; Rasnic Tem/Greg Doyle; Sammon & Lelber/Sherri Sires; Wilson/Randy Winters; Zicree/Elaine Zicree about the perils of slumber. Tem is a profilic writer who’s sold stories (most of them, like Sleep, admirably concise) to Charles L. Grant’s Shadows, Horrors, and Terrors anthologies, to Alan Ryan’s forthcoming Perpetual Light, and to an Italian magazine called, appropriately, Kadath The dog that makes a dramatic appearance in The Bite by ELIZABETH MORTON (who’s represented in Arbor House’s Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural) is considerably less amiable than the one asleep on my rug. Morton’s chillingly effective little tale is based on the sort of modern-day folk legend that’s always prefaced by the assurance “My friend knows the person this actually happened to”— like the couple who find a maniac’s hook clinging to the handle of their car door, the tramp who dies from peeing on the third rail, and the college student high on speed who writes his entire exam on a single line of his essay book. To lighten up the dreary January in which this issue (mockingly labeled “March”) will no doubt appear, we present Return of the Screw by KEVIN COOK, who, at twenty-four, is Playboy’s youngest editor and gets to write such items as “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?’’ (Look for his story “Lee and Me at the Open” in one of its upcoming issues.) Though too young to remember the original Twilight Zone, Cook informs us that he’s devoted to a Night Gallery episode, “The Messiah of Mott Street.” For dessert, try LARRY TRITTEN’s Three Bananas, as witty and way out a private-eye saga as I’ve ever seen. Tritten is a talented writer whose work has appeared in dozens of magazines, from The New Yorker and Playboy to F & SF, The National Review, and Rolling Stone. RON GOULART, one of fantasy’s funniest writers (funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar), is a shade more somber in Crusoe in New York, perhaps because the story’s setting is considerably bleaker than the Hollywood and New Orleans of his previous TZ tales. Think of this one as a modern-day homage to Max Beerbohm’s classic “Enoch Soames” (which someday we’ll reprint). Our intrepid film reviewer, ROD SERLING’S TOUGHT ZPNE“ v ^ GAHAN WILSON, makes his living being funny, and his regular appearances in Playboy, The New Yorker, and The National Lampoon show how extraordinarily well he’s succeeded. In this issue we present, in addition to his movie column, a sampling from his new cartoon collection, Is Nothing Sacred?, from St. Martin’s. Perhaps this constitutes a free ad for Gahan’s book, but I prefer to see it as free cartoons for us— and I’m very glad we have them. We’re always looking for that elusive species, a story “in the Twilight Zone tradition.” Two such came our way this month: The New Man, a powerfully unnerving story by BARBARA OWENS (whose “The Cloud Beneath the Eaves” won a 1978 Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America), and Incident on Park Bench 37, a memorably original look at time travel by ROBERT E. VARDEMAN, a much-published sf writer with a background in nuclear physics. Breakthrough, by RICHARD STOOKER, is a bit harder to pin down. It’s an ambiguous, very disturbing piece of fiction— Stooker’s first, as it happens— written in the form of a psychological case history. Stooker lives in St. Louis, where his story is set; he was married this summer in a Laotian ceremony, and our photo (if you can make it out) shows him at the wedding. Addicts of MARC SCOTT ZICREE’s continuing show-by-show guide to The Twilight Zone— and that means most of our readers— can look forward to his forthcoming Bantam book, The Making of ‘The Twilight Zone. ’ In this TZ he provides an insider’s view of the show’s controversial fourth season. Though primarily known for his journalism in Omni, the L.A. Times, and Cinefantastique, PAUL M. SAMMON tells us that “supernatural and fantasy fiction remain my first and greatest loves.” A freelancer working out of San Diego, he’s run the usual gamut of odd jobs (from musician to underwater harvester to “the most boring position imaginable,” managing a porn theater). “Considering FRITZ LEIBER’s output and reputation,” he says, “my interviewing him was a great professional privilege. It was also one hell of a lot of fun.” TZ Publications Inc. S. Edward Orenstein President & Chairman Sidney Z. Gellman Secretary /Treasurer Leon Garry Eric Protter Executive Vice-Pre sidents Executive Publisher: S. Edward Orenstein Publisher: Leon Garry Associate Publisher and Consulting Editor: Carol Serling Editorial Director: Eric Protter Editor: T.E.D. Klein Managing Editor: Jane Bayer Assistant Editors: Steven Schwartz, Robert Sabat Contributing Editors: Gahan Wilson, Robert Sheckley Design Director: Derek Burton Art and Studio Production: Georg the Design Group Production Director: Edward Ernest Controller: Thomas Schiff Administrative Asst.: Doreen Carrigan Public Relations Manager: Jeffrey Nickora Accounting Mgr.: Ch ris Gros sma n Circulation Director: William D. Smith Circulation Manager: Janice Graham Eastern Circulation Mgr.: Hank Rosen Western Newsstand Consultant: Harry Sommer, N. Hollywood. CA Advertising Manager: Rachel Britapaja Adv. Production Manager: Marina Despotakis Advertising Representatives: Barney O’Hara & Associates, Inc. 105 E. 35 St., New York, NY 10016 (212) 889-8820 410 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611 (312) 467-9494 326 W. Rosa Dr., Green Valley, AZ 85614 (602) 625-5995 9017 Placido, Reseda Blvd., North Ridge, CA 91324 (213) 701-6897 _ _ _ _ Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, 1981, Volume 1, Number 12, is published monthly m the United States and simultaneously in Canada by TZ Publications, Inc., 800 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Telephone (212) 986-9600. Copyright © 1981 by TZ Publications, Inc. Rod Serling’s The Twuight Zone Magazine is published pursuant to a license from Carolyn Serling and Viacom Enterprises, a division of Viacom International, Inc. All rights reserved. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Responsibility is not assumed for unsolicited materials. Return postage must accompany all unsolicited material if return is requested. All rights reserved on material accepted for publication unless otherwise specified. All letters sent to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine or to its editors are assumed intended for publication. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publishers. Any similarity between persons appearing m fiction and real persons living or dead is coincidental. Single copies $2 in U.S. and Canada. Subscriptions: U.S., U.S. possessions, Canada, and APO— one year, 12 issues: $22 ($27 in Canadian currency); two years, 24 issues: $35 ($43 in Canadian currency). Postmaster: Send address changes to P.O. Box 252, Mt. Morris, II 61054. Printed in U.S.A. — TK O T H D I M I O N Books by Robert Sheckley Peter Straub, author of the highly regarded Ghost Story, has written a fine chilling yam in Shadowland, now available in paperback (Berkley, $3.50). The book’s narrator, a novelist, runs into Tom Flanagan, an old friend. Years before, both had attended the same prep school. Strange things happened at the Carson School that year and later, during the summer vacation, things which were never really explained. Flanagan, who is working as a small-time magician at a club on the Sunset Strip, agrees to tell the novelist everything: He [Flanagan] smiled briefly, dazzlingly, and for a second was his boyhood self, pumping energy. “Okay. I thought it might be something you could use.” “Just that?” I challenged him. “After all this time you must realize it’s more or less in your line. And I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I talked about it.” “Well, I’m happy to listen,” I said. “Good,” he said, seemingly satisfied. “Have you thought about how you want to start it?” “The book? With the house, I thought. Shadowland.” He considered that for a moment, his chin still propped on his hand. “No, you’ll get there eventually anyhow. Start with an anecdote. Start with the king of cats.” And the story is underway. Straub begins slowly, establishing the characters and background with convincing detail. The pace quickens after the establishing shadows. Straub takes the reader into an PETER STRAUB AUTHOR OF THE TWO MILLION COPY DESTSELLIA GHOST STORY >, intricate phantasmagoria as the book gets into the nature of real magic, and then into the nature of reality itself. Once you follow the two schoolboys to Coleman Collins’s estate in Vermont, where Shadowland exists, you won’t want to put the book down. Straub’s interweaving of details, action, and apparently unconnected events is finely done. This is a first-rate horror novel, in a class with the work of Stephen King and one or two others: not to be missed. I know some people who put down Michael Crichton because he doesn’t have enough depth for them. They should only write half so good a surface. Crichton is fun to read. His prose is clear, he knows what he’s talking about, and he tells a compelling story. What else must the guy do? Can’t we forgive him for not revealing the darkest secrets of the human heart? Congo (Avon, $2.95) is a superior thriller. An American computer information corporation named ERTS (Earth Resources Technology Services) has sent a team of specialists into an almost unknown comer of the Congo for reasons not yet revealed. The team is wiped out in a strange and horrible way. Another team is quickly put together and sent in to find out what happened and to get the job done. The pacing is relentless and the detailing almost obsessive, an unusual combination. For Congo, Crichton learned a great deal about computers and their present and near-future applications for international big business. The competitive world of V- space topologies and speed-of-light circuitries is the real hero of this story. As if that weren’t enough, Crichton also throws in a talking gorilla and a lost African city. There’s one last unusual feature: Crichton’s main characters are two attractive and intelligent young scientists who go through the entire book without falling in love. They dislike each other from the beginning, always watch out for their own interests, and never even think of making out. Crichton’s characters, like Crichton himself, know how to get the job done. I was going' to read The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Southern Illinois University Press, $19.50), but I only got halfway through before I began skimming, so what follows is an intimation rather than a real review. In his introduction, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., makes a case for Woolrich’s continuing importance and interest in the present day! (Woolrich 6 BOOKS died in 1968, and most of these stories were published in the thirties.) I’m sure Nevins is right; aside from his reputation in the United States, Woolrich is still a name to be reckoned with in Paris, where he is considered one of the inspirations for le cinema noir. Woolrich was supposed to have been driven by a dark force in these stories, but I’m afraid I missed it. The author’s words kept getting in my way. Woolrich lacked a way with words. Reading him, we know why the pulps died: “A big, lowering figure looms over them, blocking the narrow stairs, ape-like arms and legs spread-eagle in a gesture of malignant embrace, receding skull, teeth showing, flashing steel in hand.” “The car had money all over » it, money without flash.” “I’m * getting the latest orchestrations from Broadway sent to me hot off the griddle.” These are typical examples. Leaving out Hammett and Chandler and one or two others, that’s how pulp writers wrote. Woolrich had his areas of real expertise, but the stories mostly take place in other places: quickly slapped together “exotic” backgrounds for his cardboard characters. His plots are bizarre and unpredictable. Maybe he did have that dark force driving him, a force which this book is supposed to demonstrate, but I missed it. I read these as pulp stories of the mid-thirties, mainly of historical interest. There’s not much here for the general reader except the fine introduction by Nevins and the afterword by Bairy Malzberg, who briefly and movingly tells of Woolrich’s life and death. Ramsey Campbell’s recent novel, The Parasite, was well reviewed by both Stephen King and Peter Straub, two people who ought to know. I haven’t read it. Campbell’s latest, The Nameless (Macmillan, $12.95), is a horror novel set mostly in England and Scotland. The protagonist, Barbara Waugh, is a London literary agent who learns that her daughter, Angela, kidnapped and apparently killed years ago, is still alive, the captive of a cult without a name. The backgrounds are well done, the pace leisurely for the most part, but compelling. I wasn’t much taken with Is Nothing Sacred? this novel, but I suspect it’s a pretty fair one. The pace picks up steadily throughout; there are some scary sequences, and a neat resolution at the end. Splatter Movies by John McCarty (FantaCo Enterprises, $8.95) explores an interesting, popular, and disreputable offshoot of the horror film. A splatter movie, McCarty explains, is more specialized than a horror movie. Its purpose is to bring you gore, mutilation, and murder, the bloodier the better, scene after scene at breakneck speed. “In splatter movies,” McCarty writes, “mutilation is indeed the message— many times the only one.” These films can be counted on for a minimum of social significance. They’re a phenomenon of our times, whatever that means. To paraphrase McCarty, the splatter movie exists for the sake of its realistic and terrifying special effects, like the Grand Guignol theater from which it sprang. Splatter movies steal each other’s plots, dispense with plausibility, and pay little attention to details. This is a large-format paperback with many black and white stills from splatter movies past and present, and an informative and interesting commentary. It tells the history of the splat, from Grand Guignol to Hammer Films, H.G. Lewis, David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, and others, takes a look at Mainstream Splat, and explores the Is Nothing Sacred? Great Splat Controversy. This evenhanded and unpretentious book should be well received, especially by all those people who can’t stop talking about Night of the Living Dead. How do you look at a cartoon? I usually glance first at the drawing, then the text, and then at the cartoon again. This is the Three-Step Viewing System derived from Leonardo da Vinci. By sandwiching one verbal between two visuals, it ensures a synthesis of experience without the pedantry involved in more elaborate viewing systems, such as Bates’s Fourteen Steps of Appreciation or Schlecter’s Twenty- Five-Part Differential Analysis. However you do it, don’t miss Gahan Wilson’s new book, Is Nothing Sacred? (St. Martin’s, $14.95; paperback, $5.95). You may have seen some of these cartoons in The New Yorker, Playboy, or Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wilson’s usual showcases. But three quarters of them are previously unpublished, so if you miss them here, you’re likely to miss them entirely. Wilson is a master of graveyard humor. He comes up with bizarre twists on everyday situations and everyday twists on bizarre situations. The formula can be simply staled, but it is difficult to do it well. Wilson does it very well indeed. His cartoons make me laugh. He’s the only man I know who understands the leprechaun’s point of view. I recommend this book highly. tS Photos courtesy Avco Embassy Pictures Corp. O TH E R DIMENSION S Screen by Gahan Wilson "The dwarves are very proud of their vlllalnousness." The Time Bandits strike a triumphant pose with their stolen time-travel map. (Clockwise from top: Malcolm Dixon, Tiny Ross, Jack Purvis, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, and Mike Edmonds.) Time Bandits (Avco Embassy) Directed by Terry Gilliam Screenplay by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, George Harrison of the Beatles, and a quantity of men and women of other worthy enterprises have gathered together and directed, produced, written the music for, and, in numerous and varied ways, created for our pleasure an excellent and unpretentious entertainment: Time Bandits. My guess is that this is going to be one of those films that keeps hanging around, like The Wizard of Oz, Top Hat, or Psycho, popping up in tottery old rerun houses, flickering on again at odd hours on your television set, and lingering in your memory betweentimes. The hero of the piece is an English schoolboy named Kevin, played convincingly and uncoyly by Craig Warnock. He’s assisted by six magical dwarves, played convincingly and uncoyly by David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon, and Tiny Ross; by God, played in the same fashion by Ralph Richardson; and by the Devil, played ditto by David Warner. On top of that we have Agamemnon, played by Sean Connery; Napoleon, played by Ian Holm; and Robin Hood, played by John Cleese. Not bad. The epic starts in Kevin’s home in a housing estate somewhere in England. Occasionally, as an American, one tends to be boastfully chauvinistic and to point with proud disgust at this or that up-to-date suburban development in Florida, say, or New Jersey as the supreme expression, brought to you by modem technology, of the pointlessness of life. Not so. We used to lead the field in comfortable despair— God knows we were the pioneers and showed the rest the way— but others have eagerly learned, and now America is no longer in the avant garde of modem dismalness; it is jostled by Germany, France and England, among others, and the Third World desperately schemes and plots to achieve something at least a little like our failed vision of progress. So Kevin’s home, or rather Kevin’s parents’ home, is not to be sneered at by us sophisticated Americans. It is, in fact, a superb example of the dead end civilization has blundered into. It is expensive, one assumes far too expensive; it is crammed with the most involved electronic hardware, but the neighbors have the same whatsis, only a little bit newer; it is without joy. Mother and Dad sit on chairs coated with plastic sheeting— against the day when they find that the resale value of their carefully protected furniture is zilch— and fail to derive any enjoyment from their radar-cooked, prepackaged dinners as they disinterestedly watch their favorite show on the telly: Your Money or Your Life. Kevin, meantime, reads of Agamemnon in The Big Book of Greek Heroes, pins dozens of pictures of brave adventurers on his bedroom wall, and plays quietly with his toy knights, cowboys, and Sherman tanks. Now and then his father opens the door to admit the blare of the television set from downstairs and to tell him to stop all that noise, but otherwise there is little communication between Kevin and his parents. So when a knight on horseback in full battle array comes crashing out of Kevin’s wardrobe one evening and gallops off into a landscape which has momentarily replaced one of the walls of his room, he doesn’t mention the matter to either one of them; he just lies in wait" the following evening with his instant camera to see if he can get a shot of what comes next. What comes next are six dwarves, inaccurately attired as dashing figures from diverse eras: a kind of pirate, a Viking missing a horn on his helmet, a goggled aviator, and so on. After some attendant confusion (throughout the film the dwarves are surrounded by attendant confusion), they fall to questioning Kevin as to a Way Out, threatening to have one of their group, Vermin, eat him alive, if he doesn’t. Kevin leans against his bedroom wall, is astonished to find it is no longer solid, sees the head of God pursuing him through his suddenly elongated room, and plunges along with the dwarves, from the supposedly solid world of the housing estate, through a hole in space and time, into the Napoleonic era. It would be no service to complete this summary of the action, which is 10 “The father that practically every kid would rather have ..." Sean Connery, as Agamemnon, takes Kevin (Craig Warnock) on a ride through ancient Greece. far better observed by you in the theater, but I wanted to try to get across the film’s pellmell quality, which is a continuous kind of spinning dive. Everything happens in a rush, yet there is nothing blurred about it. The details— and this is a film packed with carefully conceived minutia— are not hurried past; they are lingered over somehow, in spite of the generally frantic necessity to get from one scene to the next. I recall dried bare feet, for example, swaying gently from the rafters of an ogre’s lair. You knew, without anyone telling you, that they had been smoked and hung there by his loving, considerate wife so that he might have a little snack when the mood hit him. It’s decidedly one of those movies that need much more than one sitting: there are so many details, so many little jokes, and so many things happening. Take, for instance, the costume of the Devil, referred to in Time Bandits as Evil Genius. The suit must be absorbed by degrees; there is no taking it in at a glance. Offhand it’s a kind of Ming the Merciless get-up with a few extra Elizabethan touches such as elaborate fingerless gloves, the fingerlessness of them instantly explained by the long talons of the fiend. No normal glove could stand up to them! But the details of the costume confuse at first look, and at second and third. What is that decoration on his hood? you ask yourself; something uncomfortably familiar about it . . . and then you realize it’s a couple of skeleton hands clutching the top of the creature’s head. Then you see that those peculiar things on his shoulders are huge claws, and that his front is paneled like a snake’s belly; but many details still remain unset, even though you’re looking at them. Is that thing running between the skeleton hands a vertebra? Or is it one of those ridge tubes you sometimes see oozing out of complex engines? Or what? The whole thing is a running optical illusion, and as the action develops and the thoroughly nasty creature is forced to extreme measures in order to satisfactorily eliminate enemies, the costume reveals most disturbing capabilities. Inside this marvelous get-up, unleashing the forces of evil with leisurely power, is David Warner, who is showing himself to be one of the best depicters of the sinister around. I have seen and admired him in previous movies, once as a dedicated but decidedly dotty hunter of vampire bats, and again as a really first rate Jack the Ripper; but in Time Bandits Warner demonstrates that these were only preambles, mere warming-up exercises, and that he’s game for more. I do hope the filmmakers put him to good use, for he’s obviously capable of damned near anything along villainous lines. Warner’s opposite number, God, has never been handled better. Not by Charlton Heston (who, up to now, is the one I more or less visualized when asking forgiveness or hoping for a break)— not by anyone. Ralph Richardson is probably one of the classiest humans tottering around on this earth, and certainly one of the three or four best actors, and I can see how the producers figured him as typecasting for the Supreme Being, as he’s so correctly billed. He is decked out— when not floating about as an enormous glowing head or a lightning bolt or something like that— in a suit bought, I would guess, from Harrod’s, and a watch chain likewise. It is obvious that he much prefers this manifestation to the burning bush type, though he does concede that it’s reasonable that people tend to expect those flashier turns, and he is, as he observes, “the Nice One,” so he obliges. He’ll even bring you back to life, if he feels like it; and if he sometimes seems a little preoccupied and not paying quite as much attention to you as you’d like, or seems now and then even a little abrupt, you’ve got to remember he’s running everything, sparrows on up. Though Richardson and Warner are the most impressive ones in the cast (as of course they should be, considering they’re playing the cosmfc leads), they are in excellent company. Sean Connery, for example, does a lovely job as King Agamemnon, and as the father that Kevin— and practically every other kid around— would rather have than that spavined, childish parent left back in the real world. Connery’s timing throughout is quite remarkably on the button, and he gives the role a simple dignity which I do not think was anywhere near as easy as it looked. A real pro. Less spectacular, perhaps (and in such company it is very difficult not to be less spectacular), but ahead of the rest, is Ian Holm, who has a fine time doing what may be the best comic put-down of Napoleon I’ve ever seen. When we first come across him he is roaring with laughter at a Punch and Judy show. This image is typical of the well- thought-outness of Time Bandits, in that it is funny when you first see it— imagine Napoleon howling with laughter at the sight of tiny puppets clobbering one another— it gets funnier as it develops, and it continues to get even funnier after you’ve left the theater and Time Bandits plays over in your head. 11 they blunder onward. It’s almost always visible and it produces the basic running gag of the movie. Look how everything is full of holes, it says; the universe is Swiss cheese after all. As the movie progresses, the dwarves, in spite of their best efforts, find their attempts at evil being more and more easily topped. Though they growl convincingly at Robin Hood’s men (a marvelously mindless gang of thugs) even while hanging upside cown from tree limbs, Robin himself— played with great elan and hypocrisy by John Cleese— easily outrougues them; and though they pride themselves on the cool cynicism with which they pursue “the most Fabulous Object in the World,” they prove to be the victims of a transparent scam. There is no such thing as the Most Fabulous Object in the World, everybody knows that. Why, even Kevin, even a kid sees through that. But not the dwarves. One by one, gently and cleverly, evils are observed and studied. Tyrants, thieves, even ogres and giants are met and meditated upon. How far can it go, evil? What’s it up to? Why does it act that way? Can dwarves and children do anything about it? “I hate a mess,” says the Supreme Being, adjusting the handkerchief iri his breast pocket. In the end, like Dorothy back from Oz, Kevin returns from Wonderland, or wherever, whatever it was, and is back in the real world, back in the housing estate. But now that he’s been elsewhere, he can recognize clear signs that the real world is everywhere penetrated by fantastic creatures and events. Things are nowhere near as solid and sensible as people make out. The Universe is Swiss cheese. You just have to know where to look to see right through it. Agamemnon’s right over there, and concentrated evil, one drop of which could turn you into a hermit crab, smokes in the microwave oven. Of course, Dorothy eventually returned to Oz, as we all know. You don’t see Kevin go back, but you get the feeling that he will and that you may go with him. It’s hard to take real life seriously once you’ve seen around its edges, {g ". . . nowhere near as solid and sensible as people make out." On a voyage through the Land of Legend, the Time Bandits' galleon runs aground atop a giant (Ian Muir) as tall as a skyscraper. "He’s obviously capable of damned near anything." David Warner as Evil incarnate, complete with skeletal headpiece and fingerless gloves. “That’s what I like,” Napoleon explains. “Little things . . . hitting each other.” The basic idea behind the plot is that God screwed up (after all, he is only God) and left holes in existence; there is a map showing the locations of these holes, and it’s been stolen by the dwarves so that they might go through the holes from one spot 12 of space and time to another, stealing things as they go. The dwarves are very proud of their villainousness, and though they seem constantly to lose the loot stolen from one place while en route to the next, never once do they seem to think they’ve come up with anything short of a really swell idea. They cart the map around with them as OTHER DIMENSIONS Music by Jack Sullivan L ast month we ended with a discussion of Igor Stravinsky’s pounding, dissonant Le Sacre du Printemps. A more subtle world is evoked in the dreamlike music of Claude Debussy, with its elfin “impressions” of faraway places and scenes from nature. Debussy exhibited a fascination with the mysterious and the fantastic— qualities so basic to his music (with the exception of his early works) that it is impossible to segregate single pieces in this category. We can only say that some of them are more ghostly than others, and that all of them are worth exploring. Debussy’s sound is unusual in that, unlike Scriabin’s, it is not overtly fearful but it is nonetheless convincingly chilling. The world is dark and unfathomable, it seems to say, and all the more attractive for being so. The Debussy “atmosphere,” with its combination of haunting mystery and meditative calm, is one of the most delicate in music, and is a precursor of Crumb, Ligeti, Takemitsu, and many others. The archetypal Debussy piano piece is “The Sunken Cathedral,” which suggests a medieval abbey, complete with tolling bells and chanting monks, rising at night from the sea. Debussy strove for a “piano without hammers,” and this sound is captured with uncanny authority by Arturo Beneditti Michelangeli, the greatest living Debussy pianist, in two essential records (Debussy, “Images”: Deutsche Grammophon 2530196. Preludes for Piano, Book one: Deutsche Grammophon 2531200). Another pianist to look for is Paul Jacobs, who has recorded most of the Debussy canon on an unbelievably dreamy sounding Bosendorfer Imperial piano (Debussy, “Estampesi,” “Images”: Nonesuch 71365. Preludes for Piano, Books One and Two: 2-Nonesuch 73031). With their budget prices, these teautifully engineered records are hard to resist. As for the orchestral works, one can do no better than to purchase the near-complete, budget-priced Boulez set (Debussy, Orchestral Works, Pierre Boulez, Cleveland Orchestra: 3-Columbia D3M-32988). For incisiveness and transparency, Boulez is hard to match, and these qualities do more to bring the meticulously colored Debussy orchestra to vivid life— and, paradoxically, do more to sustain the spellbinding Debussy “atmosphere”— than the vague “impressionism” of ordinary performances. For our purposes, the works to pay closest attention to are Sirenes (1901), which features the first wordless chorus, an important innovation in weird music; Jeux (1912), with its goosepimply whole tone scales; “Les Parfums de la Nuit” from Iberia (1906-09), Debussy’s seductive Spanish travelogue; and La Mer (1905), the most mysterious of all sea pieces. A special treat is the London Symphony digital La Mer which unleashes a storm sequence of singular ferocity, belying the conventional image of Debussy as a precious salon composer (London Symphony: Centaur CRC 1007). On the same record is an exhilarating version of the suite from Daphnis and Chloe (1913) by Maurice Ravel. Ravel is often classified as a neo-classicist whose sound is more sharply etched and less vaporous than Debussy’s. But Ravel too had a consuming interest in the fantastic. He once made the fetching statement that all his music was based on the theories of Poe, suggesting a preoccupation with mysterious atmosphere. Daphnis and Chloe, the most gorgeous large-scale piece by a modem French composer, is thoroughly permeated with a sense of the unknown. Indeed, .Christopher Palmer recently went so far as to compare it with the fiction of Arthur Machen. The intoxicating Machenesque flavor is most powerfully realized in the Boulez performance of the complete ballet, which critics accurately greeted as the most “frightening” version. Other Ravel works which feature the diabolical include the hallucinatory piano work Gaspard de la nuit (1908) (Abbey Simon: Turnabout 34397) and the ingeniously scored Concerto for the Left Harid Alone (1930-31) (Pierre Boulez, Cleveland Orchestra: Columbia M-31426). The most obscure composer of this period was the iconoclastic Charles Ives, an American insurance man who composed at night and who discovered, in total isolation, the basic principles of nontonal music years before Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Much of Ives’s music is based r on American popular and folk music, and it is not surprising that commentators have stressed his unique Americanness. The most startling aspect of Ives, however, is the nostalgic eerieness he obtains by piling fragments of these tunes on top of each other, collage fashion, so that two conductors are sometimes required to prevent chaos. Ives’s textures are incredibly dense and complex, and in his unforgettably poetic slow movements, such as the finales to Three Places in New England and the Fourth Symphony, they create a cosmic sound that soars far above the hymns, marches, and fiddle tunes that form their backdrop (Ives, “Three Places in New England,” Michael Tilson Thomas, Boston Symphony Orchestra: Deutsche Grammophon 2530048. Symphony No. Four, Leopold Stokowski, American The world is dark and unfathomable , Debussy seems to say, and all the more attractive for being so. 13 MUSIC Symphony Orchestra: Columbia MS-6775). The most tumultuous Ives record ever released is a deleted Stokowski performance of the Second Orchestral Set. Fortunately, the Stokowski Fourth Symphony, which he premiered fifty years after Ives wrote it, is still available. Some of Ives’s most horrific works are his smaller-scaled songs and chamber pieces. The Harvest Home Chorales, for example, with their shuddery organ bass, are downright ghoulish; they would be perfectly at home in a movie like Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing (Ives, “Harvest Home Chorales,” “Psalms,” Gregg Smith Singers: Columbia MS-6921). Another aggressively original American composer was Ives’s friend Carl Ruggles, whose piercing * discords invariably inspire horrified boos. At one concert, the catcalls were so bad that Ives himself addressed the audience and denounced them as “a bunch of goddamn sissies.” Ruggles’s austere, uncompromising music can be experienced on a pioneering two- record set by Michael Tilson Thomas (Ruggles, Complete Works, Thomas, Buffalo Philharmonic: 2-CBS M2-34591). Listen especially to the apocalyptic Men and Mountains and Sun Treader (1932), music of great dignity and power. Edgard Varese, a Frenchman who came to settle in New York, was yet another uncompromising radical. Composed not of melodies but of gigantic “sound masses” which suggest vast spaces (he suffered from acute claustrophobia), Varese’s music is consistently disturbing, even terrifying. As Andrew Porter of The New Yorker recently wrote, his is “music of timbres and rhythms that has no roots in the classical or romantic traditions, no program that can be verbalized, no links with any spoken language.” Indeed, in Ecuatorial (1934), Varese’s most primeval score, the singer (who invokes the Mayan Spirit of earth and sky) gradually abandons language and moves into pure incantation. This remarkable piece is a typically Varesean fusion of the primitive and the modem: especially fascinating are the two. Ondes Martenot, the first electronic instruments in music, which Varese uses in a chantlike manner. The exotic titles of these hyper-intense pieces— Octandre, Offrandes, Integrates— reflect the same fusion. Columbia has unconscionably deleted from its catalogue the Boulez orchestral performances, the most shattering ones ever recorded, but an excellent budget sampling under the direction of Arthur Weisberg (including the rarely heard Equatorial) can still be purchased (Varese, Collection, Weisberg, et. al.: Nonesuch 71269). This record is essential. The near-fanatical consistency of Varese’s search for new, terrifying sounds in every one of his works makes him one of the rare pure composers of weird music. Another towering figure, and a far more diversified one, is Hungarian Bela Batrok, distinguished mainly for his brilliant melding of harsh modern harmonies with haunting East European folk tunes, thousands of which he discovered himself. As Stanley Kubrick demonstrated in his film The Shining, Bartok was also a conjuror of spectral effects. The intensely poetic Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste (1930), Kubrick’s choice for the film, has slithering glissandi for violins and fympani which travel up the listener’s spine (Bartok, Pierre Boulez, BBC Symphony Orchestra: Columbia MS-7206). Equally daring writing for strings can be heard in the six String Quartets, a landmark of modem chamber music (Juilliard Quartet: 3-Columbia D3S-717). The most lurid and violent of Bartok’s orchestral works is the surprisingly early The Miraculous Mandarin (1918), which concludes with a barbaric fugue that would have made Bach’s wig stand on end (Antal Dorati, BBC Symphony Orchestra: Mercury 75030 [suite]. Pierre Boulez, New York Philharmonic: Columbia M-31368 [complete ballet |). Equally vital to a recording library of weird music is Bluebeard’s Castie (1911), Bartok’s sole opera, a thoroughly Gothic affair replete with creaking doors, torture chambers, and corridors of blood (Sir Georg Solti, London Philharmonic: London 1174). The collector should also search for Bartok’s uniquely percussive, clangorous piano music, especially the “Night Music” section of the Out of Doors Suite, the first two movements of the Sonata far Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), and the first two Piano Concertos (1926, 1930). These pieces have raised quite a few eyebrows: at the premiere of the ferocious First Concerto, with Bartok himself as soloist;, one hostile critic wrote that Bartok “smote the instrument as if he had a private vengeance against it.” Both concertos are played with heart-stopping virtuosity by modem piano specialist Maurizio Pollini, supported by the predictably brilliant Chicago Symphony (Claudio Abbado, Chicago Symphony: Deutsche Grammophon 2530901). Bartok’s late music is more mellow, but its lyricism remains somber and ghostly. The noble Violin Concerto No. Two (1938) and the dazzling Concerts for Orchestra (1943— commissioned while Bartok lay in a charity hospital with leukemia) are deeply felt affirmations of life, but their rousing; major key perorations emerge only slowly out of a despairing murk. A word about the much-criticized Ormandy digital version of the Concerto for Orchestra: yes, the strings do sound edgy, but the super- charged digital dynamics sweep the listener away at the end. Surely, that is the composer’s intent (Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra: RCA ARC1. Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, New York Philharmonic: Columbia MS-6140. Ravel once made the fetching statement that all his music was based on the theories of Poe. 14 At one Carl Ruggles concert, the catcalls were so bad that Ives himself denounced the audience as “a bunch of goddamn sissies Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra, London Symphony: Angel S-37014). Most listeners find the basically tonal Bartok, even at his most discordant, easier to take than atonal composers. From our perspective, however, “difficult” atonal music should not be especially problematic, for it is precisely the unsettling weirdness of music lacking a tonal center that is usually cited as a barrier to enjoyment, For us, it can prove a delight, especially if we choose our pieces carefully. The middle and late twelve- tone pieces of Arnold Schoenberg, for example, are overbearingly abstract, but his early expressionistic works— Erwartung (1909), Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), Die Glukliche Hand (1910), and Pierrot Lunaire (1912)— are so morbid and nightmarish that they seem like backgrounds to the fantasy horror movie we would all like to see (Schoenberg, Five F’ieces for Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, BBC Symphony Orchestra: CBS M-35882. Collection, Robert Craft, et. al.: 2-Columbia M2S-679 [includes “Erwartung,” “Die Gluckliche Hand,” “Pierrot Lunaire”]). Schoenberg’s “Sprechstimme,” a bizarre vocal technique combining singing and declamation, retains its weirdness even in these jaded times. Much more popular than the forbidding Schoenberg is his student Alban Berg, the “atonal Romantic,” who incorporated “Sprechstimme” in his operas Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937) (Berg, “Lulu,” Teresa Stratas, Pierre Bouliez, et. al: 4-Deutsche Grammophon 2711024. “Wozzeck,” Evelyn Lear, et. al: 2-Deutsche Grammophon 2707023). Berg’s music is often as violent as his mentor’s— witness the knifing and suicide scenes in both operas— but it is also more passionately lyrical and more willing to flirt with tonality. Much of it, such as the elegiac Violin Concerto (1935) and the orchestral summation in Wozzeck, is incredibly beautiful, even though it is almost consistently grim ancl brooding (Berg, Violin Concerto, Seiji Ozawa, Boston Symphony Orchestra: Deutsche Grammophon 2531110). One of the most viscerally disturbing moments in music is the bloodcurdling “orchestral scream” following Lulu’s death at the knife of Jack the Ripper. The least dramatic but most ghostly master of the atonal “Viennese School” is Anton Webern. Like Schoenberg, Webern is most spectral in his early works. Many of these extraordinary concentrated pieces— the first examples of radical minimalism in music— are only minutes (sometimes even seconds) long, with gossamer wisps and fragments of melody which shimmer and vanish like apparitions. “Each glance,” said Schoenberg, “can be extended into a poem, each sight into a novel.” The coldest and most terrifying moment in Webern is the funeral march in the Six Pieces for Orchestra (1913). More delicately haunting are the Five Movements for String Quartet (1909), the Four Pieces for Violin and Piano (1910), the Bagatelles (1913), the Five Pieces for Orchestra (1913), the Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano (1914), and Five Songs (1908). These and other numerous exquisite Webern miniatures are performed by Isaac Stem, Charles Rosen, the London Symphony and other distinguished performers, all under the direction of Pierre Boulez, in a milestone Webern set (Collection, Complete Works, Vol. One: 4-Columbia M4-35193). The technical and poetic assurance of these performances— such a striking contrast to the roughness of earlier versions— puts the radicalism of atonality in historical perspective: it has taken performers over half a century to become comfortable with this strange and compelling music. Next month’s column is devoted to individual spectral masterworks by composers not normally associated with the macabre. Ifl Cancer isn’t just a grown-up disease. Cancer is the number killer disease of thousands of children each year. Time is running out for many of these children, but with your support the research can continue and the cure will be found. For information on how you can help, please write St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 505 N. Parkway, Box 3704, Memphis, Tennessee 38103, or call 1-800-238-9100. Danny Thomas, Founder ST. JUDE CHILDREN’S RESEARCH HOSPITAL 15 .V. T Z INTERVIEW Fritz Leiber: SF’s Wizard-in-Residence A CANDID TALK ABOUT WINE, WOMEN, AND WITCHCRAFT WITH THE ACKNOWLEDGED GRAND MASTER OF AMERICAN FANTASY Interviewer Paul M. Sammon reports: Fritz Leiber is a national treasure, and it’s damn well time someone gave him the same federal status usually accorded parks and monuments. Author of aver two hun- dred short stories, twenty novels, and fifty articles, Leiber has penned such enduring classics as Conjure Wife (witchcraft in the halls of academe), Gather, Darkness (a future government that holds its citizens in the grip of magic and religion), and The Big Time (a crazed group of soldiers in a strange cosmic way station who fight by altering the past). Leiber’s com- mand of language and character are legendary; he can easily skip from social satire to straight science fiction, heroic fantasy, and Lovecraftian hor- ror without missing a beat. For all that, Leiber’s greatest strength is story, and from his first published work in the August, 1939, issue of Unknown (“Two Sought Adventure, ” which introduced his ongoing adventures of two likable swordsmen, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) to 1977’s Our Lady of Darkness, his latest novel, Leiber’s narrative gifts have been rewarded with no fewer than seven Hugos, a Gandalf “Grand Master of Fantasy” citation, and a clutch of Nebula and World Fantasy awards. Leiber was bom in Chicago to Fritz Leiber, Sr., and Virginia Bron- son on Christmas Eve, 1910. His father was a classic Shakespearean actor whose film credits included Laughton’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Muni’s The Story of Louis Pasteur, and Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. (Leiber Jr. was to have his own brief film career, most amusingly in 1971 ’s Equinox, an endearingly trashy no- budget fantasy that was notable for the stop-motion special effects work of David Allen and Dennis Muren.) The actor’s son eventually decided on the world of letters, but before— and dur- ing— his writing career Leiber some- how found time to graduate from the University of Chicago in 1932 with a degree in psychology, gamer an expert rating in tournament chess, become a lay minister for an Episcopal mission- ary church in New Jersey, hold down a four-year position with the Standard American Encyclopedia and a twelve- year stint as an associate editor for Science Digest, and, not incidentally, become one hell of a fencer. He’s taught and acted, too. Thankfully, though, fantasy has been Leiber’s chief province. The publication of Conjure Wife in a 1913 issue of Unknown Worlds put him on the fantasy map; in 1917 Arkham House put out Leiber’s first book and collection of stories, Night’s Black Agents. From that point onwards, in the realm of both science fiction and the supernatural, Leiber’s forty-year career has become virtually impossible to discuss without ringing some changes on the “genius” cliche. And then there’s the personal touch: I owe Fritz Leiber. As a thirteen-year-old on a military in- stallation in the Philippines, during one particularly boring summer after- noon I wandered into the base library and stumbled on Leiber’s first hard- bound Fafhrd and Mouser collection, Two Sought Adventure. That moment was an earthshaker, the “open sesame” to a hitherto unknown world of imag- inative literature— and not only to the sward and sorcery genre, either; Leiber’s book also introduced me to serious science fiction and to the likes of Derleth, Wakefield, Benson, and other supernatural writers. So it’s not going too far to say that Fritz Leiber supplied one of my first fixes for what inevitably snowballed into a lifelong addiction to the bizarre. That afternoon also began a lifelong love affair with Leiber’s work. Memories of stories such as “Space- time far Springers, ” “The Bleak Shore,” and “Mariana” still bring back that delicious chill I felt on first reading them; novels like The Wanderer still retain their breadth and punch. Best of all, unlike some other old masters, Fritz Leiber is still producing, still creating fiction with qualities beyond even his earlier, much lauded work. So it was a special pleasure to find Leiber as personally delightful as his stories are justifiably memorable. Even in his seventies Fritz is tall and classically handsome, blessed with an impressively unforced presence and almost courtly manners. Better still, he’s a very nice guy. Giver the four separate occasions during which this interview was conducted, Leiber was helpful, relaxed, and unflaggingly plea- sant; he also went out of his way to provide a number of personal photos and an extensive bibliography. From our brief encounter, then, it seems safe to say that Fritz Leiber the man is every bit as graceful as his prose. TZ: Harlan Ellison once said that most writers aren’t fit to carry your pencil box. How do you feel about that? Leiber: Well [laughs], it’s very gratify- ing. Harlan and I had a nice ex- perience together, you know, when we were working to put my story “Gonna Roll the Bones” into his Dangerous Visions anthology. TZ: Both of which deservedly won Hugos. But what I’m trying to get at is that you’re constantly brought up as one of the finest of all fantasy writ- ers. What’s your reaction to that reputation? Leiber: One thing I can say is that sometimes my reputation is used as an excuse for not buying my material. I remember that once the Ballantines didn’t want to publish The Big Time, which had run in two parts in Galaxy. Betty Ballantine said it was very good, but that she bought it was “an editor’s novel.” I remember that phrase well. In fact, when my story “Coming Attraction” was also pub- lished in Galaxy, Horace Gold ran an 16 Photo by Nancy Moss Lelber in his San Francisco apartment, setting for some of his recent work. The life mask on the wall is of his father, Fritz , Sr. editorial a bit later s tating that all the writers had liked it but the readers had hated it. So that reputation can cut both ways. TZ: What was it that initially at- tracted you to fantasy? Leiber: I really don’t know. I think my father and mother being actors gave me a liking for the business of putting on plays that were set in other times and places, and I’ve always en- joyed wearing fancy costumes. But I was not a tremendously voracious reader. I think I got into fantasy, at least the genre, by reading some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and, as a boy, reading Burroughs’s John Carter stories. That was my earliest science fiction reading. TZ: With your taste for Burroughs it must have been nice to come full circle and finally write a Tarzan novel of your own, all those years later. Leiber: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, yes, in 1966. That was crazy. They call it a movie tie-in now; I novelized the film. It was suggested to me by the Ballantines again, who published Burroughs at the time. Dur- ing that period, “Edgar Rice Bur- roughs Inc.” was being run by Hulbert Burroughs, the youngest son, basically because his brother and sister didn’t come into the office Anyway, I just wrote that Tarzan book from the script. It does, however, have the distinction of being authorized by the Burroughs estate, unlike some other works. So theoretically it exists as the twenty-fifth Tarzan novel. TZ: Did you have any literate in- terests outside the fantasy field when you were a child? Leiber: Oh, sure. Mostly general and rather standard things. Perhaps the only element that was a little different was that I read a lot of plays— English playwrights like Shaw or American ones like Elmer Rice. I always liked Rice’s Street Scene and his interesting surrealist play The Adding Machine. TZ: Do you think that these theatrical interests and the theatrical environ- ment given to you by your father influenced your writing? Leiber: Yes, I do. Instead of “seeing” my fiction cinematically, I sometimes visualize my stories as if they were framed in a proscenium arch— as if they were on stage. The Big Time, specifically, is really a play. It could easily be done as one, in one setting. In fact, it almost was a play a couple of times, but things fell through before production. And The Big Time isn’t the only thing that mirrors my theatrical interests. Later in my career I developed an interest in theatrical touring companies. “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” was the first story I patterned about one of those. Thereafter there were quite a few of them. * You see, my childhood was, in a way, anoth^- world. After I became of school age 'I lived with my mother’s mother, her sisters, and later my father’s sister. Usually I’d only spend summers with my parents and see them at Christmas. But as I grew older I spent a good deal of time with my father on stage. Although he was in over sixty films, the theater was really his first love, and he had his own company. We played together in many Shakespearean dramas— Mac- beth, Hamlet, King Lear. It was a nice time. TZ: This all seems to be leading up to a very elemental question: how did you start writing in the first place? Leiber: I probably owe it all to a man named Harry Fischer, who’s been a friend of mine all my life. When I was a student at the University of Chicago I made friends with him— Harry was just visiting at the time— and we got along very well. He was writing a lot then, a very talented guy, and he’s still going strong today. But he wasn’t selling. After we became friends we corresponded a lot, and Harry would write me letters twenty, thirty pages long. And I had to emulate him, out of friendship. He would send me fragments of fantasy, usually of a satirical nature, and we would play with them back and forth. So that’s how I became a writer, by composing long letters to Harry Fischer. He invented the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They grew up in our correspondence. As a matter of fact, about thirty percent of my story “The Lords of Quarmall” was actually written by Harry in 1936. 17 Fritz Leiber I completed it twenty-eight years later. TZ: Didn’t it take you some time to break into the field yourself? Leiber: After I met Harry it was still some years before I sold anything. I submitted a dozen or so stories that no one would buy. The first one, I think, was about a man who shoots his double in a mirror, rather like “William Wilson,” the Poe story. In- stead of stabbing him, though, in my first story I had the lead shooting him. TZ: What initially attracted you to the sword and sorcery genre? Leiber: The reading of my youth, especially Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories and certain James Branch Cabell stories like “The Cream of the Jest”— which were, of course, much more sophisticated, but used a sword and sorcery or medieval background. Bringing those *two together was what more or less got Fafhrd and the Mouser started. Plus a little of my knowledge of the eddas of Norse mythology. That’s where I ran into characters like Loki, the mischievous Norse god who, in a way, was a pattern for the Gray Mouser. TZ: I always found Fafhrd and the Mouser to be much more human than Conan. Leiber: Well, they were actually writ- ten as something of a reaction against the Conan stories. I wanted Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to be a little less like supermen, and the stories themselves to have a little more humor to them. Also, you weren’t always sure that they were going to win, as Conan always seemed to do. Sometimes they triumphed by luck as much as anything else. TZ: Why did you make Lankhmar, Fafhrd and the Mouser’ s home base, so decadent? Leiber: If your characters are thieves and adventurers, it’s a natural. That concept really comes from Baghdad and the original Arabian Nights. And I think Hollywood, especially, was on my mind. Baghdad on the Pacific Coast. TZ: You’ve written six paperback col- lections and at least one hardback about Fafhrd and the Mouser. They were the heroes of your first story and you’re still writing about them. After all this time, do you still like the characters? Leiber: Sure I do. I wouldn’t be writing about them if I didn’t. In fact, one of the last two stories I’ve done is a Fafhrd and Mouser story. That one’s a novelette called “The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars,” which will be coming out in 1982 in an anthology edited by Jessica Salmonson called Heroic Visions. Another, “Horrible Imaginings,”— a contemporary horror story set in San Francisco, in an apartment building very much like the one I live in now— will also appear in 1982 in a Playboy anthology edited by Stuart Schiff. The book is just called Death, believe it or not. There have been people who said you couldn’t have death in a title, except maybe in a detective story. This should open their eyes. TZ: In your early career, didn’t you contribute to Weird Tales? Leiber: Yes, my first story there was “The Automatic Pistol.” But I never had much success selling to Weird Tales. My first sale was accepted by the then-editor Farnsworth Wright, but Dorothy McGillwray came in as editor after that and she said she never would buy any of my Fafhrd or Gray Mouser things. Yet I really wanted to get into Weird Tales, so I kept trying. Finally I sold them three or four stories in the late forties that featured a medical background— things like “Alice and the Allergy”— a background I’d absorbed because I was working on Science Digest at the time. TZ: I once came across another Weird Tales story you wrote, “Spider Man- sion,” in a Leo P. Marguiles an- thology. That particular effort seemed atypical of your work. Leiber: “Spider Mansion” was kind of a joke. I was annoyed at the difficulty of selling and apparently pleasing Weird Tales at the time, so I told myself I’d just lay out all the things the magazine seemed to go for and put them into one story. Actually, another fellow put that in my mind, a Western writer I knew named Ken- neth Perkins. As a joke Ken had once put every Western cliche he could think of into a story and, naturally, the editors just went crazy and bought it on the spot. So “Spider Mansion” was a parody, of sorts. It had mad scientists, gloomy Southern mansions, Spanish moss, giant spiders . . . God help me, I even included a comedy Negro who was afraid of “ghosties”! TZ: You’re one of the first genre "I sometimes visualize my stories as If they were on stage. The Big Time, specifically, Is really a play." Published by Galaxy in 1958, Leiber’s novel won a Hugo the following year. Above, its first book publication, as one side of a 1961 Ace "Double '' writers to be credited with evolving the contemporary horror story, ones that are set in the here and now, ones which could be happening in the apart- ment on the other side of the wall. “Smoke Ghost” is an excellent early example of this. What led you into urban horror? Leiber: I was trying to get at the idea that big industrial cities are frightening and that industrial crea- tions are frightening. Personally, I found big cities like Chicago scary, so I decided to write about them. Sometimes, too, I like to insert authentic backgrounds into my horror stories, and much of my background has been urban. “A Bit of the Dark World” reflects this. TZ: That’s one of my personal Leiber favorites. Some of the touches in that are among the most subtly terrifying in your entire output. Leiber: Well, thank you. I was trying to redefine supernatural horror there, so I took a lot of trouble with that one. Actually, that was written for Fantastic around a cover illustration, and done during a rather lonely period in my life. I got the background for it by doing a lot of driving around the Santa Monica Mountains, just outside L.A. The Venice, California, backgrounds in “The Black Gondolier” are pretty accurate, too, I’d like to think. TZ: For the record, what are your personal feelings on the occult? Leiber: I’m pretty much of a skeptic. It’s an interesting field, ' but the IS possibilities of fooling yourself, of get- ting off into a personal sphere of fantasy, are very great. TZ: There are some writers, like Richard Matheson, who are firm believers in what could be called occult doctrine. And they’ve arrived at this acceptance after vigorous research. Leiber: Well, I’ve felt that for some people who get in the field in a most scientific way— such as Dr. Rhine of Duke University— there is a strong drive to initially debunk the super- natural before they wind up becoming converts. TZ: Sort of disproving it to prove it? Leiber: Exactly. My own point of view is quite on the skeptical side. I’ve never seen a UFO either, although in my later years I have grown very in- terested in field astronomy and strange sights in the heavens. TZ: Sticking with your early horror work a bit longer, I understand that you exchanged a number of letters with H. P. Lovecraft. Leiber: Oh, yes, during the last few months of his life. That cor- respondence had a considerable effect on me. TZ: How did it begin? Leiber: My late wife Jonquil knew that I was crazy about Lovecraft’s stories and she, sensible person, thought the best way to get in touch with him was to write a letter in care of Astounding Stories, which had published “The Shadow Out of Time.” So she did. Lovecraft then very cour- teously replied to her in November of 1936, and I screwed up my courage and wrote him too. We all managed to have quite a correspondence in just two months; Lovecraft was writing to me and my wife. He also wrote to Harry Fischer. This was about four or five months before he died. All told, Lovecraft wrote about five letters to me, a couple to my wife and one to Harry. TZ: Do you still have those letters? Leiber: No, unfortunately. They were first borrowed by August Derleth, which was okay by me, for excerpts in his Arkham House volumes of Love- craft’s letters. They were then subse- quently “borrowed” and stolen in an elaborate scheme which I won’t go in- to. There is a conditional happy ending to this, though; at least one, maybe two of those letters have found their way into the Brown University Lovecraft collection in Providence, Rhode Island. In fact, they were on display there the last time I was in Providence, for the World Fantasy Convention in 1979. TZ: You just mentioned Derleth. What were the details behind Night’s Black Agents'! Leiber: Very simple ones. Derleth wanted to do a collection of my material for Arkham House. As for me, I wanted to include a couple of Fafhrd and Mouser stories and “Adept’s Gambit,” because it hadn’t been printed before. I wrote an original story for that collection, too, “The Man Who Never Grew Young.” I did that as a transitional device from the first, modem part of the book to the more ancient Fafhrd tales. TZ: How were your dealings with Derleth himself? I find him to be a seminal figure in the field, the man who singlehandedly kept the American fantasy tradition alive in this country for almost twenty years. Leiber: I think so too. The way he kept Arkham House alive was just remarkable. Derleth had great stature as a regional author. Younger people who’ve come into the field since 1960 don’t think of him like that, though. They tend to think of him as the Lovecraft man, who was successful at both starting a publishing house and somehow hanging on to the Lovecraft properties. Actually, that was just a sideline for Derleth, when he first started it. But later the thing he could do best, the regional novel, almost completely faded away. Derleth had lost the nationwide market, at least that part of it. So what really began almost as a hobby eventually wound up becoming a major part of his life. TZ: A large part of your own life seems to have been connected with Conjure Wife. Leiber: Yes, I have a feeling that that novel is, in many ways, my most popular. And it was an early feminist novel, I’m sure, even if its core idea was that women were witches! I think it still holds up, too. I’m very happy with it. TZ: What prompted the book? Leiber: A number of things. Conjure Wife was written quite soon after Pearl Harbor, and in a way it was stimulated by the thought of “write now or never.” I— almost everyone, really — wasn’t sure how my life was going to be affected by World War II, "I wanted Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to be a little less like supermen. . . . You weren't always sure that they were going to win." Above, Leiber's sixth collection of stories about the sword-wielding duo. so that certainly was a consideration. I was also influenced by the weird Southern California atmosphere of the period. Were we going to be invaded by the Japanese? That sort of thing. Then I was partly thinking of What Every Woman Knows, by the English playwright James Barrie. In that play the lead female character is the secret power behind her husband. But Con- jure Wife was also very much about my wife, Jonquil, and myself. My wife was Welsh, although she was bom in London. Jonquil was always interested in supernatural stories and witchcraft, the whole realm of ghosts and witch- es. So in a way it was a natural. The fact that I was teaching drama at Oc- cidental College in Los Angeles from 1941 to 1942 was also important, since that’s where I began the book. TZ: And which is where, I assume, the novel’s rather sharp poke at the academic world came from. Leiber: Yes. I think Occidental also served as the model for Aldous Hux- ley’s Tarzana College in his After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. All I could find out about this was what I was told by some faculty members. They’d once brought Huxley over to give him an honorary degree and let him speak after the ceremony. Later, In Swan, Huxley’s president of Tar- zana College, Dr. Mudd, seemed suspiciously like Occidental’s Dr. Byrd. TZ: You just mentioned that Conjure Wife was an early feminist novel, too. Leiber: Oh, I’ve always been a little 19 HMUARY STORIES OF IMAGINATION Chilling Novelet by Fritz Leiber: (3*) A BIT OF THE DARK WORLD >; THE SHADOW OUT OF SPACE by H.P Lovecraft .cJ jjtS jgm .- ' : fS and August Derleth "I was trying to redefine supernatural horror ..." Leiber's “A Bit of the Dark World” was written around this Fantastic cover Illustration. on the woman’s side. It just kind of worked out that way. TZ: That’s a consistent thread I’ve found in your work— the fascination with your female characters. Your view of women is usually quit# dimen- sional and complex. Leiber: Women were very mysterious people to me. I was familiar with them in tiie form of mothers and aunts and relatives, but in terms of girlfriends I was very, very inexperienced. My later childhood, when I entered school, was taken over by the big cities I lived in like Chicago. I had a few male friends, but those relationships were rather tenuous. I was never a regular member of any group or gang, even in a mild way, though I finally acquired a circle of friends in high school. But they were actually rivals for high grades in classwork. I kept competing for high grades all through college. So I was a long time in working out a social life or a dating life, let alone a sexual one. That didn’t really work itself out until I got married. I’m sure all of this has a lot to do with what you’ve noticed. TZ: Conjure Wife was filmed three times— as Weird Woman, as Bum Witch Bum [with a screenplay by Richard Matheson and Charles Beau- mont], and as an episode in tv’s short- lived Moment of Fear. What did you think of your other adaptations, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and “The Dead Man” on Night Gallery ? Leiber: The tv rights to both of those were bought from me by Rod Serling who, incidentally, had never ap- proached me with the idea of doing something for him on The Twilight Zone. They were good adaptations, I thought. The idea of destroying the negatives of “The Girl” which then destroyed her was a nice touch. I didn’t have anything to do with that. TZ: Has anyone else approached you with the idea of adapting your fiction for film or television? Leiber: No, that really wraps it up. Although right now a company called Wizard Productions has an option on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. But there’s nothing firm yet. TZ: As long as we’re on the subject of film, what about your film acting career? Leiber: I think I know where you’re heading on this. TZ: You’re probably right. First, though, weren’t you once in a movie with Greta Garbo? Leiber: Yes. Camille, in 1936. Robert Taylor was the leading man. I played a character named Valentine, who was getting married to Taylor’s sister. I had a few lines of dialogue. TZ: And then there was Equinox . . . Leiber: I knew it! [Laughs.] TZ: I ’ve got to tell you that it’s one of my favorite schlock horror movies. I stayed up until three A.M. the other night watching it on tv again. Leiber: Your nerves must be good. TZ: How did you get involved with the film? Leiber: Through Forry Ackerman. He knew these kids— kids in the sense of being fresh out of high school— who were very much into stop-frame animation. Forry arranged for us to get together, and that was that. TZ: Why did you accept playing a bit part in it? Leiber: It just seemed an interesting thing to do. When I first accepted the part, Equinox was purely a non- commercial venture. I signed a release, which I assumed everyone else did, that promised no recompense. We shot it, and that was that. It was really nothing more than a short at that point. Then, about four years later, they added the part of the forest ranger and got the cast together again and shot another hour of it. I wasn’t available at the time, so I couldn’t do any dubbing. That’s why my role was a silent one. TZ: It’s probably just as well, since one of the characters actually referred to you as that “weirdo from the university.” All you had to do was look terrified. Leiber: Yes, I looked strange. I thought I looked weird in that film, like a fugitive from Nosferatu. Still, though, nobody ever expected it to be released. But then witchcraft movies got big, so Equinox escaped. TZ: That sounds like a critique. Leiber: Oh, I think they were pretty good with their stop-frame work. I never thought much of the film, but I enjoyed running around Pasadena and Tujunga Canyon. That’s where I lay face-down in a brook and was a corpse for awhile. TZ: Here’s another basic question. Although you've written both fantasy and science fiction, do you have a preference? Leiber: Fantasy, I suppose. At the moment it seems like the only thing I’m writing. TZ: Your science fiction seems to show a lot of research. Leiber: Yes. On The Wanderer, for example, I had to do a lot of research on tides and tidal forces. In fact, I ended up doing so much research that I published an article on the tides in Science Digest. And I remain interested in the sciences. Psychology, for instance. I subscribe to Science News and look at Scientific American, although I don’t read all of that latter magazine by any means. I also subscribe to Sky and Telescope. My field astronomy activities here in San Francisco, though, with all the fog, are kind of chancy: But it’s still fun. TZ: Even when working in sf, you’re generally noted for your ease of characterization, for the reality of the people in your work. How do you arrive at that sort of delineation? Leiber: Half of the characters in my work are generally correlated to real folks. Sometimes the influence of ac- tual persons in my life is even stronger. Take The Big Time, for in- stance. When I put most of the char- acters in that, I was thinking of real people. TZ: Speaking of real people, how about your feelings on your literary peer group? What do you think about some other contemporary fantasists? Leiber: I don’t keep track of too many of them. I do like Tanith Lee, though. She’s very good at pulling off a story. TZ: What about someone like Robert Aickman, or litamsey Campbell? Leiber: Aickman was a very effective writer. His death was a loss to us all. He was sort of obscure at times, Photo by Walter Daugherty "I've always enjoyed wearing fancy costumes. " Lieber, a lifetime Hamlet devotee, played a gravedigger for this gag photo which, he says, we can interpret any way we please. though. At times it’s very much a question of whether something is real- ly happening in the story, or whether a major character is going crazy or having the DT’s or suffering from hallucinations— or all three. I like Ramsey Campbell, too; I enjoyed The DoU Who Ate His Mother. Again, though, in Campbell it’s hard to be sure something’s happening or if it’s mostly in the minds of the characters. But that’s characteristic of a lot of material now. TZ: Stephen King? Leiber: I admire King very much, because he’s fleshed the horror story out into what we’d call the main- stream novel. For instance, the plot of The Shining works without the horror. Stanley Kubrick certainly threw most of it away anyway, of course. Then he turned the main character into an archetypical jerk. What do you think of that movie? TZ: I thought Kubrick filled The Shin- ing with contempt— contempt for the material, contempt for the film he was making, and contempt for the au- dience. Leiber: Well, Jack Nicholson certainly got to make an amazing assortment of faces. [Laughs.] King has sort of defended Kubrick, you know, by say- ing that Kubrick’s direction of The Shining is black humor. But then Stephen contradicted himself in a* Twilight Zone interview by saying that Kubrick didn’t understand horror and remade The Shining into a domestic tragedy. I suppose King’s position in regard to his public, friends, and himself is of finding some acceptable defense for the film. I’m sure he doesn’t want to feud with Kubrick. Steve understands how movies work. You know, someone once asked me if I had films in mind when I wrote my story “Little Old Miss Macbeth,” because the imagery in that particular tale was so intensely visual. My reply was appropriate to what we’re talking about, because I answered that I wasn’t thinking in terms of movies to the extent that Stephen King does when he writes. From his Danse Macabre, it’s ap- parent to me that King has been thinking in cinematic terms whether he’s conscious of it or not. I’m not saying he’s trying to sell a film. I am saying that cinema has influenced his concepts of horror. I mean, look at his novella “The Mist” in Dark Farces. You wouldn’t need a script to adapt that. You could just literally shoot the story. TZ: On a more personal note, I understand your son Justin is a writer too. Leiber: Oh, yes. He had a science fic- tion novel brought out in September of 1980 by Del Rey Books. It’s titled Beyond Rejection. This, from my point of view, is very important. He’s an associate professor of philosophy, and that’s also very much an interest of mine. Now he writes science fiction, too! So we share a lot between us, even more now that we’re coming together on our writing interests. TZ: Your work has won so many awards— Hugos, Nebulas, World Fan- tasy Awards— that I only have the space to touch on a couple of them. So, since you brought it up earlier, what about “Gonna Roll the Bones”? Where did the initial idea spring from? That’s almost a folk story. Leiber: It began as a sort of Negro spiritual, or blues, or revival hymn that was bouncing around inside my head. Not a real one, just one I made up, one that sort of sounded off in my mind. The refrain went: Gonna roll the bones Gonna roll the bones Gonna roll the bones With death And at first I worked that into the story. But as I tried to write it, I just couldn’t see how you could say early on Gonna roll the bones/With death without giving away the point of the story. I decided I couldn’t have this music or little refrain sounding 21 •V Fritz Leiber throughout the narrative. So that’s why I started it and finished it up in what I felt was an unsatisfactory form. Then, when Harlan Ellison wanted something very fast, wanted me to give him a story for Dangerous Visions in a hurry, I thought, “Now I can get back to ‘Bones’ and write the final version.” Which I did. TZ: “Gonna Roll the Bones” is reveal- ing to me because many of your stories seem informed by a sense of death, by the idea that we’re all mor- tal. This concept peaks in “Bones” because there you actually have death personified. Leiber: Well, death seems to be a keystone of fantasy fiction, doesn’t it? I was probably influenced by some- thing Damon Knight once wrote in his In Search of Wonder, too. In trying to get at what we all mean by artistic work, Knight said that serious fiction is about love and death. But “Bones” is also concerned with all that business of alcohol, you know. TZ: Ah . . . I hadn’t quite decided whether to raise that question. Leiber: Oh, alcohol was certainly in- volved with that particular story. But then, at that particular time, I myself was off and on involved with alcohol. TZ: You don’t mind talking about your drinking? Leiber: No, that’s quite all right. In the summer of 1956, with the help of my friends and some people at Alcoholics Anonymous, I quit for about eight years. Then I drank, on and off, until about 1972, or three years after my wife Jonquil died. You can see the drinking in my writing, I’m sure. For instance, I’d been sober for about six months when I wrote The Big Time, but that book reflected drinking experiences quite a bit. TZ: Drinking is also a major theme of Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber: Yes, it is. In January of 1970 I’d moved to San Francisco, where the novel takes place, and Our Lady was finished about a year after I’d stopped drinking again. TZ: That’s interesting, because Franz, the main character, is a reformed alcoholic who’s constantly battling with himself over the urge, yet al- ways, somehow, gets through another dry day. I found that a realistic por- trayal of a very real situation. Leiber: Yes, well, that was what I wanted. TZ: I’d even go so far as to say that 22 that aspect of Our Lady was inspira- tional for others with a drinking prob- lem. By giving a convincing picture of this man winning over alcohol, you were saying that it’s possible to quit. It might be tough, it might be a daily struggle, but it’s possible. Leiber: Well, I don’t know about that, but at any rate it’s there. The drinking situation portrayed in Our Lady wasn’t the first time that sort of thing had happened to me in my own life. TZ: What gave you the initial idea for this novel? Franz inadvertently calling up an arcane creature put me in mind of the bedsheet thing in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James. Leiber: You might say Our Lady of Darkness started by seeing the Mount Sutro Tower out of the window of my bedroom. TZ: Which is the same way the novel begins. Leiber: Right. That’s the view I could see when I was living at 811 Gearey Street in San Francisco. Looking at it with binoculars made me recall several M. R. James stories, actually. One was called “A View from a Hill” and featured a pair of old binoculars in- vented by a witch man who had an un- canny talent for locating places to dig for forgotten archaeological artifacts. Then it turned out that these binoculars would show him the past, including church towers that had since fallen. Things like that. So I had this idea and thought, well, suppose along with the idea of seeing a ghost on a hilltop, you then go to that hilltop and look back on your vantage point and see that ghost there! “My God!” you’d say. “He’s gotten into my place!” That was the basic idea. I first started Our Lady as a short story, with that particular twist. TZ: What are you working on now? Leiber: I’ve in mind a couple of se- quels to “Black Glass,” a story of mine that first appeared in An- dromeda 3, edited by Peter Weston in 1978. TZ: Let me get a response on one last story. Would you mind talking about your entry in Ramsey Campbell’s Superhorror collection? Leiber: “Dark Wings”? Sure. That’s a strange one. TZ: And extremely disturbing, too. It’s another favorite of mine. Two long-lost identical twins, Rose and Violet, meeting as young adults and then maybe not being human at all, but archetypes. Leiber: Yes, it’s very Jungian. “Dark Wings” gets very funny reactions from women, you know. Take a couple of writers you’ve probably heard of. Joanna Russ, a good feminist science fiction writer, hates it. She says it’s sexist and plays a lot of games. On the other hand, Elisabeth Lynn thinks it’s a wonderful sxiry. [Laughs.] She thinks of it as a great lesbian love story. But actually, when I wrote it, it was the result of an idea I’d been playing around with for nearly three years. “Dark Wings” came down to my very amateur understanding of Jung and of his ideas on the anima and animus. TZ: Since I have that story right here on hand, let me quote the passage where you explained those terms. “You know the animus, of course, if you’ve read Jung— the male self that haunts and inspires and sometimes terrifies each of us women, over- shadowing the shadow. The equivalent of the anima in a man.” Leiber: That’s right. I believe thoroughly in the anima, and know my own female personality is there. I’ve got to watch out; for it, because it’s a real bitch! But women are supposed to have an animus, so I wanted to write a story about that. TZ: Sexuality has always been ap- parent and naturalistically portrayed in your fiction. Would you call it a primary concern? Leiber: Well, agiin, I had, it seems, a rather inhibited, lonely and wistful sort of youth. Sex was a big problem in my teens and early twenties. In the long run it’s never really been settled. So sex remains of enduring interest to me. TZ: As I’m sure it does to most of us. Well, we’ve talked about the ideation in your work, the circumstances that triggered it, and the background that shaped it. I’d like to end with this last query: are you consciously trying to create art? I realize that’s a loaded question. Leiber: Yes, it is. But I feel that art should be entertiiining. I really do. At least in any art I’ve fooled around with. TZ: Is art also cautionary? Leiber: That’s secondary. If it’s good art, then the morality is also bound to be good. But at heart, all I’m really trying to do is entertain. 10 Illustration by Jo$6 Reyes The Man Who Never Grew l(bung by Fritz Leiber THE CLASSIC TALE OF A BACKWARDS METHUSELAH AND A FUTURE THAT DIDN'T WORK. M aot is becoming restless. Often toward evening she trudges to where the black earth meets the yellow sand and stands looking across the desert until the wind starts. But I sit with my back to the reed screen and watch the Nile. It isn’t just that she’s growing young. She is wearying of the fields. She leaves their tilling to me and lavishes her attentions on the flock. Every day she takes the sheep and goats farther to pasture. I have seen it coming for a long time. For generations the fields have been growing scantier and less diligently irrigated. There seems to be more rain. The houses have become simpler— mere walled tents. And every year some family gathers its flocks and wanders off west. Why should I cling so tenaciously to these poor relics of civilization— I, who have seen King Cheops’ men take down the Great Pyramid block by block and return it to. the hills? I often wonder why I never grow young. It is still as much a mystery to me as to the brown farmers who kneel in awe when I walk past. I envy those who grow young. I yearn for the sloughing of wisdom and responsibility, the plunge into a period of lovemaking and breathless excite- The Man Who Never Grew Ifoung ment, the carefree years before the end. But I remain a bearded man of thirty-odd, wearing the goatskin as I once wore the doublet or the toga, always on the brink of that plunge yet never making it. It seems to me that I have always been this way. Why, I cannot even remember my own disinterment, and everyone remembers that. Maot is subtle. She does not ask for what she wants, but when she comes home at evening she sits far back from the fire and murmurs disturbing fragments of song and rubs her eyelids with green pigment to make herself desirable to me and tries in every way to infect me with her restlessness. She tempts me from the hot work at midday and points out how hardy our sheep and goats are becoming. There are no young men among us anymore. All of them start for the desert with the approach of youth, or before. Even toothless, scrawny patriarchs uncurl from graveholes, and hardly pausing to * refresh themselves with the? food and drink dug up with them, collect their flocks and wives and hobble off into the west. I remember the first disinterment I witnessed. It was in a country of smoke and machines and con- stant news. But what I am about to relate occurred in a backwater where there were still small farms and narrow roads and simple ways. There were two old women named Flora and Helen. It could not have been more than a few years since their own disinterments, but those I cannot remember. I think I was some sort of nephew, but I cannot be sure. They began to visit an old grave in the cemetery a half mile outside town. I remember the little bouquets of flowers they would bring back with them. Their prim, placid faces became troubled. I could see that grief was entering their lives. The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was hap- pening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora. ...” Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief. Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements. On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the proces- sion set out— the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse. At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him. Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age- old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mor- tician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood. Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a, few hours of stony- eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace. But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door. I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode. Perhaps our first ex- periences of the great crises of life always affect us in some such fashion. I love Maot. The hundreds; I have loved before her in my wanderings down the world do not take away from the sincerity of my affection. I did not enter her life, or theirs, as lovers ordinarily do— from the grave or in the passion of some terrible quarrel. I am always the drifter. Maot knows there is something strange about 24 I sometimes think that time once flowed in the opposite direction, and that, in revulsion from the ultimate war, it turned back upon itself and began to retrace its former course. me. But she does not let that interfere with her ef- forts to make me do the thing she wants. I love Maot and eventually I will accede to her desire. But first I will linger awhile by the Nile and the mighty pageantry conjured up by its passage. My first memories are always the most dif- ficult and I struggle the hardest to interpret them. I have the feeling that if I could get back a little beyond them, a terrifying understanding would come to me. But I never seem able to make the necessary effort. They begin without antecedent in cloud and turmoil, darkness and fear. I am a citizen of a great country far away, beardless and wearing ugly confin- ing clothing, but no different in age and appearance from today. The country is a hundred times bigger than Egypt, yet it is only one of many. All the peoples of the world are known to each other, and the world is round, not flat, and it floats in an endless immensity dotted with islands of suns, not confined under a star-speckled bowl. Machines are everywhere, and news goes round the world like a shout, and desires are many. There is undreamed-of abundance, unrivaled oppor- tunities. Yet men are not happy. They live in fear. The fear, if I recall rightly, is of a war that will engulf and perhaps destroy some enemy city. Others that dart up beyond the air itself, to come in attack- ing from the stars. Poisoned clouds. Deadly motes of luminous dust. But worst of all are the weapons that are only rumored. For months that seem eternities we wait on the brink of that war. We know that the mistakes have been made, the irrevocable steps taken, the last chances lost. We only await the event. It would seem that there must have been some special reason for the extremity of our hopelessness and horror. As if there had been previous worldwide wars and we had struggled back from each, desperately promising ourselves that it would be the last. But of any such, I can remember nothing. I and the world might well have been created under the shadow of that catastrophe, in a universal dis- interment. The months wear on. Then, miraculously, unbelievably, the war begins to recede. The tension relaxes. The clouds lift. There is great activity, con- ferences and plans. Hopes for lasting peace ride high. This does not last. In sudden holocaust, there arises an oppressor named Hitler. Odd, how that name should come back to me after these millennia. His armies fan out across the globe. But their success is short-lived. They are driven back, and Hitler trails off into oblivion. In the end he is an obscure agitator, almost forgotten. Another peace then, but neither does it last. Another war, less fierce than the preceding, and it too trails off into a quieter era. And so on. I sometimes think (I must hold on to this) that time once flowed in the opposite direction, and that, in revulsion from the ultimate war, it turned back upon itself and began to retrace its former course. That our present lives are only a return and an un- winding. A great retreat. In that case time may turn again. We may have another chance to scale the barrier. But no . . . The thought has r vanished in the rippling Nile. • Another family is leaving the valley today. All morning they have toiled up the sandy gorge. And now, returning perhaps for a last glimpse, to the verge of the yellow cliffs, they are outlined against the morning sky— upright specks for men, flat specks for animals. Maot watches beside me. But she makes no comment. She is sure of me. The cliff is bare again. Soon they will have forgotten the Nile and its disturbing ghosts of memories. All our life is a forgetting and a closing in. As the child is absorbed by its mother, so great thoughts are swallowed up in the mind of genius. At first they are everywhere. They environ us like the air. Then there is a narrowing in. Not all men know them. Then there comes one great man, and he’ takes them to himself, and they are a secret. There only remains the disturbing conviction that something worthy has vanished. I have seen Shakespeare unwrite the great plays. I have watched Socrates unthink the great thoughts. I have heard Jesus unsay the great words. There is an inscription in stone, and it seems eternal. Coming back centuries later I find it the same, only a little less worn, and I think that it, at least, may endure. But some day a scribe comes and laboriously fills in the grooves until there is only blank stone. The Man Who Never Grew Ifoung Then only he knows what was written there. And as he grows young, that knowledge dies forever. It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother. All the people are gone now. Only I and Maot linger. I had not realized it would come so soon. Now that we are near the end, Nature seems to hurry. I suppose that there are other stragglers here and there along the Nile, but I like to think that we are the last to see the vanishing fields, the last to look upon the river with some knowledge of what it once symbolized, before oblivion closes in. Ours is a world in which lost causes conquer. After the second war of which I spoke, there was a long period of peace in my native country across the sea. There were among us at that time a primitive people called Indians, neglected and imposed upon and forced to live apart in unwanted areas. We gave no thought to these people. We would have laughed at anyone who told us they had power to hurt us. But from somewhere a spark of rebellion ap- peared among them. They formed bands, armed themselves with bows and inferior guns, took the warpath against us. We fought them in little unimportant wars that were never quite conclusive. They persisted, always returning to the fight, laying ambushes for our men and wagons, harrying us continually, even- tually making sizable inroads. Yet we still considered them of such trifling importance that we found time to engage in a civil war among ourselves. The issue of this war was sad. A dusky portion of our citizenry were enslaved and made to toil for us in house and field. The Indians grew formidable. Step by step they drove us back across the wide midwestern rivers and plains, through the wooded mountains to eastward. On the eastern coast we held for a while, chief- ly by leaguing with a transoceanic island nation, to whom we surrendered our independence. There was an enheartening occurrence. The enslaved Negroes were gathered together and crowded in ships and taken to the southern shores of this continent, and there liberated or given into the hands of warlike tribes who eventually released them. But the pressure of the Indians, sporadically aided by foreign allies, increased. City by city, town by town, settlement by settlement, we pulled up our stakes and took ship ourselves across the sea. Toward the end the Indians became strangely pacific, so that the last boatloads seemed to flee not so much in physical fear as in supernatural terror of the green silent forests that had swallowed up their homes. To the south the Aztecs took up their glass knives and flint-edged swords and drove out the . . . I think they were called Spaniards. In another century the whole western con- tinent was forgotten, save for dim, haunting re- collections. Growing tyranny and ignorance, a constant contraction of frontiers, rebellions of the downtrod- den, who in turn became oppressors— these con- stituted the next epoch of history. Once I thought the tide had turned. A strong and orderly people, the Romans, arose and put most of the diminished world under their sway. But this stability proved transitory. Once again the governed rose against the governors. The Romans were driven back— from England, from Egypt, from Gaul, from Asia, from Greece. Rising from barren fields came Carthage to contest suc- cessfully Rome’s preeminence. The Romans took refuge in Rome, became unimportant, dwindled, were lost in a maze of migrations. Their energizing thoughts flamed up for our glorious century in Athens, then ceased to carry weight. After that, the decline continued at a steady pace. Never again was I deceived into thinking the trend had changed. Except this one last time. Because she was stony and sun-drenched and dry, full of temples and tombs, jfiven to custom and calm, I thought Egypt would enc.ure. The passage of almost changeless centuries encouraged me in this belief. I thought that if we had not reached the turn- ing point, we had at least come to rest. But the rains have come, the temples and tombs fill the scars in the cliffs, and the custom and calm have given way to the restless urges of the nomad. If there is a turning point, it will not come un- til man is one with the beasts. And Egypt must vanish like the rest. Tomorrow Maot and I set out. Our flock is gathered. Our tent is rolled. Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving. It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother. Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her. And I will go on. (3 26 IN WHICH MADNESS TAKES THE FORM OF A SMILING, FRECKLE-FACED TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY. I didn’t notice him when I got off the bus. John- son and I were deep into a rehash of the latest screwing by Washington’s merry men. Divided .by politics, we were passionately united in our con- [ tempt for politicians.. Light snow had turned to stinging flurries during the long ride from downtown, and in the minute we stopped under the streetlight to turn up our coat collars, a clear voice floated from the shadow figures around us at the bus stop. “Excuse me? Have you seen my dad? Alan Coombs? A tall mail with reddish hair— wears a brown and white checked coat? Excuse me, please, have you seen Alan Coombs?” I didn’t really hear it but Johnson did, and as he turned his head, someone laid a small hand on his sleeve. “Mister? Excuse me, have you seen Alan Coombs?” Finally, it registered. My discourse trailed off as Johnson turned back with a grin. “Someone looking for you, Alan. Hey, I gotta run. See you tomorrow, man.” His square back melted into the dark; I was left alone with the owner of the voice. A slight boy, maybe twelve, narrow freckled face, snowflakes dusting his sandy hair. He wore only sneakers, t-shirt, and faded jeans— his whole body looked pinched with cold. Snow hissed and spat through the space between us; I turtled my head into my collar. “Did you want me?” He grinned. “Hi, Dad. I came to meet you. Surprised?” When I didn’t answer he came close, peering up at me in the yellow light. “Dad? Something wrong? J ’ Without realizing it I backed away, one slow step. “Hey, I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else. I’m not your father.” At the time it struck me almost funny. How could a kid not recognize his own father? Snow The New Man started needling its icy way down my neck. “You’d better hike on home. You’ll freeze out here in those clothes.” I started to turn, but his hand was on my arm. A small hand, reddened and rough from cold. He looked puzzled. “Dad? It’s me, Jerry. Jerry, your son, remember?” Even through my coat his touch was repug- nant. I jerked my arm away. The bus stop crowd had dissipated, vanished into the night; we were alone in the yellow pool of light. “Hey,” I said, trying to be patient, “it’s late and I’m cold. You’ve made a mistake. Go home— your dad’s probably waiting there for you.” I plunged into the two dark blocks to home and knew before a hundred steps he was there, behind me. Suddenly, the cold was deeper. In the il- lumination of the next streetlight I looked back. He was a small thin shadow, maybe thirty feet behind. “Look,” I said, and was surprised to hear my voice tremble, “I don’t knew what game you’re play- ing, but I’m in no mood to be a part of it. Go on— go home.” He stopped, shuffled on the sidewalk. I couldn’t see his face. “Why ’re you mad at me, Dad? I just wanted to walk home with you.” By the time I reached the gate I was trotting. The porch light cast a warm welcome glow. Once again, at the door, I looked back. He huddled at the gate, shoulders bent under his thin shirt, face a featureless blur. “If you’re not gone in five minutes I’m going to call the police, you hear me?” His voice was small. “Can’t I come inside? Dad?” Sharon looked up from setting the table when the bolt shot home behind me, loud and final. “Oh, Alan. Hi. Dinner’ll be ready in a minute. Better get out of those wet shoes.” I wanted to look outside, see if he was there. But then I’d have to open the door. The longer I stood there, the sillier I felt, and Sharon paused on her way to the kitchen. “Alan? You okay?” Familiar words, too familiar, and I forced myself into the room. My room— my home— my wife — my— “Where’s Pete?” —my real son. “In his room— glommed to the stereo, as usual.” She turned toward the kitchen. “Give him a yell. Dinner’ll be on the table by the time he gets here.” For some reason I seemed to move very slowly down the hall. Why did I feel afraid? So some nutty kid followed me home— called me Dad. Trivial— a mistake. What was there to be afraid of? Those days were over. I was a new man now, a New Man, in control. Pete looked up when I opened the door. “Hey, Dad.” He sprawled across the bed, fifteen, and already taller than me. Before I opened my mouth he said, “I know, I know. I’ll turn it down.” I loved this boy, the only one nature had seen fit to give me, but we were each at stages in our lives when we couldn’t show it, so I said, “Deaf before you’re twenty, moron. Mom says come to dinner.” He ambled down the hall behind me and I felt myself relax. Normal, everything was normal. Why had I let a small thing spook me like that? Then Sharon’s accusing eyes met mine and I didn’t even feel Pete bump my shoulder. I froze, the cold outside inside now, turning me to living stone. “What kind of joke did you think that was, Alan? Locking him outside like that. He had to ring the bell.” The bell. I hadn’t heard it over Pete’s stereo. The boy stood in my living room, shivering, as Sharon briskly toweled his hair. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder about your sense of humor. Look at him— he’s freezing. What made you do such a cruel thing, Alan?” The boy looked up at me. I couldn’t move. This was my house— my wife— my— Pete shoved past me. “Hey, jerk, what were you doing out without a coat on? You could cart your brain around in a very small package, you know that?” As he passed the boy, he feinted at his head; the boy ducked and grinned. Pete flung himself into his chair. “Hey, is dinner ready cr not? Let’s eat.” Like a sleepwalker, I moved toward my wife and the boy. She shielded him from my approach as though I posed some kind of threat. “You know this kid?” “Funny. I’m going to get him some dry clothes. You two go on and start.” For the first time I saw it— the table set for four. I gripped the back of my chair and said to Pete, my only son, “Who is that boy? What the hell is going on?” Pete’s eyes flicked over me, all attention on his plate. “Come on, Dad, quit kidding. Sit down.” “I’m serious. Who is he?” My voice was too loud. Pete’s head came up warily, the old look in his eyes, the fear and dread I remembered from past years. Before he could say anything, Sharon and the boy were back. She steered him to the empty chair. He wore a clean shirt and pants, clothes I never saw Pete wear. “Sit down, Alan. Everything’s getting cold.” Her voice was tight. 28 “I don’t have a son named Jerry. I know it, and you all know it, too. What are you trying to do? I never saw that boy before tonight.” “Just a minute—” I began. “Just a minute yourself. It’s not like you to play mean tricks. Fun’s fun, but that wasn’t funny. I think you should apologize.” Was everyone crazy? The boy was smiling at me. Pete’s eyes remained fixed on his plate. I faced Sharon’s anger with a little of my own. “Will somebody tell me what’s going on here? I don’t mean to be rude before a guest, but just who the hell is this kid? He jumps me at the bus stop, says he’s my son, follows me all ... Now you two act— can I be let in on the joke? Sure, he’s welcome for dinner, but who is he, and why’s everyone acting as if he belonged here?” I’d heard of silences that rang, but had never actually experienced one. Pete shot a look at his mother and away, avoiding me. The boy’s gaze re- mained on me. So did Sharon’s. There was that look on her face, the mixture of fear and dread I’d seen on Pete’s just moments before. “Are you still trying to be funny?” “No! Can’t anyone answer a simple question?” I was getting loud again; I heard it, and struggled for control. Finally Sharon answered— in a slow patient voice. “It’s Jerry, Alan. Do you mean to say you don’t know your own son?” I heard the clock tick far away in the kitchen. I heard a car go by outside, tires crunching through new snow, and deep inside I heard a faint crack begin in my dam of self-control. I pushed my fist against it, through my chest, and I stayed calm. “I don’t have a son named Jerry. I know it, and you all know it, too. What are you trying to do? I never saw that boy before tonight.” I watched their faces turn away. Only the boy watched me as my wife and real son talked, talked before me as in the old days, as though I didn’t ex- ist. Sometimes I hadn’t then, not really, but now was different. A new roan, today I was a New Man. “What did he say to you, Pete?” “Just wanted to know who Jerry was. It’s not starting again, is it?” “Oh, God, I thought . . . Jerry, what was he like at the bus stop? Was he okay when he got off?” For the first time the clear voice of the boy. “Yeah. He was with another man, talking. Then, when he started acting funny— like he didn’t know me— I thought, well, you know ...” He darted a glance at me. I folded my hands on the table and said, “Thought what— Jerry, is that your name? What did you think when I denied being your father?” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I thought you’d been drinking.” My hands leaped to clench, but I stopped them. To me, my voice sounded reasonable, calm. “I have not been drinking. I haven’t had a drink in over a year. I crawled through hell to get here, but I don’t drink anymore.” - Jerry ducked his head. “I’m sorry, Dad.” I even managed a smile. “Don’t ever call me that again. I don’t know who you are or what insani- ty’s in this house, but I do know I’m not your dad.” I probably would have continued, but Sharon stopped me. She rose suddenly, pulling Jerry protec- tively to her. “I think Jerry’s had enough for one day. He’s going to bed. No, that’s enough, Alan.” She hurried him from the room, and im- mediately Pete lunged to his feet. “Goin’ to my room,” he muttered. “Pete-” “Later, Dad. Not now.” He didn’t look at me. The house was quiet. I stared at the extra plate on my dining room table and fought a black urge to run out into the snow— get away. No, that was over. I didn’t run from things anymore— I coped. Somehow I’d work this out. Sharon’s return steps were reluctant. More than a trace of her old expression hovered in her eyes. She sat down across from me and folded her hands. “You want to smell my breath, Sharon?” “Alan-” “That boy is not my son.” She leaned toward me. “How can you say that? What’s wrong with you? My God, he looks ex- actly like you! Do you know how you’re making him —all of us— feel? Why are you doing this? God, haven’t we been through enough?” “Who is he?” Her eyes misted; she knew I hated to see her cry. “What’s he done? I don’t understand why you’re—” “Where was he born?” For several minutes she didn’t speak at all. I watched a muscle tighten in her jaw. She was preparing to “handle” me as she had so many times before. “You know where he was born.” “Where? You tell me.” “In Carpenter. A little hospital— Greaves Memorial.” „ “When?” 29 The New Man The jaw muscle jumped. “June 8, 1968.” She reached out for me when I started to rise. “Alan.” Her eyes leveled with mine. “I can’t go through it again. I won’t put the boys through any more. Mov- ing every few months, losing five or six jobs a year, the police, d.t.’s— ” She drew a shaky breath. “Remember what I told you the last time?” “Of course.” I felt lightheaded, somewhat unsteady, but still in control. “You said that’s just what it was— the last time. ‘Next time don’t come home’ were your exact words, I believe. Well, it was the last time, wasn’t it? Haven’t I been sober every day since?” Her hand dropped from my arm. “I hope so,” she whispered, and turned away while I made pur- posefully for the phone. “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator said. “The lines are out in Carpenter due to the storm. Please try your call again.” “The phones are down there,” I told Sharon. “The storm. I’ll try again.” * Without a word, she turned away from me and went into the kitchen. The door to my den was closed. Warily, I cracked it and peered in. A night light glowed on a bedside table. Beanbag chairs slumped under the window, a dresser, bookshelves, small desk, walls thick with pop posters, and boy-type things. That morning my desk had been there, a recliner, a small tv, and the work table with the model I’d been mak- ing strewn across it. The head on the pillow stirred. Eyes like mine focused on me in the doorway. “You want something, Dad?” “You’re not my son,” I told him softly. Did I imagine something besides innocence in his open face? “Goodnight, Dad.” T he night passed, sleepless, slow. I sat with my family at a silent breakfast and watched the boy. He ate heartily, piling food into his face as if he belonged. “Where do you go to school?” I asked him suddenly “Aw, jeez, Dad!” Pete flung down his fork and pushed away from the table. “Stop it, Alan!” Sharon’s voice was sharp, raw; I’d heard her turning restlessly through the night. “You know where he goes to school.” “Where?” She hurled the answer. “Dumont Junior High!” “Where before that? Let him answer.” “It’s okay, Mom. I went to seventh grade in Belleville— I think.” The boy’s gaze snaked to mine. “We moved around so much, sometimes I lose track.” Pete clattered down the hall. I started to rise. “Wait, Pete. I’ll walk to the bus stop with you.” He didn’t look at me. “Can’t today. No time. Come on, Jerry, we’ll be late.” I watched them leave together. Neither said goodbye. It was like viewing from a distance some scene where I couldn’t possibly be involved. As I started for the door Sharon stopped me. “No more of this, Alan, I mean it. If you’re starting some— some more craziness, I’m through. Either get help for whatever it is, or— or— ” I smiled at her from my distance. “I know. Don’t come home.” Snow was high on the sidewalks, crisp under my feet. I was late; Johnson had caught an earlier bus and I rode downtown in busy silence, my head pounding from lack of sleep and the thoughts careen- ing through it. Hold on, Coombs. Your demons are buried. You don’t imagine things anymore— you’re cured, a new man, New Man. At Local Finance, Johnson glanced up from his desk. “Hey, Alan. You’re late. Novello’s on your tail.” “Johnson, remember me telling you about my son, Jerry?” “What?” A button lit up on his phone. “You never told me anything about your kids, man.” All business, he purred into the phone. The morning mail lay on my desk waiting to be opened and distributed. Local Finance— a crappy job in a crappy town, small beginning for a new man. Novello’s office door was closed; with only a minute’s hesitation I reached for my phone. Obvious- ly, the junior high would be covered— the grade school in Belleville would have the answer. The woman answering had nothing more pressing in her life than talking to me on the phone. “Oh, Mr. Coombs, I’m sorry. Didn’t you know about our fire? Let me tell you, it was terrible, just whoosh and it was gone— well, it was so old, you know. All our records were destroyed. Actually everything was destroyed— well, that’s not quite true, Miss Lewis managed to save her world globe— ran back into the History room like a maniac and came out carrying that silly globe. Had almost all her hair singed off for that heroic effort. What did you say the boy’s name was— Jerry Coombs? How do you spell that last name? I don’t remember any Coombs and I’ve been here fourteen years, but if you were just here a short while it’s possible I— what? Well, I suppose District Superintendent Smith might be able to help you, but I believe he’s out of town. His sister died and ...” Very carefully, I laid the receiver back in its cradle and watched the pencil shaking in my hand. Novello’s door opened and his ugly face poked through. 30 “Alan? A minute, please?” His office was cramped, cluttered, smelling of many stale cigars. Cautiously I seated myself before him. This man was responsible for my job; he’d hired me as a favor to a friend of his and a fellow AA ac- quaintance of mine. “Half-hour late this morning, Alan— no call, nothing. Mail’s not opened yet. Something wrong?” He stuffed the air with fat brown smoke. “No— sorry, Stan. I should’ve called. It won’t happen again.” “Hope not.” His jowls bunched in a grin. “You’ve been doing a fine job here. I took you in on faith, you know. Sure would hate to see you screw up.” “Oh, I won’t, believe it. I’m a new man.” “Good, good. 1 ’ He propelled me to the door. “Get out there and hustle now. You’ve got a good future here if you don’t blow it.” He lounged in the door, watching, while I picked up the mail with unsteady fingers and started the highly skilled job of slitting envelopes. Although I half expected it, no one was waiting at the bus stop that night; but he was waiting at home, open-faced and smiling, no hint of reproach at my behavior. “Hi, Dad. How are things at the old finance company?” Pete was out, staying overnight with a friend. He’d done that often in the past during the worst times, and Sharon’s tight face let me know she remembered. Dinner was a nightmare. All semblance of family conversation absent. We ate silently, me separate, Sharon and the boy joined by some invisi- ble but obvious bond. Sides were being taken— it seemed I was on mine alone. Several times I glanced at him, and each time met his eyes— young, innocent, yet shining with something that didn’t belong there. After dinner I stared mindlessly at television. Sharon read. When Jerry finished his homework he joined us, settling on the floor between us on the couch. Almost immediately, he moved, nestling against my leg and I jumped, repelled by his touch. Sharon’s glare followed me from the room and hung over me while I prepared for what would prove to be another sleepless night. On the following morning, I deliberately stayed in my room until he left for school. I heard the door close. I sat on my bed, waiting. Her face was flushed, furious, but I was in control. “Save your breath.” I was proud of the way I sounded— firm, steely. “I’m getting to the bottom of this whether you like it or not. You’re turning Pete against me again and, by God, I won’t stand for it. I’m going up to see Mother today. The only family I have left— she’ll sure as hell know how many sons I have!” I guess I shouted. A look of fear flashed over her face. She hesitated, then knelt beside me, taking both my hands in hers. “Alan, please. Can’t you see something’s wrong? Let me call a doctor. Maybe you’re having a kind of flashback or something. I’m so proud of you. You’ve done so well. We’ve started to put our lives back together and— please, Alan, let me get someone to help you!” I threw her off; remember doing it with dis- dain and style. “No more doctors! I’ve done all that— God, have I gone through doctors! I’m cured, goddamn it, sober, and you’ll never know what I went through to get here. I couldn’t do it again. Stop trying to tear me down, destroy me, you— just leave me alone!” T ires screamed, skidding in packed snow. I caught a glimpse of her face in the front window as the car roared away. I drove too fast; miles and hours flashed by my window and I was aware of horns blaring and dark shapes squeal- ing away from me several times, but the car wouldn’t seem to slow, so I gripped the wheel and held on. A young face looking much like mine rode with me. My mother— she would set it right. “What a nice surprise, Mr. Coombs. We haven’t seen you in a long time. She’s in the crafts room. I don’t know how you’ll find her; she has good days and bad ones, you know.” I followed a starched white back down a hallway, keeping my eyes on the square tiles in the floor. The shadowy shapes in the rooms, in the hall around me, didn’t exist. An old man in a wheelchair reached out and clutched my arm. “Frank?” I jerked away and bit my tongue to still my nausea. “Joanna? It’s your son, Alan. He’s come to surprise you, isn’t that nice? Let me just take you in- to the cafeteria so you can have a nice talk.” He just stood watching me. His eyes gleamed and he smiled. And smiled and smiled. I turned and ran. I was left alone with an old woman in a wheelchair. Her lips fluttered constantly, hands rolled and unrolled her bathrobe belt. Clouded old eyes met mine. “Who are you?” “Alan, Mama. You remember Alan, don’t you?” “Why, of course. Nifie boy, Alan. Prettiest baby I ever saw.” “How are you?” “Why am I here? There’s nothing but old folks here. I want to go home.” Her attention wandered away; I held her arm to bring her back. “Mama, you do know me? Alan, your son?” “I know my son. You take me for a fool?” She shook a finger at me. “I have three sons— Alan, Theodore, and Clover. They all want me to live with them, and I’ve been thinking about going.” I felt tears behind my eyes. “No, Mama! Me— I’m the only child you have. Just me— Alan. I need your help. Help me, Mama. Do you remember my wife, Sharon?” She stared at me with no expres- sion. “Sharon? And Pete? My little boy, Pete? Remember him?” She frowned. Was she trying to remember? “Did I have another son, Mama? I never did, did I? Never had a boy named Jerry?” She leaned forward and slapped her thighs. A thin sound trickled from somewhere inside her; she was laughing. “Jerry!” she cooed, and slapped her thighs again. “Fine boy, Jerry. Prettiest baby I ever saw. How is Jerry, Alan?” I didn’t realize I was running until a shape rose from behind the entry desk. “Mr. Coombs? While you’re here could I speak to you about your mother’s bill? We’ve written you several times—” The cold outside air knifed into my lungs and stayed there through the ride back home. My hands were numb on the wheel; several times I raised them and shook them to be sure they belonged to me. It was dark when I careened into the drive- way. The car’s back end swung, slamming into one of Sharon’s tiny new trees. On the other side of the hedge, old Mrs. Harris straightened, clutching the evening paper. “My goodness, Mr. Coombs! You shouldn’t drive so fast in this kind of weather, you’ll have an accident for sure. Would you look what that paper boy did— threw it in the hedge again. Inconsiderate boy. That reminds me, about your son, Jerry ...” I snapped around to face her. “Do you know what he did? Shoveled all my walks this afternoon. Just looked out and there he was. Mowed my yard all last summer and now this— wouldn’t, take so much as a cup of cocoa for his trouble. You and your wife must be proud of him, he’s a good boy.” The front door crashed behind me; pictures rattled on the walls. I knocked a dining room chair over in my race to the kitchen. Sharon looked up and saw me; she stumbled backward, pressed into the refrigerator door. “This is your last chance!” I heard my echoes roaring off the walls. “Who is he? I want the answer. Now!” Already tears brimmed in her eyes. “Alan, please, don’t—” “Tell me who he is!” She bit her lip; one hand rose, then fell limp against her side. “Stay calm, Alan, please stay calm. You’re supposed to— a man named Johnson called. Mr. Novello wants to see you first thing tomorrow morning. You’re ... I think it’s about your job, Alan. You didn’t call in or anything.” The first tears rolled. “Why don’t you call Mr. Johnson and then—” Her head snapped back into the refrigerator door. I was trying to talk, tell her I couldn’t take any more and had to know the truth, but the words wouldn’t come out, and I just kept shaking her until hands took me by the shoulders and flung me against the wall. The breath shot out of me and I hung there, grunting, staring up at Pete’s closed face. “Never do that again, you hear?” The voice was ragged, adolescent, but he was stronger than I, and we both knew it. “I was always too little and scared to stop you before, but I’m not now. Don’t ever touch my mother like that again.” I. had to get out, away. I couldn’t breathe, my head pounded, pools of red mist undulated in my eyes. Still bent over like some damned hunchback, I shuffled away from them down the hall and flung open the door of what I knew to be my den. “Who are you? I’ll kill you if you don’t tell!” He looked back at me from that face so like mine and said, “I don’t know what you mean, Dad. I’m your son.” Suddenly I was crying. Sagging into the door frame, I heard myself whispering a litany of “You’re not my son, you’re not my son, you’re not my son—” He just stood watching me. His eyes gleamed and he smiled. And smiled and smiled. I turned and ran. 32 S everal days passed, I know, but I don’t know how many- 1 remember only flashes. My first real awareness returned with the sound of announcements coming from a loudspeaker. I was sitting in a station. The train station. I recognized it. The waiting room heaved with people, all hurrying in different directions; until my hearing returned to normal it was like watching the Keystone Kops. I found myself enjoying it; nothing like a little free entertainment. I slouched alone on a long bench— the stink and condition of my clothes told me why. Cheap liquor fumes shimmered the air around me; clutched in my arms was a brown paper bag. Tenderly, carefully, 1 looked inside— good, the bottle was three quarters full. Leaning back, I scratched the stubble on my face, content to sit and watch people going by. So I was in the train station— good a place to be as any. I felt at peace, benifpi. The world moved around me and that was fine with me. A blare from the loudspeaker announced a new arrival. People appeared in the distance, surging toward me. With some amusement, I spotted a brother in the forefront. His jaunty step and fragile veneer of confidence wavered before my knowing eyps. He was sure he’d licked whatever his particular demons were, he was whole again, a new man, New Man. But there was a shudder in his gait and im- perceptible fissures in his fragile shell that only I, a fellow new man, could see. I watched him pass and walk away, and then a voice floated from the pack behind him, a child’s voice, a clear voice as familiar to me as my own. “Excuse me? Have you seen my dad? Roger Steed? A dark man with horn-rimmed glasses? Ex- cuse me, please, have you seen Roger Steed?” He broke through the crowd almost in front of me, a boy, tall for his age, a young mirror image of my fellow new man striding confidently away. Only his voice was the same, and his eyes, those strange shining eyes. For just a whisper, they brushed mine and locked there. He looked deep inside me, and smiled. Then he was gone, hurrying after the man named Roger Steed. Brown paper rustled— the bottle lifted out almost eagerly. I looked after the tall departing figure and the smaller persistent shadow of the boy. I raised the bottle. And drank deep. 10 IfiiilEn CoLLECTion A unique opportunity to have your name and your quality donation presented on television to millions of viewers To make your donation of art or antiques for the benefit of Public Broadcasting station please contact: The Thirteen Collection 356 West 58th Street New York, N.Y 10019 (212) 560-2700 weekdays Traditional and Contemporary Paintings and Decorative Art* Prints* Judaica* Antique Furniture • Sculpture • Oriental Art ■ Tribal Art • Art Deco* Rugs* Jewelry • Autographs and Rare Books* Stamps and Coins* Photography and Folk Art Donations toUmtill are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law 33 The Return of the Screw by Kevin Cook WHEN A 15X2 HEX-HEAD CAP SCREW SAYS HE'S SENDING ALLIGATORS AFTER YOU, CHANCES ARE HE'S TELLING THE TRUTH! O kay. I’m going to go over all this in my head and see if I’m nuts, or what. If any creatures or people can hear me— hello. I don’t know how in the hell you can expect a guy to work for a living, drive a cab on the weekends, not go crazy living with a battle-ax like Thelma, and still talk to alien creatures from outer space. I mean, it seems to me the outer space creatures should go after those science-fiction writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Mr. Spock. But no, they got to come right to yours truly like magnets, or bills. So don’t ever let ’em tell you Jimmy Mc- Queen isn’t the best damn screw-packer, cab driver, and alien talk-toer on earth, or in Indianapolis at least. I guess I should start at the beginning, which was just this morning, which goes to show you how fast a calm, peaceful life can turn into a real mess. Little Jimmy put an ice cube down my back to wake me up, which is better than a cockroach but not much, and Thelma started hollering at me it was already quarter after seven, and the john was backed up. So I rolled out of bed and tried to put on my slippers. I was a little surprised when one of the slippers turned around and bit me, but then I remembered that the cat had never fit on my foot and liked to bite me, so he always slept by the bed. Thelma hollered again and little Jimmy fired a piece of scrambled egg into my eye as I went into the bathroom. The kid had good control. “All right, already!” I yelled out to Thelma, showing her who was boss. Some guys take a brisk shower in the morn- ing to wake them up, but I just step on the linoleum in the bathroom. The floor must be made out of the same stuff they put in thermos, bottles, because it absorbs all the cold on the south side of town and then waits for me to come in barefooted. The bathroom floor and the cat teamed up against me a long time ago. There’s something wrong with the bathroom mirror, too, because the guy in it is about forty pounds overweight, only has seven or eight teeth left, and most of his crewcut is falling out at the same time as his tattoos fade away. He’s getting old, and he looks kind of like Andy Devine would have if you took away most of his hair and twenty of his teeth. Most mirrors look like that, though, so I don’t let it bother me. Personally, I look a lot like Robert Redford, and the only thing I’ve got in com- mon with the ugly guy in the mirror is we’ve both got bulging eyes from the linoleum. Well, I made it through shaving and getting dressed, and got to the kitchen in time for some bacon, eggs, and coffee, all soaked in Mrs. Mc- Queen’s famous-recipe industrial grease. Wasn’t anything worth reading in the paper. Something about a war in Iran or somewhere, and a busload of old ladies getting kidnapped out in California, but the reds had the day off| and the 34 Illustration by Randy Jones Clay (I always call him Clay) comeback fight wasn’t for another week. I kissed Thelma goodbye, one of the great mixed blessings of all time, and jumped into the car at fourteen till eight, just enough time to get to work if those downtown stockbrokers would just get their behinds in gear and do thirty miles an hour. The guy on the radio said it was three minutes till eight as I was pulling up next to the ex- ecutive parking lot at the warehouse, so I did what I always do when I m running late— whizzed my red ‘69 Olds 98 into the President’s parking space (with the big number one: on it), jumped out, moseyed up past the security guard and got punched in at 7:59. Smart, huh?. Then I took my time going back to the car— since the prez never shows up before ten- eased her back out into traffic for a block, pulled in- to the blue-collar lot on Shelby Street, and drove over the bottomless chuckholes into my #46 space. I straightened my ID badge with the picture that looks like a Polish refugee onto my shirt pocket and wandered back past the overgrown train-tracks to the entrance, taking my own sweet time like I do whenever I’m punched in on their own sweet time. The security cop, a skinny little Mexican kid from Cuba named Davey, looked right at the dumb badge like he did every day, not even recognizing me after he’d been two years on the job. I could have been Frank Nitti, but if I had that badge I could go right in and grab every screw in the place. a 35 •V Now, about the place I work. It’s called Hard- ware Supply Company, Inc., and we fill orders from all over the world for nuts, bolts, pop rivets, flat, split, internal and external lockwashers and, most of all, screws. Cap screws, wood screws, drive screws, tapping screws “A” and “B,” brass screws, zinc screws, cad screws, copper, aluminum, bronze, and even nylon screws— you name ’em, we got ’em. In fact, believe it or not, our slogan is “The House of a Million Screws.” No fooling. It’s right on the building and all the official paper and all the trucks, in big red letters— “Hardware Supply Company, Inc., THE HOUSE OF A MILLION SCREWS.” But don’t ever rib the execs about it, because they don’t get the joke. You know, it just so happens I know of another establishment down the road with the same motto. Har-har. I’m a packer, which doesn’t mean I play foot- ball. Beat you to it. When we have an order for, say, ten thousand V2-14x4 (half-inch screw width, fourteen thread count, four-ijich long) flathead drive * screws, Zeke brings me a big metal tray full of them and I pack ’em in boxes of anywhere from ten to 100. Those drive screws would go 100 in a number two box. Then I go find the labels on the shelf by the west wall, get my sponge, and put a label on every box. Then I get my stamp pad and box of little rub- ber numbers and letters that fit on the stamper. You wouldn’t believe how long it can take to find a one, a slash, a two, a dash, another one, a four, a times, and another four in that box full of mixed-up little rubber stamps, and you have to remember to put them all in backwards so they come out front- ways on the label. I always get the threes backwards, which is to say forwards on the stamper but wrong on the label. Then, if the screws are plated with any metal, I get out my “brass” or “cad” or “zinc” or “alum” stamp and put that on the label. The labels already have the number of screws, the company name, and “House of a Million Screws” on them, so all I do then is count the boxes and put that down on my daily packing record, and then Zeke carts the boxes to the shipping desk. See, it’s not all that easy, is it? And when you do it twenty-three years, it gets a lot tougher. But there’s variety in it, which is the best thing about the job. One day you’ll pack all screws, and the next day you’ll do nothing but nuts and bolts. S o this morning I’d just gotten my radio plugged in, my label sponge filled up with water and my Boraxo can opened up, when this thing you’re not going to believe happened, happened. Zeke had just brought over a tray of oily 3 /4-15x2 hex -head cap screws and taken his first break, since he’d already been at work fifteen minutes. I was standing there at my bench (I usual- ly work standing up, since Geneva comes in early and takes my chair over to shipping), putting on my gloves, when one of those cap screws looked up and said, “Hey, there, Jimmy, don’t you think it’s time you got to work?” God’s truth. I’m not lying. I was about as flabbergasketed as when Parnelli Jones blew an engine and lost the 500 and about fifty bucks of mine, on the last lap a few years back. I said, “Huh? Who said that?” “You’re looking right at me, Jimmy boy, so I guess you know who it was,” the thing said, looking just like any other cap screw except for a mouth that looked like a grease smudge and two tiny little eyes. “Next thing you’ll say is ‘what are you?’ so I’ll tell you right now I’m what you might consider your guardian angel. My name is Sbghaw, and I’m from the planet Gpmelleron, which is in the fifth or- bit out from Rigel.” “Zeke! C’mere!” I yelled. ‘They’re giving you a raise.” (I wanted him to come quick.) I wasn’t about to face this thing by myself. “He can’t hear you,” the thing said. “The hell he can’t. I saw him turn on his hearing aid not five minutes ago.” “He can’t hear you because I don’t want him to, and because he doesn’t really exist.” “Tell him that,” I said, and went to get Zeke. Except that in two steps I almost fell into a thirty- foot-deep alligator pit, right in the middle of the warehouse floor. We never had an alligator pit there before. It went all the way around my bench like a moat, about five feet away in every direction. The gators looked hungry. I turned around. “Did you do that?” The little grease smudge wiggled around into j 36 One of the gators came up and lidded my hand. I could feel his teeth and smell the worst cose of bod breath east of the Mississippi, but he seemed real friendly. a smile. “Yep. So don’t go running off. It’s not polite, and the next time it might not be alligators.” “What would it be?” Dumb question. “How about, a dozen of Thelma?” Scary answer. It stretched out and rolled over across some of the other screws in the tray. “How about moving me up onto the bench, ol’ buddy, so I’m not so cramped? These nonsentient cap screws are so in- flexible they hurt my back when I associate with them.” I picked him up real slow and careful, and covered him with my hand so I could have a minute to think. I wasn’t really too scared, since twenty- three years of working in a warehouse sort of stif- fens up your mind, but I’d heard bad things about alien monsters. The Boraxo can said, “Okay, wise guy, lemme go or the alligators sprout wings and come up after you.” I opened my hand to see if I still had him and he hopped over to the top of the bench. “Jim boy, I really wish you wouldn’t do dumb things like that. I’m not gonna hurt you, exactly, and we ought to be buddies. Don’t make me end our relationship before I have to, ol’ pal.” “How’d you make the hand cleaner can talk?” He giggled. “Easy! I just pulled a transference and took it over, leaving this body unoccupied. But I’m really much more comfortable in a screw. Ready to talk?” “I can hear alligator stomachs growling.” “Oh, sorry. SEX!” The pit disappeared. “What’s that got to do with it?” “Didn’t you know? That’s the magic word on your world.” “It is?” “Naww. Hell, Jimmy, I’m just pullin’ your leg. My race doesn’t need magic words. I just wanted to see your facial capillaries fill up.” I looked around for Geneva or Larry or somebody, mainly to make sure they weren’t watch- ing me talk to my work. But it was like everybody had gone out cn break at the same time, leaving me all alone on the first floor, except for ... it. So I just sucked in all my gut and asked it the question. “Are you gonna kill me and take over the world?” He flipped over and laughed like the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms commercial, like I was a real mallethead. “Hooo boy, Jimmy, have you got a lot to learn. Sit down on the edge of the bench here, while I tell you what I’ve been trying to get through your thick skull all morning.” Now, I know my skull isn’t so thick they didn’t make me head packer on the first floor, but I didn’t say anything but a little “sheeeit” to let him know I didn’t put much stock in all this stuff. He rubbed his threads together and started what looked like a long story. ^ I t’s a looong story, Jim. But I’ll cut it to the I bare bones, since I know you’re as long on ■ attention span as you are on brains.” He set- tled back into the other screws. “I come from Rigel Five, like I said, and my race is a group of guys you might call ‘Projectors.’ We’re a metallic people, so we can’t move around much, but we do have the most advanced mental powers in the Galaxy. “About eleven million years ago we came into sentience, gradually, as a great mass of still-molten iron compounds beneath the surface of our planet. We probably would’ve evolved into an iron-based animate race, you see, if we could have worked our way to the outside. But we were stuck just below the crust, and the crust had a disproportionately high concentration of one metal in it— zinc. Unfor- tunately, our negligible physical but amazin’ mental powers can’t do a damn thing to penetrate zinc, so we were trapped in there for nine million years. You following this?” Bull. Sounds like Science-Fiction Theatre on Channel Four, I thought. “Sure,” I said. “It’s not bull.” He was offended. “You want the alligators back?” “Okay, okay. I’m listening.” “So around two million years ago there was this massive upheaval in the mantle, which forced some of the crust up through the surface, and hosanna boom-de-ay, we were up above the zinc. We owed our freedom to a giant Gpmelleronquake. “During our captivity we’d had nine million years to evolve into almost totally psychic beings. It didn't take us long to find out we could vacate the premises and zoom out interplanetary distances with just our personas. Now, I ask you, is that class?” I wasn’t so impressed. “Great, but so what?” “So what? So eventually a bunch of my col- leagues and myself found this bumpy little planet, 37 •V A The Return of the Screw inhabited by a race of microscopic grubs with no ex- ternal senses. You.” “Who, me?” “You. The human race.” I don’t mind saying, I was insulted. I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, but I was pretty sure he’d just called the human race a bunch of grubs, and I didn’t have to listen to that kind of stuff. “Don’t go calling us grubs,” I told him. “Grubs are little worms. We’re people, with arms and legs and noses and stuff.” “You think you are. I’ll admit you have bodies, itty bitty ones. But nothing else to speak of, or with. Look— without us, you’d be in this flat gray state of existence with absolutely no sensory input except for a little sensitivity to light. Don’t you see? That’s what’s so great about you! We have these fantastic minds all zipping around in energy waves, but we can only occupy things that are close to our original substance, and thosd things are inanimate and boring. But each of you presents a blank slate— we can direct things through your tiny brains, create whatever world we want, and you get to live in it.” “You mean aliens made up everything in the whole world, and it’s all fake?” “No, it’s real all right, if you mean concrete and tangible. It’s made of real matter. But we can fool with it any way we want to. And I’m your per- sonal Projector. I created everything you ever perceived. I came along forty-three years ago to get you started, and now I’m back. You’re lucky you got me, too, because I came right out and chewed the fat with you before . . . well, before I had to move on, if you know what I mean.” I knew I didn’t like the sound of that, so I changed the subject. “I’m going on break,” I said, “and don’t try to stop me. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” I took a few steps toward the stairs that led to the snack bar on the second floor, watching out for deadly alligator pits, but there was nothing on the floor but old grease. I figured I’d get a Twinkie and talk to somebody for a while. Then maybe the screws would all keep quiet when I went back to work. Our snack bar is like an oasis in one of those Rudolph of Arabia movies. All the rest of the ware- house is hot as hell, smoky as a factory, and there’s grease all over everything. Everything. The water fountain looks like an oil well. But the snack bar is clean. It’s air conditioned and wood paneled, and when you open the slick wooden doors there’s this “whoosh” as some of the cool air goes out and gets a heart attack from the heat in the rest of the ware- house. The windows are big and clean in the snack bar, since that Puerto Rican kid Davey Windexes them every day. All the other windows in the building are painted gray. Coming in the door is like coming from a wino alleyway into Mary Tyler Moore’s kitchen, and the snack bar is where all the execs drink coffee when they’re not checking up on us. I always feel kind of lousy when I go in there in my overalls and they can see me in the reflections off their shoes. I’d never seen the snack bar empty, but there was nobody there when I came in. I sat down in one of the orange plastic chairs and watched the floor for signs of alligator pits. After a while I took out a dime and a nickel and went over to the machine for a Coke. The machine never worked right— you had to give it a left jab to get it going, so I did. “Take it easy, for crying out loud,” it hollered through the coin return. “I’m coming. Why’d you have to press ‘no ice’ and screw things up?” “ Gyaaddammit! ” “Leave my brother out of it. Here’s your Coke. Now sit down and let me finish my story.” The Coke machine wanted to finish its story. I sat down. “As I was saying, you’re lucky I’m your Pro- jector. You can understand that after a long time it gets kind of tedious arranging the world for one of you guys, so we have to terminate the partnership and go off someplace else. Now, most of us don’t say word one to their hosts before ... ah, sending them back to their natural habitat. But I think you deserve better than that, Jim old pal, and I figured you were tough enough to take it like a man. Or a grub, as the case may be.” “Fun-ny.” “No offense.” “But what about Thelma. And the kids?” “Jimbo, haven’t you seen by now that they’re just figments of my imagination? They’re part of the picture I created for you. Look, if not for me you couldn’t see, couldn’t feel or hear, or anything. After about a half-hour without me, your percep- tions would revert to nothing but a big empty ex- panse of gray, a little like being the third cell from the left on the toe of a poison ivy plant. You couldn’t even think for long. I made up all of reality for you, and you ought to thank me.” “Poison ivies don’t thank Coke machines.” I was proud of that quick retort. He gurgled his syrup. “Well, a Coke machine isn’t too comfortable for me, a,nyway. I’ll take a simple ferrous screw any day. Come on back downstairs, and we’ll finish our little talk before I have to recharge.” “No way.” I wasn’t about to go back down 38 I wasn't really too scared, since twenty-three years of working in a warehouse sort of stiffens up your mind, but I'd heard bad things about alien monsters. there and have him try turning me back into a grub. I didn’t feel like a grub, but I wasn’t taking any chances. That was when some alligators came in the other door of the snack bar, ate up the candy machine, and started sidling up to me like they were strolling in the park. They herded me all the way back to my bench and then got in a circle around me. I never knew alligators could climb stairs so good. The 3 A-15x2 alien monster was waiting, and I figured this must be the Ultimate Screw. It wiggled its grease stain into an understand- ing smile. “You shouldn’t take this so hard, Jimmy. You’ve been a good pal, and I’ve really enjoyed be- ing with you these forty-three years. I’d give you a gold watch, but grubs don’t have any arms.” He was all heart. He started to roll over, and said, “Sooo, I’ll see you ...” “Wait! Wait a minute!” I was maybe a little upset. He looked up. “Hey, take it easy. You’ve got a while left to go. You see, we have to store up ra- diant energy for a while before we can transport any great distance or make a major change in real- ity. Now, there’s no place to run or hide, and I’m indestructible, so why don’t you just enjoy your last few minutes? Do yourself a favor. It’s not such a tragedy— being a microscopic bug isn’t all bad. You don’t have as many distractions. So just relax, and I’ll come back and chat some more before I cut out in a painless way. I am kind of a prodigious talker, you know. See you soon.” “Wait! What about those alligators?” “Aw, they can’t hurt you.” Then the little mouth and eyes were gone, and all of a sudden there were people working over at the loading dock and at the shipping desk. The monster screw had jumped up into my shirt pocket, where it just nes- tled and didn’t do a thing. I yelled out to Larry down at shipping to come help me with the gators, which were lolling around like Saint Bernards. He came up closer so he could hear me and stepped right on a scaly green tail, but he didn’t notice anything unusual. I paid him the five bucks I owed him for the Bears exhibition game and he went back to boxing bolts. I gave the gators a long look. They kept turn- ing their heads sideways to see me better. “Nice gator ...” One of them came up and licked my hand. I could feel his teeth and smell the worst case of bad breath east of the Mississippi, but he seemed real friendly. He lolled out of the way when I stepped real easy around him. I thought I’d go talk to Charley up on the fourth floor about the whole thing, since he’s about the smartest guy in the warehouse, and his brother went to college. Didn’t know what I was going to say to him, since I wasn’t sure I believed anything that was going on, but I wanted to talk to somebody who wasn’t an alien creature or an alligator. Charley works in plating up there on four, and he’s always hard to find in all the smoke and soot, in between all the big boiling pots. Took about five minutes to find him. He was way up in the scaffolding, trying to get one of about a million chains that were up there back in its track. I climbed up the metal ladder, which was hot as a radiator boilover, and joined him up there on the platform. Around this time I was beginning to get awful worried. Charley was grunting and groaning with that big chain, all covered \tfith grease and oil, but you could never say about Charley Waterman that he wasn’t a big, friendly type of guy. Anyhow, I owed him money from the Bears game, too, so he was especially glad to see me. “Jimmy!” he yelled, with a big smile on his face. He clapped me on the shoulder with one of those big ham hands of his and about knocked me off the platform, then grabbed me and straightened me up real fast like a punching bag, all of which was what knocked that cap screw out of my shirt pocket. We watched it fall. “Awww, DOGCRAP!” Charley hollered. “If the foreman sees that, he’s gonna wanna kick my ass! Why’d you have to have something in your pocket, Jimmy?” It bounced off the edge of a pot of hot copper, kicked against a girder, slid down a support beam and fell right into a vat full of boiling zinc. And you know— that set me to remembering what the creature said about his people and zinc, that it was their only weakness. I guess falling into that vat won’t kill the thing, but it sure ought to put it out of commission fot a million years or so. Of course, that’s if you believe all the stuff that talking 3 /4-15x2 cap screw had to say. I was go- ing to ask Charley what he thought about the whole thing, except that a minute ago Charley disap- peared, along with everything else. 10 A i 39 Crusoe in New York by Ron Goularf MAYBE IT WAS LONELY AT THE TOP; IT WAS CERTAINLY DESPERATE AT THE BOTTOM. BUT WHAT A DESTINY AWAITED HIM! H e was standing there amidst hopeless idiots. The cold didn’t faze them, nor did the slush underfoot. They were gathered there on late- afternoon Fifth Avenue— at least thirty of them, a pack of certified nitwits— staring into the bright-lit window of the D. Trumbo Bookstore. All of them ogling the pudgy lump of a man who was sitting in the window with a sickening smirk on his nonde- script face. The microphone dangling over the small metal desk picked up the sound of his stubby fingers as they pecked at the keys of his battered portable typewriter, carried the sound, along with the typer’s self-satisfied whimpers, out to the small crowd of imbeciles gathered on the chill late February side- walk. “You are watching one of America’s favorite young authors at work,” announced an unseen spokesman of the bookstore. “Young?” said Barney Sears inside his head. “He’s my age, which is thirty-nine almost forty. We were in college together, we have the same agent.” “... yes, you’re enjoying the opportunity of watching the world-renowned Buster Menjou create a chapter for his upcoming novel of unbearable suspense ...” That’s the right word. Unbearable, Barney said to himself as he stood there watching the sorry spectacle. “And Jesus, the little toad can only type with two fingers.” He jammed his hands deeper into the pockets of his seven-year-old overcoat. He was a tall, lank man, dark and lantern-jowled. “ . . . in our Trumbo window. Of course, we can’t duplicate the spacious studio Mr. Menjou works in at his palatial villa on the fabled Riviera ...” “Must be the shady side of the Riviera. Buster’s face is pasty and pale as a frog’s belly.” “ . . . otherwise, you’re seeing him working exactly as he does in the privacy of his own ...” “Oh, so? Where are the piles of Ludlum and Follett novels that he swipes whole thick paragraphs from?” “... during an unprecedented tour of his native country, Mr. Menjou will be making appear- ances in the windows of all four hundred and eighty- six D. Trumbo Bookstores across this ...” “Jesus, think of how many nitwits he’s going to attract. Let’s see, thirty times four-eighty-six is . . . well, a lot.” “. .. remind you that every half-hour during his unprecedented display of creativity, Mr. Menjou 40 Crusoe in New York will take a quick break to sign your copies of his latest book.” “Two hours of creativity will use up all Buster’s got.” “. . . forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, of course, is Buster Menjou’s The Brinkerhoff Memo. TVumbo’s also has, of course, copies of his latest paperback, which is now number two on the list, The Hackensaeker Blowoff.” “Who but an idiot would want to read books with titles like those?” “. . . soon to be a major motion picture ...” “How can you make a major motion picture out of a minor novel?” Barney was suddenly tapped gently on the back. “You mustn’t take it to heart,” said a soft sympathetic voice. “Your work will outlive his.” He swung around, just in time to see the blond young woman pushing away through the Buster Menjou watchers. “Hey, wailri” he called. She kept going, a slim girl in her late twenties, wearing a crimson raincoat and matching boots. Barney had seen her before, three times at least. Twice she’d been with a man, a big guy all muffled up in a dark overcoat, scarf, and ski cap. Barney had the feeling they were watching him, following him, and had been for at least the past week or so. The girl was pretty and the one he always noticed first. She’d showed up at the Mexican restaurant in the Village six nights ago, the night he’d had the quarrel with Olympia and barreled out of the flat to dine alone. And just three days ago, when he was crossing the wide lobby of the Dibble Building on Lex after visiting his agent, she’d been buying breath mints at the cigar stand. Yesterday, he’d decided to start jogging again, and she and the muffled guy had been on a bench up in Central Park. Now, today, she’d spoken to him. Barney stumbled, slipping on a mound of slush and nearly falling off the curb and into the slick street. He kept his balance, though, and started running. “How does she know I’m a writer, too? They never put author photos on the kind of paperback crap I write. I don’t loll around in shop windows either.” The red raincoat was easy to keep track of. The blonde was roughly a half block ahead of him, hurrying along late afternoon Fifth Avenue. “I have hardly any fans at all. So, now I meet one and she runs off.” He increased his pace, dodging pedestrians, pools of slush, and a blind beggar. Two blocks up from D. Trumbo’s he caught up with her. “I’m not a mugger, Miss,” he announced, tak- ing careful hold of her arm. “Not a flasher, sadist, chain stealer, or nonspecific loon. But you spoke to me and—” “I shouldn’t have. It was a viola— a mistake. I’m sorry.” A delicate flush touched her pretty face. “Not a mistake since you seem to know who I am.” He kept hold of her arm and walked briskly at her side. “Some writers, like that egomaniacal Buster Menjou, can be nasty with fans. I, on the other hand, like to talk with mine. What few fans I have.” “You mustn’t let people like Buster Menjou bother you,” she told him, slowing. “Don’t allow his fleeting success to upset you.” “That little schmuck has earned near sixty-four million in the past seven years.” Barney was breathing through his mouth. “I don’t mind when I hear a Rockefeller makes that, or an Arab oil sheik, but Buster I went to school with, and—” “The University of Bridgeport, I know.” “You do?” The young woman said, “I’m a student of twentieth— an admirer of your work, Mr. Sears.” “Really, I didn’t think that anybody . . . That is, I do get quite a bit of fan mail, but most people don’t seem—” “It is a shame isn’t it? Not to be recognized in your own time.” He was studying her face, her profile, as they walked along. “You’ve actually read some of my books, you aren’t kidding me?” “I’ve read them all,” she assured him. “Includ- ing the entire Thrillkiller series for Plaza Paperbacks.” “You’ve read The Bulgarian Sickle Murders and The Armenian Skewer Murders?” “As well as The Japanese Ceremonial Sword Murders, The Eskimo Icicle Murders, The ... I’ve read all thirty of them.” “No, they’ve only published twenty-eight of them so far. The other two haven’t come out yet.” “I’ve read all that have been published. I just don’t count very well, I guess.” “The series’ll be ending— has ended,” he said. “I have mixed feelings about the books. Even though they were hack work, I tried to put some—” “You succeeded, Mr. Sears. Everything you write has a special quality,” the young woman said. “You mustn’t undervalue your talent.” “I hope you’ll get to read the latest book I’ve done. I just dropped the manuscript off at my agent’s this week,” he said. “New approach for me. It’s called The Selkirk Syndronw, an international suspense thing that’s set entirely in Manhattan. I’m hoping—” “The Selkirk Syndrome? That’s not the ... ” “Hum?” “I’ll have to make a note of that title. When will it appear?” 42 “How does she know I’m a writer, too? They never put author photos on the kind of paperback crap I write. I don’t loll around in shop windows either.” Barney laughed, shrugged. “Who knows? My half-wit agent, J. J. Dahl, has to sell it,” he ex- plained. “You probably don’t know that he’s Buster Menjou’s agent, too. For that simp, he’s made sixty- four million. For me, the best he’s ever done is seventeen thousand in one year. If it wasn’t for Olympia’s collages we’d be in even worse shape financially.” “I’m curious about Olympia. That’s Olympia Keech, isn’t it?” “Sure, but how do you—” “You live with her, is that it?” “We share a flat in the Village, on Emerson Street.” He frowned. “I guess you’d call her my live- in love. In school I always figured I’d end up with a beauty, but Olympia’s more on the dumpy side. Not that I’m a—” “You’re a very attactive man. You deserved . . . deserve better than Olympia Keech,” she said. “Her work is dreadful as well.” He chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve always thought so too, but those nitwits at the Apocalypse Gallery get three hundred per collage,” he said. “Imagine mak- ing pictures out of old candy bar wrappers. It’s a unique art form, jet . . . Would you like a cup of cocoa?” “I really shouldn’t. I’m-” “I put on my best suit today— only suit, actu- ally— to visit a magazine that owes me two hundred dollars for an article on sadism through the ages,” Barney told her. “When I wear my good suit, I like to go up to the Soda Shoppe in the Ritz-Gotham for a cup of cocoa. Three-fifty a cup, but I love the atmosphere. Reminds me of a soda fountain in New Haven when I was—” “That’d be Crouch’s Malt Shop?” He stopped dead on the twilight street. “How the hell did you know that?” “I’m doing . . . I’ve studied your life and work,” she said. “I think that if you enjoy an author’s work, you ought to take some interest in his life as well.” “I don’t give out many interviews. Once in a mystery fanzine, called Fatal Kiss or some such, I talked a little about my childhood. Don’t remember mention—” “That must be where I read it, yes.” “Now you have to come along to the Soda Shoppe. It’ll be the next best thing to going to Crouch’s, which burned down in the sixties.” She hesitated. Then, glancing once around, said, “I’d enjoy it, Mr. Sears.” “Great. By the way, what’s your name?” She replied, after a second, “Lizbeth Janny.” “Allow me to escort you one more block east to the Ritz-Gotham, Miss Janny.” He held out his arm. She took it, smiling. T he phone in the shadowy loft rang seven times before the thickset woman grunted up from her drawing board, smoothed out her purple shift, and went waddling through the scatter of magazines, newspapers, and discarded clothes on the bare hardwood floor to the crippled little phone table. “Hello. Oh, crap!” “Olympia?” “Just a sec. I stepped on a Baby Ruth wrapper and it’s stuck to my foot.” “Candy bar wrappers usually don’t—” “This one I was intending for my latest col- lage, J. J., and it’s gut library paste clobbered all over it.” Olympia Keech hopped on one fat leg, swip- ing at the colorful wrapper stuck to the sooty ball of her bare foot. “I hope you’re calling about a check.” “Not exactly. Is Barney there?” “Nope. He went uptown to try to badger a check out of some magazine or other. How come you, as his so-called literary agent, don’t do that sort of-” “I only handle books, Olympia. Of course, if Barney’d start selling to Playboy, Penthouse, Gallery and—” “What about the check for The Norwegian Ice Axe Murders?” “Any day now. When do you expect him back?” She shrugged both broad shoulders. “He’s been roaming a lot lately, J. J. He usually comes home by chow time.” “Okay, I’ll be here another couple hours. Tell him to phone me.” “Is it about his new book?” “Yeah, I just read the manuscript.” “You think it’s better than the crap he’s been doing?” ' “All Barney’s stuff is good, Olympia,” said the agent. “Tell him I called.” “Sure thing. Send money.” She hung up, squatted on the floor and plucked the candy wrapper free. 43 -V Crusoe In New York / ■ really shouldn’t be telling you all this,” said I Lizbeth Janny, touching at her lips with the “ paper napkin. “It’s just that ...” Barney was sitting across the marble top soda shop table from her, an odd expression on his face. “Buster Menjou,” he said, snapping his fingers. “He knew I’d probably show up to see him flaunt his ego today, so he hired you to—” “No, really.” She reached across the table to touch his hand with her warm fingers. “We aren’t supposed to discuss this sort of thing with a ... a subject. It violates all the rules.” He scowled at her. “What’s the name of the villain in The Portuguese Harpoon Murders?” “Dr. Rowland Mephisto.” Barney said, “Son of a gun, you have read my books. Who’s the Thrillkiller’s first and only love?” “Princess Irena Romanoffsky,” she answered. “Believe me, Barney, this isn’t a hoax. Ordinarily, I never talk to the people I’m researching. But since you . . . you looked so forlorn standing there on that cold sidewalk. Besides, since you’re ...” “Since I’m what?” She shook her head. “Nothing. I only meant that I don’t think it makes any difference. My talk- ing to you this way,” she said. “I simply wanted you to know you’ve no reason to be jealous of Buster Menjou. Before this century is even over, his work will be completely forgotten.” Barney hunched, leaned closer to the pretty, blond young woman. “You know that for a fact,” he said slowly, “because you live in the future, huh?” “Exactly. Although to me 2071 is the present.” “I can see that. And you got here to my time by way of time travel, you said?” “Yes, and I’m violating the Time Travel Overseeing Committee rules by admitting this to you,” Lizbeth said, taking her hand away from his. “I let my heart outrule my head.” “We all do that. So you came from 2071, in a time machine, to do research on me?” “I’m doing a series of vizbooks on major twen- tieth-century authors. Naturally you—” “Sure, naturally.” She said, “It’s true, Barney. In my time you’re considered to be one of the best authors of this en- tire century. Your book Crusoe in New York is studied in every EdFac in the entire world. Not only in vizbook format, but in the old-fashioned printed format as well. You don’t realize how important that book you wrote is to future gener— ” “I never wrote a book called Crusoe in New York.” “But you must have, because . . . That is, you will,” she said, a frown touching her face. “It wins the Pulitzer Prize.” He rocked in the wrought iron chair, laughing. “That’s a nice touch. I’m going to win a Pulitzer.” “The book will, yes.” Barney shook his head. “I don’t know exactly why Buster or whoever it was hired you to try this hogwash on me,” he said, grinning at her. “I’m not a sci-fi nut, I don’t believe in that kind of garbage. Why didn’t you just pretend to be from Time or Peo- ple? That kind of practical joke might work on me. With my vanity, I might just—” “I’m not a hoax,” she insisted. “I’m a qualified litresearcher from the twenty-first century. I never should have broken my vows of noncontact. But, as I say, you looked so forlorn and I thought a bit of con- solation before you ... at this time, wouldn’t much hurt anything.” Barney watched her. “You’re an attractive young woman.” “Yes, I know.” “You seem bright,” he added. “You really don’t have to lend yourself to cheap tricks like this.” “Believe me, Barney, you will be remembered as one of the great writers of your century,” she said. “Crusoe in New York will be a fantastic bestseller.” “Or maybe just goofy,” he said. “Sure, this is Manhattan after all. Next to Los Angeles there are more loonies per square inch here than anywhere else in the world.” “I’m perfectly sane,” she assured him. “In my time we’ve virtually eliminated mental illness.” He scratched at his prominent chin. “I still don’t see why you went to the trouble of reading so many of my books just to pull . . . who’s that guy?” He pointed at the misted window of the Soda Shoppe. It was the muffled man he’d seen with the girl before. Lizbeth glanced over her shoulder. “He’s my . . . traveling companion.” “Oh? He’s not going to bust in and claim he’s your husband? Nope, I guess that only works in hotel rooms and not in malt shops.” Lizbeth said, “I have to go now.” “With him?” She lowered her voice. “He’s not ... I use him to make my jaunts in time.” “He carries your time machine?” “He is my time machine,” she replied. “An android with temporal-spanning equipment built in.” “I want to meet him.” Barney pushed back his chair. “That’ll prove that you’ve been—” “No, it’s impossible. If he were to tell TTOC I’d spoken the truth to you, I’ll never be able to travel again.” Smiling across at her, he said, “Right, that would spoil everything.” She stood. “I must leave. It’s been very enjoy- able talking with you.” 44 “Good luck on your book. Vizbook, that is.” Lizbeth took two steps away from the table. “Don’t go back to ...” “Don’t do what?” “Nothing. It would cause a chronic malfunc- tion . . . Goodbye, Barney.” She went hurrying out of the Soda Shoppe. On the sidewalk she joined the man in the heavy overcoat. Barney counted to ten, slowly, then rose up. “I think I better follow Liz and her time machine,” he said to himself. “Christ, not again!” Olympia went lumbering to the phone, snatched it up. “Yeah?” “Hate to keep bothering you, but is he back?” “Just a sec, J. J.” There was a Mounds wrap- per clinging to her wrist. Catching it in her teeth, Olympia yanked it off. “There. No, Barney’s stjll out moping around in the slush somewhere.” “I’ll be in my office another hour.” “I’ll tell him as soon as he pops in. Bye.” B arney shivered. It wasn’t the cold. It was what he was watching through the trees. He’d followed the girl and the muffled man into Central Park, unseen by them. The pair had cut across the field and into this wooded area. They were alone in a small, empty clearing, unaware that Barney was watching. The man had opened a thick coat and then pulled aside a blue shirt. Instead of flesh there was shiny metal showing. Metal dotted with dials and knobs. Lizbeth was manipulating those knobs and dials now. The man, or whatever he was, was making humming noises. Not a human sort of humming at all. Lizbeth linked her arm with his. She reached across his chest, flipped a final switch. The humming grew louder; the two of them began to shimmer. Barney found that his teeth were rattling. Lizbeth was fading. So was her time machine. There was a keening sound and they were gone. “Holy Jesus!” he exclaimed, straightening. “It’s true. It’s all true.” Laughing, grinning, he left the park and headed for the darkening Fifth Avenue. “I must look like your typical New York loon.” No matter. He was elated. All he’d always known would happen was going to happen. He’d be recognized as the excellent writer he was. There’d be celebrity, money. All the money he needed. He could write only what he wanted, no more hack stuff. He could (that was an interesting notion) dump Olympia. There was the D. Trumbo Bookstore. That oaf, Buster Menjou, was still in the window putting on his show. There were still a couple of dozen people watching on the slippery, slushy sidewalk. Barney, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, pushed up close to the large glass window. “You just wait, schmuck,” he said to Buster in his head. “I forgot to ask her where or when, but as soon as I write Crusoe in New York, I’m—” He didn’t hear the runaway taxi until it was nearly on top of him. The car skidded wildly on the slick street, jumped the curb, and came roaring through the crowd in front of the bookstore. It hit Barney hard, driving him right through the shattering window. He died sprawled across Buster Menjou’s desk. “I’m going to disconnect that trapping thing.” Olympia hefted herself over to the phone. “Now what?” “Is he back?” “Not yet, J. J.,” she told the agent. “Could be he’s going to have dinner out someplace.” “Listen, I’m going to close up shop,” said J. J. Dahl. “So why don’t you give Barney a message and he can call me first thing tomorrow.” “Just a sec while I get a pencil.” She bent, huffing, and sniped one off the floor. She used a spare candy wrapper as a memo pad. “Go ahead, shoot.” “Tell him I really like his new book.” “Good, that’ll cheer the old sourpuss up. For a few minutes anyway.” “The only thing is,” continued Dahl, “I don’t like the title. So suggest to Barney that instead of calling it The Selkirk Syndrome, I want to call it Crusoe in New York. Okay?” “He won’t care, so long as you can sell the damn thing,” said Olympia and hung up the phone. Picking up a bubble gum wrapper, she returned to her drawing board. “How am I supposed to get any serious work done with all these distractions?” she sighed, (g 45 Photos courtesy Universal Studios, Inc. Why is this dog snarling? Because Some THING Wicked This Way Comes! *: ■ i mum- 4 ’ T?-i% I' HOLLYWOOD-AND A PIECE OF ALASKA-ARE DOUBLING FOR ANTARCTICA IN JOHN CARPENTER'S REMAKE OF 'THE THING.' ED NAHA REPORTS FROM THE SET. T he corridor is long and narrow, illuminated by dim overhead lighting fixtures and cluttered with unopened packing crates stacked haphazardly against the walls. A group of haggard men are huddled at the far end of the hallway. They ap- pear nervous, alert. Two comrades, bundled in parkas, enter the area from a nearby steel door; blasts of snow swirl in their wake. Suddenly a third figure bursts out of an unwatched portal. “He’s got a gun!” someone yells. There is a mad scramble for the weapon. The pistol discharges. “Okay, cut,” calls out a tall moustachioed man hidden behind a nearby motion picture camera. He is the director, John Carpenter. The men in the hallway relax. “I’m not sure about my arm motion,” one of them says. While a technician attends to fake snow which fell from the rafters when the door slammed, Carpenter strolls past the narrow catacombs of the set, housed in Universal’s Hollywood studio. He is 46 putting together his most ambitious film to date, a big-budget remake of The Thing. Firmly established via the success of such modestly budgeted epics as Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York, Carpenter is finally entering the big leagues, backed by a major studio and a budget of more than twelve million dollars. Accordingly, he’s pulling out all the stops to make The Thing his most striking work yet. Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 classic novelette Who Goes There?, Carpenter’s film— unlike Howard Hawks’s famous 1952 screen adaptation— will adhere to the original plot. His film will therefore present the terrifying tale of twelve men stranded at a U.S. National Science Foundation outpost in the Antarctic. In the midst of a hard winter, they are confronted by an alien life force with the uncanny ability of duplicating the shape of any earthly organism it devours. Enhancing this premise will be the special physical effects of Roy Arbogast (Jaws), special visual effects by A1 Whitlock (an Oscar winner for Earthquake, The Hindenburg, and Dr. Dolittle), and bizarre makeup designs by Rob Bottin, who, last year, master- minded the hair-raising transforma- tions in The Howling. Despite the excitement generated by so ambitious a project as The Thing, the mood on the set is one of weariness tinged with claustrophobia. Since practically the entire studio is filled with small, cramped sets, both actors and technicians alike have prob- lems walking from point A to point B without bumping; into someone or something en route. As Carpenter chats with Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, and Thomas Waites at one end of the debris-strewn hallway, the movie’s star, Kurt Russell, squeezes past them and heads for an abandoned chair in the comer. With shoulder-length hair and a full beard protruding from the hood of his parka, Russell looks more like rock hero Jim Morrison than a science fic- tion stalwart. Kurt Russell, as the 'copter pilot for a U.S. scientific outpost in Antarctica, comes upon a clue amid the icy ruins of a nearby base’s research lab. Though this scene was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, the crew will spend a month filming on the Taku Glacier in Alaska's Huneau Ice Field. “Excuse my snow,” he smirks, sliding out of his flske-laden jacket and slumping into the chair. Russell seems quite immune to the low-key at- mosphere on the set, displaying the same sort of jaundiced humor he did as Snake Plisskin, the outrageous anti- hero of Escape from New York. “I love this movie,” he says earnestly. “It has a lot of great elements in it. There’s a strong horror angle, there’s a lot of dry humor . . . and paranoia!” He nods in the direc- tion of the mazelike set. “I mean, look at that place. It reeks of paranoia! Our Thing is a creature that is able to physically duplicate other organisms. That’s how it survives. It blends in with the existing population and stalks its victims one by one by one.” Russell flashes a sly grin. “By the time the men on the outpost realize there’s an alien roaming around, some people are not who they appear to be— but we’re all still housed together in the same building. For the rest of the movie, we’re trying to figure out who is who. The Thing, meanwhile, just keeps growing and growing. Rela- tionships break down. Friendships dissolve. Paranoia runs rampant. These men are totally on their own. Stranded. Helpless.” The grin becomes a smile. “I like that.” Russell is admittedly mesmerized by what he considers the intricacies of the new Thing’s plot line. He’s not at all worried about having it compared with the 1952 version, either. “I just saw the old Thing for the first time a couple of weeks ago,” he shrugs. “This film has nothing to do with that. It’s more in tune with the book— almost identical, in fact, except that our characters are more developed and our Thing doesn’t have telepathic powers like the book’s creature. “I’m not a horror or a science fic- tion film connoisseur, so I don’t know why the first Thing is considered a classic. I don’t know if this movie will be classic or not. All I know is that, as far as horror movies go, this is a good one. “The first movie? I mean, jeez, James Amess came out and he was a big carrot. They fried him. Great! But classic?” Russell leans forward in his chair. “Everyone talked about the first movie being relevant to the political period, the McCarthy witch hunts. I saw the movie, and I’m not sure whether that’s valid or not. It’s sub- jective, I suppose. John’s film isn’t at all relevant to today’s political climate, but it is relevant to the human condi- tion. People today are experiencing a certain level of paranoia in their lives. It’s being stoked by the headlines in the news. They’re wondering whether this stranger on the street is going to be the one who’ll rob them or kill them. “John’s movie takes that sense of paranoia and lets it run wild. Nobody trusts anybody else in our story. I think my character is pretty in- teresting because he’s in the outpost group but not of it. He’s not connected with any of the scientific research. He’s just a helicopter pilot out to make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. He’s a Vietnam vet, and he’s isolated from the rest of the group. When the Thing causes condi- tions in the camp to break down, he has the leadership of the group thrust upon him. He’s as scared as the others, but the war has taught him how to act instinctively. The script pits an outsider against another out- sider, the pilot against the alien.” Russell becomes more animated as he tries to explain the film’s theme. “It’s survival, man,” he says, “plain and simple. Personally, I like our monster. It’s not an evil monster. It doesn’f possess you. It doesn’t try to take over your mind and turn you into a slave or a zombie. The Thing is a creature, stranded on an alien world, just trying to stay alive. “There’s a direct correlation be- tween the Thing’s species and the human race. No matter what kind of an overview you take on various Earth civilizations, one goal was com- mon to them all: they all fought hard to survive. The Thing may be from outer space and be pretty strange looking, but it’s only trying to do the same thing: stay alive. When it takes a man over, it’s incredibly grotesque to watch. It’s horrible. But the way the humans behave in reaction to it is probably just as horrific to the Thing. Horror is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no good and there is no evil. It’s just two species trying to survive. One has to eliminate the other in order to do so.” According to Russell, this primor- -dial element will be reenforced by the movie’s physical appearance. “This is rugged. Period. There’s no role for a woman in it. In Antarc- tica, women are rare. The first film worked in a female love angle. We haven’t. One of the strong points of 47 Some THING Wicked American scientists discover remnants of the Thing’s space vehicle. In a precredit sequence, audiences will see the ship spin dizzily toward the earth. John’s film is that it’s primarily male: a dozen very solitary men just trying to maintain their sanity. From scene one, nerves are frayed. The overall feeling will be pretty brutal. The weather is harsh, the look is harsh . . . and the alien organism itself is pretty gross!” Russell begins to chuckle when he tries to describe Rob Bottin’s top- secret alien makeup designs for the film— a deft blend of cosmetic and mechanical savvy. Russell attempts to be as obscure as possible in his description; there are Universal publicists hovering nearby, studio min- ions dedicated solely to the task of keeping Carpenter’s secret alien “look” just that. “Rob’s stuff is amazing,” says Russell. “This is my first horror movie, and this may sound weird, but it reminds me of the Disney films I did as a child. You’re dealing with stuff that’s out of control half the time. Some of Rob’s stuff is very ex- perimental. You have to be on your toes because you don’t know how the 48 Director John Carpenter realizes he's treacling on sacred ground with this remake. "Science fiction fans feel they own the movie, they feel it's theirs by right. I can’t do anything about that. This movie will stand on its own merits." Something powerful— and not of this earth— has trashed a heavy snow vehicle. The film, says star Kurt Russell, is “totally male. I have an electronic chessboard that I believe will have a woman’s voice in the final cut. That’s the only ’female’ in the movie." creature is going to react, physically, during a scene. You have to make the dialogue fit its actions sometimes.” Before Russell has a chance to elaborate on the Thing’s workings, he is called back on the set and asked to run down a corridor half a dozen times. • “The set is pretty confining,” he says between sprints. “Claustrophobic. It creates a feeling of tension that, I guess, is helpful. The scenes we’re do- ing now are pretty paranoid. You in- stinctively want to stay away from everybody, but as you can see, that’s physically impossible. You find your- self feeling compressed on and off camera. It’s tough sometimes.” A buzzer sounds and a mantra of “Quiet, quiet, quiet ...” is chanted on the set. immediately afterward, a new litany of “Rolling, rolling, rolling” echoes across the studio. Russell, back in his snow- encrusted parka, sprints down the hall. After reaching his mark, he ex- tends his arms in the classic runner- across-the-finish-line pose. There’s scattered applause from the crew. Next to the corridor, three cast members read the Los Angeles Times and Variety. “Did you see where Burt Reynolds was bleeped on the Tonight show for saying the word ‘Jew’?” one of the Thing’s future snacks remarks to no one in particular. Meanwhile, back in the hallway, Carpenter instructs his technicians to alter the positions’ of the overhead lights. While this is being done, he takes a breather at a makeup stand nearby and chats amiably about his newest project. Why choose to remake The Thing when the original Hawks film is remembered so clearly by moviegoers all over the world? “Because it’s one of my all-time favorite stories,” he ex- plains. “I loved the first film. I thought it was great. But they left a lot of Campbell’s story out of it. I read the story before I saw the film. I guess I was about ten. Even then, I realized that the whole nature of Campbell’s Thing was different than that of Hawks’s. “Actually, Alien borrowed quite a bit from Campbell’s concept of the creature. Now, I suppose, when this movie is released, it may be compared to Alien. I’m not worried about it, though. I mean, Alien was one of the few effective monster films to be made recently, and it only took snip- pets of Campbell’s ideas. We have the entire story.” Carpenter’s The Thing is reminis- cent in theme to his first professional film, Assault on Precinct 13, a taut tale of survival in which a soon-to-be- abandoned police station and its skeleton staff are continuously assaulted by an army of marauding street toughs. The movie fared poorly, and Carpenter is still surprised. “I was really amazed about that,” he shrugs. “I thought it was really hot. “Then again, my whole career has surprised me,” he says with a smile. “The success of Halloween really caught me off guard. I didn’t actually catch onto what was happening until The Fog came out. Then I realized what I’d started. Phew! “I was very flattered that Hallo- ween spawned a slew of imitators. I didn’t think that people would find the 49 Some THING Wicked Makeup wizard Rob Bottin (leaning on box at left) and director John Carpenter (kneeling at right) carefully position a mechanical sled dog which, within moments, will be transformed into a dinner for the Thing. movie all that relentless. I had filmed it that way, but I assumed that people wouldn’t pick up on it. I mean, Assault on Precinct 13 was totally unrelenting, and it died in America. My only consolation came from the fact that, when Assault was shown at a British film festival, people went crazy over it. It got big reviews in big papers. It played over there for three years, and when Halloween debuted, it was billed as ‘another film by the director of Assault on Precinct 13.’ The critics didn’t like it as much.” Carpenter turns to watch his crew struggling in a comer of the set. “I like relentless movies,” he says. “I en- joy suspense films that keep you on the edge of your seat. This movie was written by Bill Lancaster, the fellow who wrote The Bad News Bears, and there’s a lot of grim humor in it. “Suspense and humor work well together,” he adds. “My favorite com- edies are all very suspenseful. Look at that classic scene of Harold Lloyd hanging from that oversized clock in Safety Last. You laugh at the sight of it, but at the same time you hold your breath, because you’re really worried that he’s going to plunge to his death. Laughter is the release of tension. Suspense builds tension.” We pause as two technicians push a stack of boxes down the corridor and accidentally bump into each other. “This is a tough set for everybody,” Carpenter remarks. “It’s a realistic approximation of what it’s like to live down in Antarctica. There’s no room to move. Actually, our set is bigger than it would really be. As it is, working here gets to everybody after a while.” He arches an eyebrow and smiles. “Wait until we go up to Alaska for location work. People will really hate this movie then!” Though Carpenter tries, at every opportunity, to speak of The Thing as a suspense film, a “psychological thriller,” it becomes obvious, after on- ly a short time on the set, that the film’s impact will depend upon the death-dealing effects concocted by Whitlock, Arbogast, and Bottin. Rob Bottin’ s multifaceted Thing may well turn out to be 1982’s Critter of the Year. Carpenter, however, is reluctant to play up the effects angle. “I don’t see the effects as being all that big a deal,” he says. “The movie is really a study of the effects of fear on a human being. There are very elaborate displays of pyrotechnics, but they don’t run the show.” As for Bottin’s alien, Carpenter is all but mum on the subject, and won’t allow any photos of the makeup. “No 50 one is going to know what the Thing looks like in advance,” he states em- phatically. “Even if I showed you a photo of it, I’d have to say, ‘This is sort of what it looks like.’ Our creature doesn’t look like anything; it looks like everything. “That’s part of the surprise. We have a whole group of Things. They’re all very delicate, and to shoot them re- quires a lot of patience and time. But when they’re fully realized on camera, they’re unbelievable. They’re hard to work with because they’re mostly pro- totypes that didn’t exist before this film. No one, not even Rob, had thought of them before. They should really startle you. I’d hate for people to leave the theater saying, ‘It was okay.’ I want them to leave saying, ‘Jeeezuz, I’ve never seen anything like that before!’ ” A crew member yells “Okay, J. C.” The lank/ director nods and gets ready for the next take. The ac- tors are resuming their places in the corridor once again, primed to wrestle with the gun-toting traitor. There’s silence on the set. The ac- tors tense up. The cameras roll. This time out, when the pair in parkas bursts through the metal door, no fake snow falls from the rafters. The door, however, bounces open after being slammed shut. The scene is stopped. Someone begins fiddling with the metal door. “I guess there’s no getting away from it,” says Carpenter, by way of afterthought. “This is a monster movie. It has a lot of suspense and some wonderful psychological aspects, but what it comes down to is ‘There’s a monster from outer space loose!’ ” He smiles. “That was my favorite kind of movie when I was a kid. There haven’t been many good ones made in a long time. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them made if The Thing’s a success..” One week later, however, after most of the corridor confrontation scenes are in the can, the director looks back on his monster-, murder-, and ghost-laden cinematic career and offers this enigmatic view of the future: “You know what? I’d love to do a Western. I love Howard Hawks’s Westerns. I could do about fifteen or sixteen Westerns; in a row— do them for the rest of my career— and be perfectly, perfectly happy.” ,(0 ©1981 United Artists SCHEIDER AND STREEP JOIN BENTON AND NEWMAN IN A HUSH-HUSH MODERN-DAY 'JACK THE RIPPER' TALE. JAMES VERNIERE TRACKS DOWN A FEW IMPORTANT CLUES. W hen the Victorian philosopher Thomas Carlyle said that “the history of the world is the biography of great men,” he could not have foreseen that, in a diabolical twist on his words, the history of the twentieth century would be the biography of assassins and mass murderers. Nor could he have foreseen the public’s enduring fascination with another Victorian gentleman known as Jack the Ripper. Ever since the Ripper stalked Whitechapel, the mass murderer has had a prominent place in the popular imagination. In America, Charley Starkweather (the inspiration for Terrence Malick’s film Badlands), Ed Gein (upon whom Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho— and Alfred Hitchcock’s film— were based), John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, and David Berkowitz have become figures of myth. In Great Britain, where mass murders are less frequent if no less horrible, the recent spate of murders committed by the so-called “Yorkshire Ripper” have resurrected the hidden fears of a nation once fascinated by the atrocities of his predecessor. What is the allure of these killers? Perhaps it’s that in them we see living proof of the existence of evil in the world. So we sift through their lives hoping to catch a glimpse of the precise moment that the devil won them over; and instead, more often than not, we get an ordinary story of an ordinary man. Not content with such discoveries, we flock to see films like Halloween (1978), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and Dressed to Kill (1980) to see the mass murderer in action, perhaps drawn as much by the implicit misogyny of such films as by the spectacle of evil. So often are the killer’s victims sexually active young women that there fs an undeniable connection between our fascination for mass murderers and our unconscious desire to see “scarlet” women punished, just as Jack the Ripper, the archetypal mass murderer, set a pattern for the rest by killing prostitutes. Unlike others of his breed, however, Jack was never caught; his identity remains a mystery— and a source of endless speculation. Not surprisingly, the Ripper character has a long history on the screen, dating as far back as 1926, when Alfred Hitchcock directed Ivor Novello in the first film adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger, a novel about the Whitechapel murders. In 1928, the Ripper carried off the beautiful Louise Brooks at the conclusion of G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Later, with the advent of the talkies, Maurice Elvey directed a remake of The Lodger (1932) with Ivor Novello repeating the role. In 1944, John Brahm directed what is for many the definitive version of Lowndes’s novel, starring the American character actor Laird Cregar. Jack Palance played the Ripper in Hugo Fregonese’s The Man in the Attic (1954). In the sixties, the character resurfaced in films like Robert Baker’s cheapie Jack the Ripper (1960), and in James Hill’s gem, A Study in Terror (1965), in which the Ripper’s nemesis is that other cinematic icon, Sherlock Holmes. In 1971, Peter Sasdy directed an interesting failure about the murderer’s daughter entitled Hands of the Ripper, which starred a very young Angharad Rees (of tv’s Poldark) as the killer’s haunted offspring. In Peter Medak’s black comedy, The Riding Class (1972), an insane Peter O’Toole is cured of his delusion that he is 51 Stab Christ only to become the reincarnation of Spring-Heeled Jack, and in his latest film appearance, 1979’s Murder by Decree, the Ripper is pitted once more against Sherlock Holmes. Film has not been the only medium to exploit the Ripper myth. Featured in countless stories and novels, he also survived in modern times in the Thriller episode “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (based on the Robert Bloch tale), and he has been the star of two recent stage productions, both entitled Jack the Ripper, one Off Broadway and one in London’s West End. Oddly, both plays were musical comedies. This year director Robert Benton will offer still another variation on the Ripper theme in Stab, starring Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider. (Based on a story by Benton and David Newman, the team that wrote the 1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, Stab was originally scheduled for a spring release, but United Artists may hold it till the fall to allow Benton time to recut it.) “In the early sixties,” said Benton in a recent interview, “exactly twenty years ago, I was involved with a woman whom I loved very much. We broke up, and I was deeply depressed. As all single men do when they need a shoulder to cry on, I went to dinner at the home of a married friend. While we were eating, his wife suddenly put down her fork and said, ‘You know what your trouble is? You’re terrified of women.’ Her remark hit home. It went completely through me because it was true.” Couple this self-discovery with the fact that Benton and Newman were once approached to do a fourth version of The Lodger, and you have the germ of an idea. “What happens,” wondered Benton, “when a man finds himself falling in love with a woman who might be a female Jack the Ripper?” But before Benton could address himself to this, he had to direct The Late Show (1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), for which he won an Academy Award. By the time he returned to Stab, he and Newman had rewritten the original script several times, at least once to tone down the violence of the murders. The final version is Benton’s own, with Newman receiving credit for the original story. Billed as Robert Benton’s most glamorous film, Stab takes place in and around an auction gallery not unlike Sotheby Parke Bemet— a setting Benton may have chosen over the original version’s high fashion to avoid the latter’s similarity to Eyes of Laura Mars. “I guess I’m very materialistic,” he says. “I always wanted to know what went on behind the scenes at auction houses.” That psychosis can fester in the midst of material wealth and fine art is an integral part of Benton’s theme. While finishing the script— a script that would ultimately go through countless versions and last-minute alterations— Benton and producer Arlene Donovan assembled a cast. They chose Roy Scheider to play the psychiatrist, Dr. Rice, a compulsively meticulous man (as is Benton himself) who serves as the focal point of the film. Scheider, a star best known for his work in Jaws (1975), Marathon Man (1976), and AH That Jazz (1979), finds parallels between the psychiatrist and the police chief he played in Jaws. “In both cases,” says Scheider, “the audience sees the movie through my eyes. In Stab 52 Meryl Streep plays Brooke Reynolds, a shy, beautiful woman who becomes a prime suspect in a series of brutal slayings. She also happens to be the mistress of . . . A RIPPER RETROSPECTIVE The two most memorable roles in Laird Cregar's tragically brief career were as psychopathic murderers in films directed by John Brahm: The Lodger (1944), above, and Hangover Square (1945), in which Cregar played a demented composer. He died that same year at the age of twenty-nine. . . . the modern-day Ripper's first victim, George Bynum {played by Josef Sommer), head of the antiquities department of Crispin's auction gallery. In A Study in Terror (1965), based on the novel by Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) fights a battle to the death with the black-caped Lord Carfax (John Fraser), whom he's exposed as the Ripper. Newcomer Angharad Rees (right) played Jack's equally violence-prone daughter Anna In Hands of the Ripper (1971). The Hammer film also starred Jane Merrow and Eric Porter, the latter as an "alienist" who explores the girl’s past through hypnosis. they see things when I see them. They discover things when I discover them.” Ironically, after establishing himself in cinema mythology as the harried police chief of Amity, Scheider now finds himself chasing a female Mack the Knife— and, like the original, this “shark bites with its teeth.” (As we go to press, reports are that Scheider may be headed for still another cop role, this time as a policeman of the near future who, in the service of a repressive government, pilots the ultimate helicopter, one equipped with silent engines and infrared x-ray cameras for spying on the citizenry. The conflict occurs when Scheider grows disillusioned with his job and finds himself battling his own ’copter.) Of Stab costar Meryl Streep, Scheider says: “She has the difficult task of playing a woman who appears in one scene to be dangerously lethal and in the next deliciously vulnerable. As my character falls in love with her, so the audience must fall in love with her, or the story won’t work. The burden of making the woman irresistible lies Sherlock Holmes resurfaced as Christopher Plummer in 1979's trendy Murder by Decree, exposing the Ripper murders as the work of a government conspiracy. Here David Hemmings, as the overinquisitive Inspector Foxborough, is run through by an aristocratic assassin (Peter Jonfield). Before going on to play absolute Evil (see page 12), David Warner — here menacing Mary Steenburgen — was a resourceful Ripper in Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time (1979), escaping to modern-day San Francisco in H. G. Wells’s time machine. Stab Roy Scheider plays psychiatrist Dr. Sam Rice, whose patient is murdered — and who tinds himselt falling in love with the woman who may be the murderer. on Meryl, but if the audience reacts the way I do it’ll be love at first sight.” Meryl Streep’s Brooke Reynolds is a shy, beautiful woman who works as an assistant to the antiquities expert at Crispin’s Auction Gallery. She is also her boss’s mistress, and when he is murdered she comes under suspicion. Streep, who took an Oscar for her performance in Kramer, created something of a flap when, at a press conference this past fall for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, she revealed somewhat more about her role in Stab than Benton would have wished. As a result, the film is now under tight security, and the filmmakers have been careful that the stills they’ve released give away little of the plot. .Stab reunites Benton with the cinematographer of Kramer vs. Kramer, Nestor Almendros. A three-time Academy Award nominee and a winner of the 1978 Oscar for his work on Terrence Malick’s breathtaking Days of Heaven, Almendros seeks inspiration in the work of history’s greatest artists. He says that Gauguin influenced his work on Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (1971), and that the Anglo-Swiss romanticist Fuseli was his guide in the composition of The Marquise of 0 (1976). For Kramer, he drew upon the work of the fifteenth- century artist Piero della Francesca, and he’s borrowed Piero’s colors for Stab, though this time, he says, he’s added the spatial perspective, loneliness, and menacing starkness of twentieth-century American artist Edward Hopper. Undoubtedly, Stab boasts an impressive array of talent, but the true test of the film’s success will be whether or not Stab establishes itself, in the public’s imagination, along with those very few classics of the genre— as a testament to the power that evil has to enthrall us all. »B 54 Rice’s mother, Grace (Jessica Tandy), a fellow psychiatrist, senses immediately that her son is in danger Compounding the mystery is the presence of another woman at Crispin's. Brooke's best friend Gail Phillips (Sara Botstord). Director Robert Benton — at left, above, with cameraman Nestor Almendros — has maintained tight security over the entire production in orderto keep the identity of the killer a secret. THE BITE by Elizabeth Morton BEWARE OF DOGS THAT BITE . . . AND ALSO THOSE THAT KEEP THEIR TEETH CLENCHED! S o at the end I thought of the Doberman. The Doberman that would have saved me trouble if I had truly understood the conditions. My Doberman is named Titus. I bought him for protection a year ago. “Protection” is an important service in this city; faith has gone the way of the trolley. The question might be who will protect us against ourselves, of course, but that is sheerly metaphysical. In any case, the answer is that we will protect ourselves and I do what I must. I have Titus. Consider the Doberman: his simple willing at- tempt. When I opened the door at six, Titus did not come to greet me. Instead, he stood in the small bedroom toward the rear, whining. Breezes from an open window scattered some things from my dresser at his feet but he didn’t seem to notice. He whined again. “What is it?” I asked. I was alert from the outset. I want to make that clear. I was not naive. One fine-tunes apprehension in this city, becomes suspicious of circumstance. “Tell me, Titus,” I said. He did not move. His legs trembled. “What’s wrong, boy?” I asked. Why do we never call our pets man? He whimpered, his jaws locked. “Let’s open your mouth, boy,” I said, getting down on my knees to face him. He would have none of it so I ran a finger over his muzzle. (Such a stupid act, but I was concerned and what did I know?) Titus had always been quite firm about anyone stroking his head. But he only whined again and dropped to his knees. He started to drool. Rabies? Lockjaw? Animals can give tetanus, I suppose, but do they get it? I’ve always been slightly in awe of this animal and I regard Titus as a motile, biscuit-chomping weapon— but I am a woman with some feeling. I did not want him to suffer; even a defective weapon should be fixed. “I’ll take you to the veterinarian,” I said, “if you don’t stop this at once.” Titus groaned yet again, that shaking sigh. I should have pointed out earlier in this hasty memoir (but it is coming out, as you may have noticed, under enormous pressure) that there is a veterinarian on the ground floor of this large apartment building: a fool’s parade of pets and anxious owners stalks through the lobby during daylight hours. I have used Dr. Stone’s services a couple of times because he is so convenient, otherwise I would hardly have in- vested my time with him. Outside of his routine duties, which he seemed to perform efficiently, he was a lazy and shiftless sort. Used to be. But Stone’s proximity made me press Titus once more. “Come on, boy,” I said, hoping he would follow reasonably. “We’ll find out what your mouth problem is.” To my relief, Titus followed me quietly out of the apartment and into the gray hallway where we waited patiently for the elevator and boarded it, join- ing a fat man and two blunt-faced adolescents who stared at us all the way down. Titus sniyeled but 56 Illustration by Frances Jetter 57 held his ground. “That dog is frozen,” one of the adolescents said. “Frozen solid,” said the other. We all laughed, except for Titus, myself, and the fat man. On the ground floor, I watched the adolescents skim across the lobby and out the door with an in- truder’s panache, exchanged a look of disgust with the fat man, then turned left and went up the four stairs to Stone’s office. The door was open, even though it was after posted hoifrs. Stone, no less than the rest of us, is greedy: he will not let a concerned (paying) owner go. Androcles was the last member of the profession who took the long view. The waiting room was empty but -not for long; Titus and I stared at copies of The Pet Dealer on a long table until Stone emerged in a flurry of yelps from the rear. I do not have the time to characterize him except to say that he does not suffer from age, humility, or compassion. “He can’t seem to open his mouth,” I said. “Can dogs get lockjaw?” “You mean that one, right?” Stone said. “So, I’ll take a look.” He pulled on Titus’s collar and they trotted toward the door. “Read a magazine,” Stone said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” “I’m in the building,” I said. I gave him my name. “Remember? You can call me. My number is in your file. You have a file?” “I’ll call you then,” Stone said. “If you don’t have the patience to wait.” “I don’t want to wait,” I said. “I’m upstairs; let me know when the examination is done. That way I can have a drink. I work hard too, you know, and I need fortification to come back and deal with you.” I got up, started for the door. “Just find out what’s wrong with the dog.” “I’ll call you,” Stone said. “Argue responsibil- ity with yourself.” He led Titus through the door, in- to another swirl of yelping. I left the reception room. The adolescents were not on the elevator but the fat man was. “They didn’t come from any floor in this building,” he said bitterly. “There’s no security. Anything can happen in this place. Don’t you think anything can happen?” I did not answer. I did not want to take our relationship one step beyond where it was; if strangers do not want to hurt you, they want an involvement. “Frozen, ” I heard him say as I 58 got out. It did not disturb me. In my apartment, I made myself a scotch and water, thinking of life in a city where protection is a major service; where dogs are weapons and weapons are a way of greeting. The phone rang just as I had decided, yet again, that the conditions of my life were tolerable after all. I had a job that I loved and the scotch, which I endured, and the fear neutralized by Titus. “This is Dr. Stone,” the voice said, “what are you doing? This is Dr. Stone, do you hear me?” “I hear you,” I said. I took another swallow of scotch; it broadened me somewhat. “What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m sitting here by the phone, thinking about lockjaw, which for all I know is contagious. I’m thinking of the city and my life. I’m thinking—” “Get out of the apartment now.” “What’s that?” I took another swallow. “I don’t think it’s worth the rent and I keep looking but I’m not ready—” “It’s not funny,” Stone said. His voice had the tone of the boy saying that dog is frozen. “Get out now. Come downstairs to my office.” I put down the glass. Through the haze of scotch and fatigue I felt a small stab of implication. “What is this?” “I’ll tell you downstairs. I’ll meet you in the lobby.” “You tell me now.” “Shut up and get out of there.” “Goodbye,” I said. “You fool,” he said rapidly, “I got your dog’s mouth open.” “That’s what you were supposed to do, Doctor. ” “Wait. Listen to me,” Stone said urgently. “Get out of that apartment now.” I stared into the mouthpiece. “What?” “There were two fingers in that dog’s mouth.” I put down the phone then, my hand reflexive- ly numb, and heard the sounds inside the bedroom closet. The door seemed to move slightly and it was only then, looking down, that I saw the thin strip of blood spreading from the closet . . . I heard the knob within the closet turn. What had the fat man said? But I knew nothing of the fat man; I had refused to become involved. I dealt only with myself and my biscuit- tracking weapon. And so, even before I saw the face, even before I saw the dull revolver that was held in the hand that had not been ruined, even before all that, in fine and pure constancy, un- moving like Titus, I thought of the Doberman and his simple, willing attempt. The phone began to ring again. Oh God oh Stone oh Titus, I am frozen. (B Illustration by Marty Blake Park Bench 37 by Robert E.Vardeman IT WAS FUN TO SIT AND WATCH THE WORLD GO BY AND SOME THINGS NOT OF THIS WORLD! 1 enjoy sitting in the warm noonday sun. You would, too, if the cold of more than sixty winters had chilled your bones and frozen your joints and memories ever so slightly. I was stretched out on my usual park bench, soaking up as much warmth as the chary sun was willing' to give on a cold October day, when it happened. Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t actually see anything. I was too busy feeding those scavenging pigeons from a bag of peanuts I’d bought from old Jake. Jake’s been out here in the park almost as long as I have, selling peanuts when it gets cold and that sticky, spun sugar cotton candy in the summer. When the wind stops blowing in the spring and I see Jake with his pink, fluffy halos of cotton candy, I know summer is almost here. I was there on park bench 37 just minding my own business and feeding the pigeons— Ralph and Flossie were the only two hungry enough to bother with my meager offering that day— and wondering where everyone was. Usually that time of day brings out all the young mothers pushing strollers loaded with kids. Some are real cute. And some of the kids don’t look all that bad, either. For rug apes. But I was all alone, unless you want to count the pigeons. I’d just cracked open a couple shells and tossed the innards out for the gourmet samplings of Ralph and Flossie when I heard a tiny pop. My ears aren’t all they used to be, even a few years ago, but it was loud enough and near enough to make me turn my head. 59 Incident on Park Bench 37 The man with the silver hair was sitting at the other end of the bench, his head braced in both hands like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders and was crying out his sorrow. I’ve seen just about everything in the park. One day I even saw a murder; a punk in a grimy denim jacket tried to mug a guy in a business suit. Real sharp-looking suit, expensive, well-tailored. All of a sudden, as soon as the mugger flipped open a switchblade, he was surrounded by cops. He lunged and killed the man in the suit. Bloody. Still haven’t forgotten it, and it must have happened at least ten years ago. The punk got away, in spite of six cops chasing him. I still chide poor old O’Connor about that when he plods flat-footed along his beat every day at twelve-thirty. But what got me about the fellow with the silver hair was the odd clothing he wore. It seemed to glimmer and sparkle as if some of the threads were copper and silver. As I watched him, he slowly straightened and stood, shucked off the jacket with the fancy weaving. He laid it on the ground as if it were the last friend he had in the world and that friend had just died, telling him what a son of a bitch he was. Silver Hair sat back down on the bench and just stared at the jacket. He must have been a down-and-out magician because when I looked back at the ground after giv- ing him another once-over, the jacket had vanished. There may have been a popping noise like before, but I can’t really say. My ears miss a lot they used to pick up. Besides, those damned pigeons were rais- ing a fuss wanting more peanuts. My curiosity was getting the better of me. But then it usually does. What else is left for an old man content to sit around in the waning sun, feed the pigeons and ogle the pretty young girls? “Say, mister,” I called. “I don’t want to butt into something that isn’t my business, but what hap- pened to that fancy coat you had on? I couldn’t help but notice you put it on the ground, and now it disappeared.” Silver Hair turned to me, and I got the first good look at his face since I first spied him. He had a long, aquiline nose, a thin face that looked like the edge of a meat cleaver, blue eyes pasted onto red- inked road maps, thin lips that could be cruel if he tried. He gave me the creeps. He shook his head slowly, as if trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. Finally, in a low, choked voice, “I didn’t do it! Honest! I didn’t do it!” Seemed to me he was getting mighty upset. I couldn’t understand why he should think I was ac- cusing him of stealing his own jacket. I didn’t care if he fed it to the pigeons. Let them choke on it. “All right, all right! Take it easy.” I tried to calm him, but I saw that would be impossible. He didn’t quite break down and cry, but he came close. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t about to put my arm around him and tell him it was okay. If he was that broken up over a lousy coat, even one that was as shiny and nice as the one that had done the disappearing act, he might not have been playing with a full deck. You know, he could have been a psycho like they show on tv all the time. I debated leaving my park bench, then got stubborn. He wasn’t going to run me off. I never figured out why the Parks Department numbers the benches. Maybe they had a maintenance schedule or something, although #37 hasn’t been painted in over two years while #21 had three coats of bright green paint in less than nine months. Old Canfield sits on #21 just like I have #37 staked out, and he rubs it in that his bench gets painted and mine doesn’t. I had the last laugh on him, though, last time. He didn’t figure they’d be painting his bench three times, not when the last coat was barely a month dry. He never noticed the smell of the paint, and I doubt if he ever found out that it was me who took the “Wet Paint” sign off #21. He’s still got green slat marks on his blue corduroy pants and red and black checked shirt. No, this silver-haired guy wasn’t about to run me off my bench. I’d paid taxes for one hell of a long time and this was my bench. I’d paid for it. Taxes, idiot mayors, long years of frustration. I’d earned the privilege and this fellow hadn’t. I didn’t have to get tough about it, though. The guy wiped his nose on his sleeve, reinforcing my opinion of him, then hurriedly left down the asphalt path going to the fountain, mumbling, “I didn’t do it! Why won’t anyone believe me?” 1 didn’t think anything more about it until three days later. In my more than sixty years, I never came to believe in coincidence. There was always an explanation for everything. Sometimes it was pretty fantastic, sometimes it was childishly sim- ple and everyone just overlooked it. I’m sure you remember the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Pur- loined Letter.” Everything can be right in front of your face, and you can’t see it. Forest full of trees or however that old cliche runs. I had a bigger following today because I’d brought some homemade popcorn. Ralph and Flossie were joined by Ned and Doris and Jackie and a cou- ple others of the filthy birds I didn’t recognize. They all love homemade popcorn, especially when I put lots of butter on it. I’d better confess about that. It isn’t butter. It’s really margarine but the stupid birds don’t know the difference. This time, as I scattered a handful of popcorn out from my bench like a priest blessing his flock, I 60 heard that funny pop and smelled ozone. I’d smelled it too many times working around high-voltage equipment to mistake the garlic odor. I turned and saw a ponderous man seated at the other end of my bench. He had to weigh 120 kilos— minimum. And he had on a larger edition of the glittery jacket my silver-haired psycho had worn. I said nothing but didn’t want to miss a thing. The fat man stood and stripped off the circus-tent- sized coat and tossed it at his feet. I riveted my eyes on that shiny coat. Maybe something got in my eye and I blinked. Or an extra-cold breeze caused my eye to water and the tears made me miss it. I don’t think so. I’m certain the coat grew in- distinct and then popped away into nothingness. The leaves under the coat swirled briefly in a little whirl- wind, then subsided to be nudged along by the gentle breeze blowing from the east. Fatso glared at me, sneered slightly and then stalked off, contempt dripping off him like water from a newly waxed car. I had seen what I’d seen. That fancy coat just whooshed away. Occam’s Razor says the simplest of two explanations is usually the best. I didn’t have a single idea about what happened, much less two. Back when I was active in research, I fancied that I had a pretty sharp mind. Somewhere along the way, the arrow of time began cutting into my mental tendons, but I can still lay claim to being bet- ter off in the brain department than most. For reasons locked up in my DNA, my body seems to have given out before my gray cells. The cataract operations have been successful but things are a tri- fle blurry, even with my glasses. Hearing is okay for most things; you don’t have to shout for me to hear you. But my brain’s still in top condition. I decided that two similar incidents occurring on my bench was not coincidence, that there was a reason. I’d find out what it was. I waited the rest of the day until the sun col- lapsed from exhaustion and fell into the trees at the west end of the park. A thin sliver of moon was barely discernable and Mercury shone brilliantly as the evening star. I would have made a wish on it ex- cept the chill wind that had been building steadily in intensity all day now whipped and slashed at my thin carcass like icy knives. I stood up, stretching my muscles and wishing my arthritis would go away and leave me alone. It didn’t. Disgusted with my Benedict Arnold of a body, I began the trudge home before darkness became absolute. The asphalt path was familiar; I had walked it every day for the six years since my retirement. The noise of the animals in the park and the city beyond reached my ears. I quickened my pace. The chip- munks and squirrels would soon be replaced by the muggers and rapists going out for their night’s work. Shuffling down the street, the thought oc- curred to me that crime was so much worse now than it had been even ten years ago. Sure, I’ve read all that crap about humans going bonkers when they’re forced to live together in crowded conditions. Somehow, that never really impressed me as an ade- quate answer to the burgeoning crime rate. I’m well read. Let me amend that. I used to be well read until my eyesight fogged a bit. I do listen a lot to the radio and tv. Not those siHy soap operas, mind you. I couldn’t care less whether Phil and Tara ever get back together (they never did), but I listen to the news and the specials. Population is increasing exponentially and that’s supposed to explain the crime increase, too. There are exponential increases and exponen- tial increases. Some are faster than others. I don’t have the data at my fingertips but I’ll bet a bag of peanuts and any three of my pigeons that you’d find crime increasing faster than the population as a whole. When I’d settled on that idea, my mind began generating all sorts of improbable theories. The more theories I conjured up, the more I realized I had nothing substantial in the way of evidence. Hell, I didn’t have any data at nil! I reached the steps leading up to my house. Apartment, really, and it was my daughter and her husband’s if you must know the truth. Jerry and Patricia didn’t treat me badly; I just didn’t fit into their life style. When I’d been younger, people con- sidered me a bit avant-garde. Bohemian was the word used then. My daughter and her husband were so middle- class and stuck in the nine-to-five rut, it disgusted me. Not that it was any of my business. It was their life, not mine. Laura and I had had a good life together. I still regret the freak accident in the laboratory that cost her everything a human can lose. I’ve never cared to work with plutonium since then, and the mere thought of plutonium dust sends cold shivers up and down my spine. I pushed open the door of the apartment and saw Jerry sitting in front of the tv, feet propped up on the hassock and a can of Pabst clutched in his hand. If he squeezed any harder, the can would rup- ture and he’d spill all that precious fluid. Precious to him, not me. Anyone that drinks anything but bour- bon, neat, is a sissy. “Hi, Pop,” he said in a singularly monotone, bored voice. “How’d everything go today?” It was almost a ritual. He didn’t care, but felt he had to ask, for Patricia’s sake. As if she cared, either. “Nothing much happened, Jerry. Three a 6i •V Incident on Park Bench 37 murders, one an axe murder, a couple of gangsters machine-gunned. You know, the same old stuff.” He didn’t know whether to take me seriously or not. Jerry’s biggest failing is a lack of humor. But what can you expect from a man who thinks the best com- edian in the business is Don Rickies? “Hi, Dad!” Patricia’s greeting was a trifle more spontaneous, but my years of living with them had worn out any real spark of enthusiasm. Her mother’s death had been hard on her, but not as hard as the miscarriage and the necessary hysterec- tomy that had barely saved her life. Maybe kids would have made things go easier between her and Jerry. I doubt it. Jerry wasn’t father material. “How was the interview, Patty? Did you get the job?” I knew the answer before I asked. I could read her like a book. Her face fell slightly as she said, “No, I didn’t. They’d already decided on someone else. I’ve got another lead for tomorrow, though.” Her voice was taking on the automaton like, notes characteristic of Jerry. It would be nice to get a job for her, put some meaning into her life, but she had gotten trapped in a typical twentieth-century bind. A master’s degree in physics and no jobs in physics open. She would have turned it down, anyway, even if something was offered. She still thought of her mother’s death. Other companies wouldn’t hire her because they felt she’d quit a lower-paying job if anything came up that a master’s degree holder might accept. Overqualified was the catch phrase. Jerry’s job as junior executive fitted him. He was at the zenith of his career. What was truly sorry was that Patricia realized it and Jerry didn’t. I tried to explain what had happened again on my park bench but neither listened to me. They politely nodded and continued their pointless prattle about the neighbors and what was on the tv. I shut up and went to my room, pleading tiredness. I sat up until very early in the morning think- ing— hard— about everything that had occurred on my park bench. There was only one solution. Ques- tion the next one who seemed to appear out of nowhere about . . . about . . . about what? That would have to follow naturally. T he next day was dreary and the sun played hide-and-seek between raindrop-laden clouds. The wind was colder than it should have been, but I’d come prepared. I had on my heavy coat, and it provided the warmth the sun didn’t. I maintained my vigil until almost three o’clock. Barely discernible over the whisper of the wind, I heard a humming note that quickly raced up the scale and vanished far beyond my limits of hear- ing. My eyes glued to the end of my bench and, coin- ciding with the popping noise, I saw a flicker, then a 62 man appeared out of thin air. Park bench #37 had two occupants. I had walked there, this other fellow had taken a more enigmatic route. Black hair combed straight back on his head, cold, piercing black eyes and a s warthy complexion were the things I noticed first. El specially those icy, harsh eyes that seemed to bore into me, saying “I hate you!” The jacket he wore was similar to the two previous visitors’ garments. The man snorted and quickly stripped off the jacket. It vanished before it hit the ground. He said in a voice chiseled from polar icebergs, “They really hated me, the bastards!” He turned to me and snapped, “Old man, where am I?” Here was my chance. I could question him and find out what was going on. I could at least get one side of the blade of Occam’s Razor. “I’ll trade you information. Does that suit you?” I realized this was not a man to anger. I’d seen psychopathic personalities before and I felt this was another. He was a cold, harsh, brutal man. But what does an old man have to lose but his life? And what was it worth to me, senses failing? My curiosity was my only comfort. “Done. You start and make it quick. They might be after me.” “Who?” I stopped short. I remembered the old stories about the man with three wishes and how he squandered them. I’d have to be very careful in what I said and did. “Sorry. You’re in the park. This is park bench 37.” He furrowed his brows slightly. “When am I?” “What?” “When am I?” he repeated. “What year is it?” “1976, October twelfth.” “1976? Damn, those fremming bastards really hated me.” He slammed a fist into his other cupped hand producing a loud, smashing noise. The power of that blow hinted at how strong this black-visaged man was. “My turn,” I hastily said. “When are you from?” “2134. 135-487 in 2134, but that doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re still on the old calendar.” The man was from the future. Things began clicking into place. Here was a man apparently trapped in a time almost 160 years in his past. He tore me out of my reverie with his next question. “Do you use credit cards or money?” “Both, but we’re slowly going more and more to credit cards.” “Can you steal money?” “Sorry, my turn.” I was gaining far more in- formation than he was, I was sere of that. “What crime were you convicted of?” He sneered at me. “I killed a couple people. One of them happened to be an Eternal. That’s somebody allowed to live out their full thousand-year lifespan. Now, can I steal money in 1976?” I nodded. “You can steal it from banks, places where money is stored, that is.” No sense in letting this jackal loose on unsuspecting people. Let him tangle with the feds and people able to handle him. “Why did you take off the time-travel jacket?” “The jumpjac? If I’d returned in it, they would have brain-wiped me. This way, I’m exiled for however long I can stay alive, but I’m me. Me, damn them! Those hypocrites hate killing but don’t think it’s not crueler being stranded among savages or having your entire personality destroyed. But then, maybe they do think it’s crueler than killing and that’s why they do it.” Things were beginning to form a nice picture now. The people of the future exiled their criminals into 1976 rather than imprisoning or executing them. God, they must hate us up there in the future. Or maybe they just consider it fair putting animals together with other animals. The ones I’d seen dropped onto my park bench were fairly typical twentieth-century specimens. “What kind of weapons do you have? Laserifles? Meson disruptors?” I hesitated. He’d find out this soon enough. He was that type. “Nope. Just lead pellet spitting gadgets called guns. Guns, knives. Might be some other stuff out in the streets, but I wouldn’t know about that.” I watched his lips thin to a slash, the kind a knife would leave. “How often do criminals get sent back?” “Whenever someone gets convicted and sentenced. No particular time interval. My girl friend was convicted with me and should be along in a day or two. Who do I see about getting a gun?” “Damned if I know. You might wait until night and ask someone then. Most of them would know.” I silently added, most of them will gladly divide your throat for you, too. “Why do your criminals get sent back to now, 1976, and not some other time?” “The time-travel gadget’s only good for a cou- ple hundred years. I don’t know how they decide when to send someone.” He shivered in the icy blast that rummaged through the park. “Where can I find shelter until nightfall?” I motioned in the direction of the Faithful Shepherd bread line. “Some people over in that direction will feed you and give you a place to sleep.” His growing nervousness made me uneasy. He might decide to kill me and take my coat, tacky as it was. ' I hurriedly asked, “Don’t the people running things in 2134 worry about time paradoxes?” “How the hell should I know?” Without another word, he stalked off in the direction I’d in- dicated. Brother Albert would feed him, I was sure. Albert would have fed a crazed tiger bent only on killing. I laughed out loud, my laugh totally lacking any humor. Albert would be feeding such an animal. I sat for a while longer, thinking about the conversation. I had answers that seemed adequate to all my questions. The man could have been an escapee from a funny farm, but I had seen the jump- jac, as he called it, vanish. I had seen him appear out of nowhere. It was easy to believe he had told the truth. My mind drifted to the future. What was it really like? He had killed a person who somehow had been granted a thousand-year lifespan. That must mean an incredible medical technology. Since the world was still around, no great war had destroyed human life. Indeed, it seemed they were more peaceful and civilized than we are. I didn’t appreciate them dumping their social debris on us, but perhaps we were the logical place for a criminal. We had the police, we were violent. It certainly explained the question I had pondered so many times about crime increasing faster than population. We had not only our own homegrown crooks, but vicious criminals from the future as well. My mind wandered for a bit as I sighted a vee of geese flying overhead, 'the wedge driving into the setting sun. That made me consider something else. Another criminal, a woman, would be coming to in- habit my park bench in a day or two. She was prob- ably a murderer, too, just like her boyfriend. And she would have a jumpjac. The magic time-traveling apparatus built into a simple jacket. The solution to my dreary existence came to me in an instant. Jerry and dear Patricia might wonder where I went, why my body was never found, but they wouldn’t mourn long. They were too caught up in their mediocre, hypnotized middle-class existence. The pigeons would miss me, but someone else would come by. They always did. I knew I’d miss my park bench, my home for so many years. But I would be leaving for the future, which I would otherwise never see. I knew that my curiosity would force me to snatch the jump- jac from the woman and disappear into the future. Who knows? They might kill me. My days are numbered anyway. They might wipe my brain clean, a tabula rasa. I would lose nothing in that case; I simply wouldn’t remember being me. They might even give me a youthful body; it was within their power. Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be dull. I’m starting my vigil tomorrow and I’ll keep my eyes glued on the far end of park bench 37, waiting. Waiting and watching for the future. (0 63 IT WAS A TOUGH CASE, BUT THE PRIVATE EYE KNEW HE'D CRACK IT, ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS COMB 21ST-CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO IN SEARCH OF . . , Three Bananas by Larry Tritten B ananas. Nobody even remembered what they were. That was the ironic part. Banana was a word like “puttee” or “condominium” or “jogging.” It was part of the past. Oh, sure, there were a few old-timers here and there who dimly remembered them and still made an occasional wistful reference to them, but the word wasn’t really a part of the language anymore. The average person wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what you meant if you described Zeon Doon as a top banana or if you said that a disc of dreamol made you go bananas. Bananas had been gone for seventy-five years. All of the world’s fruit had been destroyed forever in the Wars of Commerce, and the Wars of Commerce were remote history, like World War IIIV2, the Oil Wars, or the War of Janet’s Pants. Bananas had been a little bit harder to kill than most of the other kinds of fruit; they had lingered on in a few coun- tries for a couple of years after the initial blights wiped out apples, peaches, cherries, and the rest, but in the end all of it was gone, and it hadn’t seemed to matter much since there were so many new and zany kicks to make up for the loss: a whole spectrum of fulgurant drugs that played the central nervous system like a pinball machine and all sorts of mind bangers and sensibility stingers. The world had forgotten all about bananas. But some of us were just about to start learning. It all started with a phone call. It was one of those cold, dark San Francisco days featuring a sky the color of wet ashes and the kind of aggressive wind that slaps you around like a sparring partner, and I was entrenched in my Irving Street office tip- pling snifters of rocksauce and trying to forget about unpaid bills and unfulfilled dreams. The phone rang and I caught it in the middle of the second ring, not because I had any interest in talking to anyone but because I figured the sound of a ringing bell would be more annoying than some- one’s voice. I was right. The party on the other end said something in an undertone so soft; and inconspicuous it was like listening to the voice of my conscience. “You’ll have to play that again,” I told him. “Then maybe we can turn this into a dialogue.” The voiee registered a bit more clearly this time, but it still sounded like someone in the wings delivering a stage whisper. “Is this Rad Sway speaking?” “It’s Sway speaking,” I said. “Who’s this listening?” “This is Isham van Bourke,” the voice said. It was a hesitant voice, the customary style for clients with confidential stories to tell. A private in- vestigator is a professional confidant, like a priest or a psychiatrist. They all get to hear lots of hair- raising tales about sex and money, the two most favorite topics in every culture sophisticated enough 64 Illustration by Larry Blizard Three Bananas to have income taxes and birth control. I waited for Isham van Bourke to tell me something that would stimulate my interest, and he did. “I would like to retain you,” he said, loosening up a little as he forged on. “At your usual fee— uh, whatever that is ...” “That is expenses and ten bucks an hour, cash in advance, no stamps, food coupons, IOUs, heartfelt promises, or hot merchandise,” I said, wanting to get that straight from the outset. I once spent two weeks tumbling down stairs and dodging bullets for a blonde in Mill Valley who paid me in horizontal favors, which was great except that I subsequently had to hock everything but my hat and mattress to keep my practice afloat. Van Bourke was upset. “I always pay cash,” he said quickly and firmly. The knowledge warmed me considerably. “Do you want to talk about this on the wire?” I asked. “Or do you want t» pull your collar up "around your neck and meet me in the shadows somewhere?” “I’ll be in your office in fifteen minutes,” he said. “If that’s all right with you.” “That’s fine,” I said, and hung up. I put away the rocksauce and got up from behind the desk and walked around the room, checking out the way the office looked. Van Bourke sounded like a man who hailed from green fields and you had to humor the type, make them feel comfortable so they could throw their money around more easily. I made some neat piles out of a lot of mail and magazines and assorted scraps of paper on my desk, dusted the foundering filing cabinet (termites) against the wall, and turned the radio on low, tuning in KSEA, the station that programs only the sounds of the sea. They were doing the beaches of Southern England and there were some very nice breakers coming in, perfect for a relaxed mood. I got back behind my desk and cultivated a seasoned and professional look. I heard van Bourke coming down the hallway, torturing the antique floorboards with every step, and saw the dark shape of him through the opaque glass in the office door before he knocked. He came into the room cautiously, like a show poodle entering a garbage dump. To say that he was pale and fat would be to understate. He was the col- or of bone china and too wide to reach around. He got, somehow, into the chair across from me and flashed a tight smile of greeting. He was wearing a suit the color of dried blood that fit like a tent. On its lapel there was a gold pin: a drumstick crossed with a loaf of bread inside a wreath of sausages, and underneath the phrase bon viand. “Mr. van Bourke,” I said, and nodded. Van Bourke nodded. “Hello.” He was going to need coaxing, I could tell. He wasn’t used to bringing his dirty laundry into anybody’s office. I smiled at him and said evenly, “Why don’t you tell me about it, whatever it is, and we can float with it.” That seemed to relax him some. He tilted back in the chair, which made a sound like a cruiser nudg- ing a dock, and composed a melancholy expression. “I guess I should start at the beginning,” he said. “You could start in the middle— if I were clair- voyant,” I said brightly. Passing that up, he let his gaze drift around the office for a couple of seconds, and when he had himself all coordinated, said in a dignified voice, “What I want you to do is check into a matter for me. And I suppose the best way to get at this is to introduce myself first—” He gave me a sudden sharp glance. “I don’t happen to look f£.miliar to you?” “Nope.” He seemed disappointed. “Well, I’m the editor of a magazine, Mr. Sway. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Vittles & Viands, the magazine of victuals. We’re dedicated to presenting a shamelessly gustatory ap- proach to eating— to fine dining, I should say. For us, you see, food is a very serious thing. . .” So much I could see by his dimensions. “Food,” he went on, letting the word melt in his mouth like pure ambrosia, “is something I’ve devoted my life to. It is, you might well say, my vocation, avocation, pastime, forte, and pleasure. If you can understand that, you will be able to see just how important this whole matter is to me.” I nodded, absorbing it and waiting for him to go on. “S & M’s?” I said, offering him a package of those little candy-coated chocolate drops, the kind that are stamped with an image of a dominatrix and melt in the hand, not the mouth. Van Bourke waved them a.side with a limp gesture and said pointedly, “I should rather talk about bananas for the moment.” “Bananas?” I got a fix on the word, probed the back of my mind for connections, and came up with a dim memory: that long yellow fruit people used to eat. “Why bananas?” I asked. Van Bourke eased back in his chair, a smile touching his lips. “Because I think there are bananas somewhere in this city,” he said. “And I would be willing to pay a delicious sum to have this in- vestigated. I can’t emphasize that too much.” I gave him back his smile. “It sounds more and more interesting.” Van Bourke let his hand slip furtively into his coat pocket, and the pale fingers came out with some photographs that he held low in his lap and facing away from me like a man with a, hot poker hand. Then he handed them to me and watched with a 66 “Bananas?” I got a fix on the word, probed the back of my mind for connections, and came up with a dirn memory: that long yellow fruit people used to eat. “Why bananas?” I asked. troubled expression as I turned them over. They sur- prised me. They looked like shots from one of those sex-dream layouts in one of the better men’s maga- zines— Playboy or Decor or Wit & Bawd: two young women, one wearing nothing but black riding boots and a diadem of guindrops in her waves of blond hair and one in a coal-black, skin-tight leather body suit with minimal slits for the eyes and a mouth visor, and a man, nude, all tangled together on a bed whose sheets looked like they had hosted a stam- pede. The photograph s were not the best. They had a fuzzy, unfocused look that made them hard to ap- preciate. I put them face up on the desk, one at a time, all five of them, and glanced up at Van Bourke. “Well, you didn’t come here to sell these.” “Look at them again,” he said. I looked at them again, browsing through the background detail this time, then saw what he was getting at. The three revelers were in an expensive king-size bed with an opulent brass frame that shone like polished gold. I;r> the background was an in- distinct wall, colorless in shadow, and the only other thing to see was part of a nightstand to the left. There was a phone on the stand and beside it a white dish with something in it. Three long yellow objects. “Bananas,” van Bourke nodded, tapping one of the pictures. “Here in this dish. You see them, don’t you?” “I see them,” I said, “but I’m not so sure they’re bananas.” He frowned. His voice became firm. “But they are bananas. I know they are bananas. I believe they are bananas. Musa paradisiaea sapientum—in the peel, by God! I was there in the theater, took these pictures— which are, admittedly, not exceptionally good. But I thought the important thing was to get something on film before the opportunity passed.” His eyes sought mine and his voice rose with dramatic emphasis. “These pictures were taken in the Calliope Theater. I went back a second night to get them and took five shots off the screen. They lose something in the translation, I admit, but when I was there in that theater, seeing them on the screen, they were, I assure you, much more palpable and plainly authentic.” I said, “You took these pictures in a porno theater?” Van Bourke nodded. “I was there the night before last. That’s when I noticed the dish. I went back last night with a camera.” I admired his spirit, but I couldn’t help think- ing about wild geese. Van Bourke sensed my skep- ticism and nodded knowingly, removing his wallet from his coat and holding it up with some ostenta- tion. “You think I’m eccentric or enigmatic or perhaps just somewhat ridiculous,” he said, smiling wanly, “but the fact is I can afford to pay your price, Mr. Sway. I have a fine gourmet’s instinct for the near presence of an exotic comestible, and even though all logic, sense, and precedent would seem to dispute me, I am going to side with that instinct. I will not claim to know how or why there should be bananas in a world that has forgotten the word, but there is something here, something ...” He paused and stared at the air for at least fifteen seconds before going on, “ . . . something portentous and quite important ...” I took the wallet out of his hand, something he scarcely noticed, and holding it in one hand nudged a thumb into the currency vent until I felt the wad of bills, then flicked three out, glimpsed the denomina- tion, nodded, and said, “I’ve got to trace a film back to its source. No problem.” Van Bourke shrugged, frowned. “A film with no credits, one that might have been made by any of scores of errant purveyors of the like. It will involve energetic footwork, persistent queries.” “For bananas,” I said, deadpan. “But bananas, by God!” van Bourke exclaimed with a burst of zeal. “Ah, Mr. Sway, if you could only appreciate this. Do you know that bananas were once as basic to the civilized palate as bread, meat, and omnisweet? The banana was there, everywhere: banana bread, pudding, cake, banana cream pie. It was in frozen confections, ice cream, pastries, candy. Liqueurs. They served banana nirvana at the Hyatt Regency. The flavor was, apparently, exquisitely adaptable. It was, as Andmore Yam says in his Lure, Lore and Life of the Banana, the perfect flavor. No kitchen or table or mouth went without its grace.” He sat up in the Phair and his eyes were wide and clear as he went with the flow. “Can you imagine tasting one?” he asked, and sat back with the impact of the thought. It was a rhetorical question, so I ignored it, tucked the three bills into my shirt pocket, and gave 67 *V Three Bananas my client the self-assured smile I figured he deserved for his money. “I’ll be in touch with you, Mr. van Bourke,” I told him. T he Calliope Theater was in the Tenderloin on Eddy Street. It was listed under Adult The- aters in the movie section of the Chronicle and the ad promised a miscellany of “hot holograms, sizzling celluloid, and sexy surprises.” It sounded in- teresting. I drove over there in my old Caravelle, found a place to park, and walked two blocks, taking care not to look too hard at a hooker in pearls and a black dress with a mandarin collar and cuffs who trailed me for a while. She looked pretty good. The Calliope wasn’t Loew’s Colossus. It was a cracker box of a building that had once been a small shop of some kind. Now the glass doors were painted black and darkly curtained. They opened into a dingy little booth where you bought your ticket, passed through a turnstile, and vanished through curtains into the small screening room where the fantasies were shown. I bought my ticket from a dark voice in the booth, went inside and gave it a chance. A naked blonde with eyes as blue as sapphire ice and hair cut short and glittering with iridescent sequins was drift- ing somnolently above the aisle, reaching down toward the audience, her fingers weaving the air. It was a vivid fantasy, and when it had run its course it faded, leaving wisps and traces of blue light in its wake. A film appeared on the screen down in front. Two women were coming down a ramp from an ocean liner amid a blizzard of confetti and paper streamers. There was no sound— just the ratchety whisper of the projector unwinding film. The women were very young and at first glance very beautiful, but as they came down the ramp toward the crowd on the dock, approaching the camera in extreme close-up, you could see that the makeup was laid on so heavily that they looked like Fauvist ghouls: eyes the color of steel shadowed with dark purple, and grape-colored mouths forcing exaggerated, prurient smiles out of faces as pale as chalk. The faces drifted toward the camera and filled the screen, which went blank, then phased through six blank squares, each a few seconds in duration, citron, lavender, electric blue, bright pink, neon green, and cerise, before fading into an image of both of the women, nude and curled into fetal positions, side by side, fused into the center of a great translucent block of some pale gelatinous substance. In the soft green depth one could see very slight signs of motion, a finger, elbow, the stirring of a foot. The camera moved in and their eyes opened as they peered out in smiling lassitude, lips moving to form mimetic kisses. Not bad, I thought. Arty. Then I was watching three people tumbling around on a big brass bed. I tuned into the action very keenly and when the camera panned past the white dish got a clear look at the yellow objects. I found myself wondering what something so lurid- looking would taste like. Sour? Sweet? Dry? Juicy? I watched for a while as the blonde with gumdrops on her skull was being nibbled over by her companions, then got up and went up the aisle and out to where the ticket seller was laying down a game of solitaire. Peering through the glass that separated us, I made out a pair of harsh eyes in a wasted face beneath a lot of slicked-back hair alight with oil. He smelled like a Tenderloin barbershop. “How’s business?” I asked. His eyes stayed on the cards. No answer. I tried again. “A rat worked over one of my shoes while I was dreaming in the front row. Who do I complain to?” He picked up a card and turned it over, and when it was down gave me a quick nasty glance as he turned over the next one. “Beat it,” he said. I lighted a wooden match on the side of the ticket booth and fired a cigarette and blew the smoke at the glass. “Yeah?” “Yeah,” he said, but there was more irritation than conviction in his voice and now he sized me up. That gave him the notion to ease up a bit. “Didn’t like the show?” he ventured. “Loved it,” I said. “Especially the part where the man in the glass booth realizes just how serious life can be.” I backed that up with the kind of ex- pression a barracuda makes biting into a tin can and tapped the glass a couple of times to make sure he was wide awake. “Who owns this trap?” I added. “Owns?” He caught his lower lip with his teeth and shot a glance at the stairs going up to the pro- jection room. “I’m listening,” I said. “You— you got an appointment?” he faltered. I rapped the glass again, impatiently this time, enough to sit him up straight. He took a deep breath and said, “Ahhh— well, Mr. Saracen is upstairs now. But he don’t, he—” I left him struggling with his grammar and went up the narrow spiral stairs in the darkness to the next floor where a corridor led to the projection room and another door at the far end behind which a tinny little radio was blaring out Dry Stone’s latest blues tune, The Prisoner of Brenda. I rapped the door twice with my knuckles. A voice came back with, “Yeah?” in a noncommittal monotone, and I opened the door and went inside. It was a hot, tight little room with just enough space for a desk and the man behind it. He had a face that a mother might be able to love: a skulker’s 68 | eyes, a nose that had been broken as many times as an ingenue’s heart, and a dull mouth that wouldn’t waste much time with smiles. His desk was littered with papers and the papers were littered with ashes and covered with coffee stains and chewed-up toothpicks. He was wearing an expensive Scott Lee shingle tweed that was lost on him. He looked sur- prised to see a stranger, but that didn’t change his expression much. “I don’t know you,” he said to the wall behind me. I held out a hand. “Roth Saint-James Place,” I introduced myself while he looked over the hand. I was about to put it away but then he shook it briskly and released it and sat back. “Barney sent you up here?” “I found my way. Barney isn’t social.” “Who’re you?” His gaze was empty, flat. “Well ...” There wasn’t another chair so I relaxed my stance and put the cigarette between my lips, working on a faint smile. “I was watching your program downstairs,” I said. “Some very interesting stuff. Not the usual product. I’ve seen my share of loops, but there’s a little something extra there ...” He looked at me with vague curiosity. “Yeah? You a film buff?” “Writer,” I said. “The thing is, I’m doing a rundown for Light & Shadow on porn films. The ones with a little class and style. I’d like to talk to a couple of filmmakers, do an interview or two. For starters, it’s pretty clear that whoever makes your j loops has got some kind of unique imagination and an attitude toward his stuff that puts him out of the hack league.” “You think so?” he said thoughtfully. “The style shews through. I’d like to talk to him, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.” He considered it and looked annoyed. It would definitely be trouble, his eyes told me— but I sensed that I could ease the pain by making it worth his while. “I’m a freelance writer,” I told him. “I don’t make a lot of money.” My wallet was in my hand and he was watching through narrowed eyes as I slipped a bill out. “It’s worth a seventy-nine Ford,” I said. “Tops.” I started to pass him the green, but he had it in his hand with a conjurer’s dexterity sooner than I could make the move. He tucked it away in his coat without looking at it and leaned back in the chair to dig something out of his other pocket. He handed me the card and I held it up to read. There was a name, Cinemagic, and a phone number, 347-14-769323. In the upper left-hand corner a mo- tion picture was spilling out flowers and fruit onto the name and number. “This nut shoots all my loops,” the man behind the desk said. “Nick Malmsey. Good man. Used to be the best cameraman Electropix had working for them till a hologram exploded, iced his eyes out. No depth perception now, but he’s got a good mind’s eye for composition.” “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give him a call.” “He loves to talk,” he said, making it sound like a warning. “Thanks,” I said again, and went out and down the corridor. Just to make sure the projec- tionist was on his toes I rattled the door as I passed by and snarled, “Focus th’ goddamned thing!” I could hear him grumbling through the door all the way to the bottom of the stairs. Outside it was summer on the street. There would be wind on the bay tonight, but the air in the Tenderloin was as thick as a blanket. Neon cocktail glasses hovered in the air in front of all the bars, pouring out their pink and green bubbles, which winked out or floated away as fading scintillas of ef- fervescence. Drifters, panhandlers, dreamers, rum hounds, vags, hookers, prowlers, idlers, fixers and d.p.’s roamed the streets. There was pie in the sky this evening. They’d programmed a slice of vanilla cream and it was drifting in the dark sky over the Embarcadero, a mile-long wedge of phantasmal light, dripping clouds of frosting that dwindled away like vapors. I stood there watching the apparition un- til I became aware of someone standing behind me and a little off to one side. “Don’t turn around,” he whispered. “It would be dumb. What you want to do is move down the block . . . the parked Halberd. Get in. Watch the sidewalk. Do it right and. I won’t have to do anything dangerous.” It was a voice you wouldn’t want to debate with. I walked to the Halberd and opened the door. “You drive,” he snapped. I slid over behind the wheel and sat thebe. The keys were in the ignition. He slid in beside me and sat there with his eyes on me. His smile was civilized but his eyes might have belonged to a Visigoth. He was wearing a pink shirt with black sharks on it and a pair of white slacks. “You’re smart,” he said. He showed me the 69 Three Bananas .45. “Keep smart, stay smart. Or I’ll open your breadbox.” He kept smiling. “I’ll assume you know what a .45 slug can do. That’s why they still make them— since 1911. And it’s all you need, mac. You can keep your .56 Minim, your Belgrade Windjam- mer, .33 Firebrand, and all the rest.” I nodded sagely. He ran a paw over my suit and came up with my wallet and my .38. He put the gun in the glove box and looked through the wallet, handed it back. “A dick. I figured.” “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” I said. He put his fingers under my chin and turned my face to the side. “I’m not a good audience, dick. I’ll rock you.” His smile was as hard as the Tenderloin pavement. I got the idea. We drove, at his direction, across Van Ness and up toward Pacific Heights. The house he pointed out was a big French bonbon with doors and win- dows and balconies. We went up the flagstone steps and inside. We paused at the ^bottom of the stairway while he fished a pair of cuffs out of his pocket, shackled one of my wrists and locked the other around a standing antique iron lamp an ocean liner could have used for an anchor. He went up the stairs. There wasn’t much to look at— just the stair- way and another corridor, both lost in shadow. I didn’t wait long before he came back down the stairs. He looked puzzled. He sat on the steps and tossed me the key to the cuffs. “It’s over,” he said. I unlocked the cuffs and stood watching him. He looked up at me and shrugged. “Damn.” He shook his head. “Damn.” “I don’t get it,” I said. “He’s dead, dick.” “Dead.” Who’s dead? I wondered. “Never mind.” His face was red and he looked embarrassed. “I got no personal interest in this,” he declared. He sat for a while, then said, “Hell, I need a drink. Drive you back downtown if you don’t ask any questions.” He drove me back into the Tenderloin. Neither of us said a word during the ride and when I got out of the car, he put his head out the window and called out to me on the sidewalk, “Stay away from that house. It’s hotter than a Death Valley barbecue ...” I waved and said, “Drop me a card.” I watched the car turn a corner and then got in a parking lot phone booth, folded the doors shut, and dialed the number on the Cinemagic card. Six rings and I was ready to hang up, but then a tired voice sighed into my ear, “Yeah, speaking ...” “I’m looking for Nick Malmsey,” I said. “Me,” he said, “You’re lookin’ for me. So who’s lookin’?” 70 I told him that I was writing a piece on loops for Light & Shadow, that he was an unappreciated Leonardo of the lens, and I was here to put a cor- nerstone under his name. He was tired, he said, he’d been in the darkroom for hours sifting fantasies out of the tray, but he wasn’t too tired to talk to a guest who cared about his work and brought a bottle of tangerine green. N ick lived out by the ocean on the Sundown side of Golden Gate Park. It was a building that would have made an architect weep. Square, yellow, and dirty. The facade had that eczematous look that old stucco acquires when the seaside winds have worked it over for a couple of decades. The windows were opaque smudges, and the shrubs out in front were stunted and hunch- backed, the deep green worn out of them by wind- blown sand. There was no bell. I tried the door and found it open, walked up to the apartment and knocked. Nick opened the door. He was a slight, polite- looking man with a garland of hair on a balding dome. His leather and velvet jump suit, orange and umber, make him seem perhaps a few years younger than he was, but there was a tranced look in his eyes that spoiled the effect. “Hey, man.” He smiled, and slid his palm into mine. “Make yourself homey. Let’s drink and talk.” I sat on a couch whose cushions were going slack with age and uncorked the tan, looking about for glasses. “Hell, let’s use the bottle,” Nick said, and I knew exactly where he was: a man with no use for pretense. We passed the bottle back and forth while I asked Nick questions. It wasn’t long before he was talking enthusiastically about his work, anticipating the questions and making it unnecessary for me to do anything but listen. He was a man with a craft who was eager to talk about it, to explain the mean- ing of it, and I felt just a little bit bad about leading him because he was one of those rare people with a genuine sense of excitement. “So now’m doing loops,” he said wistfully but not bitterly as the level of tan reached the halfway point on the bottle’s label. “But I don’t shoot ’em and run. I try to keep the scenarios inventive— maybe with a tendency toward the bizarre, the sur- real. And I use beautiful men and women, and costumes, nice clothing— chiffon and velvet, floral silks, and soft body lights. It’s the shine of black leather and mist of pink nylon, the wedding of fashion and sex that gives eroticism a flavor of art.” “One of the things I noticed right away about your stuff,” I said. “Exotic costumes.” I took the bottle he handed me and took a belt. “The model She was as tall as I am and wore an emerald green dress that showed plenty of leg and a cleavage that would dispel any notion that she was shy. “Hi,” she said eloquently. with the crown of gumdrops. Very nice ...” I let a thoughtful moment pass and then said, “Where do the models come from? I’d like to talk to one.” “Nara, the one you mention,” he said, “is pret- ty typical. She’s twenty-three, experimenting with life. She made a few loops with me last year when she lost her job. Lived with a guy until it went down the tube, filed papers for a while, then back for a few more loops last month.” “Where’d you shoot the one with the brass bed?” Nick paused. “Well,” he said finally, “that one was different. Yeah . . . really. We were all stoned on that one. Shot it at a big pad in Pacific Heights- just the other day. Nara was going with someone with a lot of dough — name of Domino Londos. He wanted to watch a session and he made it worth our while. Turned into kind of a kink party. Everybody was higher than NASA.” He paused, then added, “But that’s not common. He made an offer I couldn’t refuse, y’know?” “Money talks.” I nodded, sipping from the bot- tle. I gave it to Nick. “This guy’s money shouts,” he said. He upend- ed the bottle and finished the liquor. “You want to talk to Nara?” he asked. “Uh-huh,” I said. “That all?” He grinned. I was turning that one over and working up an answer when he suddenly laughed. “Well, hell, you’re human,” he said. “Yeah, talk to Nara. She’s friendly. Got a sense of humor. She’s okay. I’ll give you her phone.” He wrote her phone number and address at the top of a page in a book, tore the page out and gave it to me. Page 79 of Popcorn Epistemology. “Practice of mine,” he said, “to give a little food for thought with the information.” I folded the page and tucked it away. “Thanks,” I said. “I guess it’s getting late.” “I’ll watch for your piece,” he told me at the door, smiling, amiable, pleased to have found a listener. “Keep up the good work,” I told him, feeling like a real son of a bitch going down the steps. T here was fog in the air but birdsong in the fog as I parked in front of Nara Sands’s place next morning. She lived on the cor- ner of Jackson and Santa Monica in an ultra-chic combination Spanish/Hollywood/Gothic cottage that someone with a vivid sense of exoticism had painted a soft lilac, so that it seemed to be seen through a violet filter. The neat lawn was violet as well and so was everything in the small garden- out front; and the papier mache jacaranda tree that shaded the front door was in full violet bloom. I walked across the pastel scape up to the front door in the fog and rang a doorbell that touched off a quiet chime inside the house. The door opened and the woman who looked out at me smiled. Friendly. She was something more than pretty. Lovely perhaps. Her colors were all win- try: long hair so pale it seemed somewhere between the lightest gold and the richest silver, skin the color of pale rose, eyes full of pale blue light. She was as tall as I am and wore an emerald green dress that showed plenty of leg and a cleavage that would dispel any notion that she was shy. “Hi,” she said eloquently. “Hello.” , Her smile stayed put. “Well, you don’t look like a salesman.” “I tried to call first,” I told her. “There wasn’t any answer, so I went for a drive— and stopped by.” “I was out in the garden in back,” Nara said. “Watching things grow.” “In the fog?” “Sure.” I went inside and as I followed her through a hallway into another part of the house, she said. “Nick called. So I know about you, in case you’re wondering.” We emerged in a room whose floor was a white sand beach. A Pacific horizon was programmed on one wall, the water white with reflected sunlight, the day hot. There was a gentle sound of the waves coming in and the cry of seabirds. The only furniture was two big palm trees and a portable bar. “You don’t mind talking out here?” she said, then smiled and extended her hand. “I’m Nara. Anyway, some of the time. Sometimes I do masque films— then I’m Liza Rd.” “What’s your real name?” “It isn’t Chastity,” she smiled. She met my gaze and held it as her smile defined her mood. She eased my name out of her mouth. “Rad.” Warmly. I looked around for something to sit on. I needed it. But there was just the beach. “C’mon, sit,” said Nara, taking my hand, and I gingerly eased down beside her on the beach. She 71 •V I Three Bananas took off her shoes and in as much time as it takes to open an eye had slipped herself out of her dress and was stretching her legs in the sand. Every part of her that wasn’t concealed by three small triangles of black silk was the color of polished copper. I sat beside her and she took my hand between hers. “You don’t know what to make of it, right?” she said. I didn’t know what to say. “Rad, don’t say anything,” she said. “I know you’re not a writer.” There was a tremor in her hands. Her eyes darkened and her smile sank with the light dimming in her eyes. “I’m not so easy,” she said, apologizing, and put her cheek on my shoulder. She shuddered and I held her lightly. Her heart was beating swiftly and her fingers moved along the edge of my jaw, touching me with trust, seeking something. I grazed my lips through her hair and she clung. She was afraid and confused and it was hard to resist the lure of her, so I followed those old in- stincts and went with her guidance into the lodes where the gold lay buried. She was all gold and when we opened our eyes again in the burning sunlight her smile was placid, she was calm and steady again. “Want a drink?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. She plodded through the hot sand to the bar and I waited until she came back with two frosted glasses. “Cheers,” she said, touching her glass to mine. How can I describe that drink? The heavy sweetness of rum flavored with a taste so subtle it seemed to fade the moment it registered. Yet it was strangely . . . memorable. “What is this?” I asked Nara. “Banana daiquiri,” she said. “Like it?” I didn i say anything and after a few seconds her mouth twisted into a flat, taut line. “We were like toys to that son of a bitch,” she said with sudden anger. “Like those old mechanical banks you put a coin into. Performing toys.” She sipped her drink. “He was all hands and ego— push, grab, take. He didn’t even know how to play an orgy. Money was all he knew. His idea of sex was using someone— manipulation. There are diamonds in the coal, Rad, moths fly with the butterflies— but he didn’t know that. When he found out he didn’t have a couple of slaves, he got pretty weird, ugly. He beat Mustela up, broke her nose. He was like a mad wolf. I hit him with the nearest thing I could find. It was the blender I mixed these daiquiris in.” I was watching her as I listened. She had it all under control now as she went on; there was no regret. “That was a couple of days ago in his place in Pacific Heights. Know what I did with the two bananas we aren’t drinking? His priceless bananas.” I shook my head. “I could’ve traded them for the Hope diamond,” she said, smiling faintly. “Well ... I took them to the Nicaraguan embassy ... I would think just in time, too. They were getting brown.” “The Nicaraguan embassy?” I said. She nodded and said, “I couldn’t think of a better place. Mr. Mendoza said they’d be taken care of. That’s where bananas used to come from, you know— N icaragua. ’ ’ I nodded. “Yeah. I’m wondering how you knew who I am.” “Not who you are,” she said. “Who you aren’t. When Domino realized that his bananas were on film, film that was being shown, he got a little crazy. He was convinced somebody would see the film and know what they were seeing. And come looking. It was all an accident. We were all so high on snappers and Immelmans that nobody thought about moving the fruit dish. It was—” she smiled and shrugged, “—an orgy ...” It all graphed. Londos had his man watch the Calliope to field anybody who might show up with questions about the loop. But when he took me to Londos’ s house he found his boss dead— which wrapped it all up as far as he w as concerned. Nara went on, “They belonged to a collector of objets d’fruit—a wealthy guy whose hobby was col- lecting art that depicts fruit. He paid him enough to buy a fleet of Ferraris for them. They’d been cryogenically suspended for seventy-five years. Domino just thawed them a day before our photo session. He was going to put on a yellow suit, drop some wig fizz, and eat them while watching The Gang’s All Here, that old Busby Berkeley flick with the banana ballet in it. The ultimate trip.” She gave me a curious smile. “And that’s it. Except I still don’t know who you are. I’d say you’re okay. I’m that perceptive ... You get that way ...” She let the implication fade and her smile stayed put, melan- choly highlighting her beauty like the last rose in a tragic garden. “I’m a dick on a case,” I said. “My client is a gourmet.” “A detective.” She said the word flatly, and lowered her eyes. “So I guess it’s the Big House for me.” I thought about that and chuckled. “Nara, I’m not the law. And insecticide isn’t my jurisdiction. I’m a guy trying to make a living. You know?” I crossed the room and stood by the door in the sand, pausing, then came back toward her and reached out and touched her cheek. The blue light in her eyes was bright enough to blind me for a moment. She could be trouble, sure, but then so could anybody. Milkmaids and princesses. We’re all people. “I’d like to see that old Busby Berkeley film,” I said. “If you’re not doing anything, how’d you like to?” (0 72 tljejejp rETE 1RASNIC TE. THE LUCKY ONES, THEY SAY, DIE IN BED. THE UNLUCKY SIMPLY LOSE THEIR WAY. C harlotte woke up confused, inexplicably on the verge of tears. She stared up at the ceil- ing, at the thin network of arms and legs crosshatched over the dusky blue paint, and at a small oval face bobbing in and out of the center— a face whose features she could not quite distinguish. * Its cheek-lines wavered as if* the face were wailing, terrified. She blinked, saw that the shadow was that of the naked tree limbs outside their window. The face was no doubt merely a clump of leaves bobbing in the wind. She almost chuckled over her foolish morn- ing fantasy, but was unable to bring herself to break the stillness with any sound. Will was sleeping; his undisturbed rest was important. Then Charlotte looked around in surprise. It was not morning as she had expected; it was the middle of the night. She’d never awakened in the middle of the night, not since she’d been married. She’d had trouble sleeping the last few years before her marriage; she’d heard things, seen things, awakened from nightmares, and sometimes unable to sleep at all had stayed up the entire night. But things were so much calmer since she’d met Will; she’d slept like an exhausted child with him beside her. The bedroom at night seemed totally un- familiar, someone else’s territory, someone else’s home. The furniture was unrecognizable; the dark bureau, thick-backed chair, clothes hamper full of shadows were not hers, she was sure of it. They seemed deceptively similar to the things she had fur- nished the room with during the day, but not quite the same. Not quite. Something seemed wrong here. She turned her head slightly, careful not to awaken him, and watched Will’s face as his chest rose, nose barely moving with his shallow breaths, right hand pressed protectively against her side. He appeared to be fine. Why was she being so silly? There was nothing wrong with the room, or Will. It was her: she shouldn’t be awake now. She just wasn’t used to it. Then she remembered she had had a dream. 74 It was unusual for her to remember any of her dreams; she’d awaken some mornings vaguely aware that she had had one, and usually also knowing whether it had been a pleasant dream or a nightmare. But even though this one was so sharp and vivid— she remembered every detail— she wasn’t sure which of those two categories it fit. Her eyes darted towards the ceiling and the gentle movement of limb shadows there. It had been a dream about a long— no, an endless gray tunnel filled with people. The people weren’t standing, but flying, or maybe, swimming through the tunnel, horizontally, coming from both directions. They were all naked, and you could see through their bodies occasionally, as if their skin were made of gauze, and they were passing before a candle flame. Thousands of people, massed together in this corridor, yes, that’s what it must have been, a passageway from one place to another. And so crowded that the peo- ple were bumping into each other, hurting each other. That idea made Charlotte shiver involuntarily. Then she remembered the one face bobbing up and down in the midst of all that confusion, a face she was sure she recognized, staring out at her as if aware of her presence. But she couldn’t visualize that face for the moment. Wasn't it . . . yes ... it had been screaming, contorted in pain. She found herself snuggling closer to Will, hoping this wouldn’t awaken him. Will wasn’t the kind of person to be disturbed over a dream; in fact, he reveled in them, even the nightmares. Each morning as soon as he woke he’d hastily scribble down what he remembered, and he usually seemed to remember them all. Later he would read over his notes, type them up in more presentable form, and study them for patterns, recurring imagery, hidden messages. He thought of it as an adventure, a journey into some uncharted country. He loved it. His interest in dreaming he,d always disturbed Charlotte. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but it had something to do with i;he intense involve- ment he had in this solitary activity. It was an area of his life she could not participate in, ' and he Illustration by D. W. Miller wouldn’t want her to. And he seemed somehow dif- ferent after his dreams, as if it were some stranger waking up beside her. The thought surprised her, but she knew it was true. She coughed, turned her head to the wall, and— afraid of losing him— began to cry. Will suddenly stirred beside her, began moving his legs, then jerked his head off the pillow, “Whaaaa ...?” He shook his head side to side, reached over with his right hand, and flipped on the bedside light. He turned to her and stared, groggily rubbing at his eyes and cheekbones. “What . . . what’s going on? I was . . . sound asleep. Dreaming.” She felt guilty for waking him up, but angry at him as well. Why should she have to apologize? He stopped moving around and reached out to her, stroking her forehead. “What’s the matter, honey? Have a nightmare?” She. just looked at him, her lips tight, knowing her eyes must be red from th^ crying but not caring; in fact, hoping he would notice. “You know, it might help if you just tried to accept your dreams, enter into them fully. That way you won’t be so frightened of them; you might even learn things from them. Important things.” “Go back to bed, Will,” she spat. “Get back to your dreaming. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” He seemed puzzled by her reaction, then hurt. That irritated her all the more. Then he shrugged his shoulders, reached over and turned off the light. “So, okay,” he said. “I don’t want an argument tonight. Talk to you in the morning.” Then he laid his head down, and incredibly soon was fast asleep once again. His dozing so quickly frightened her. She wanted to grab his shoulders, slap him, shake him in- to wakefulness. Why was he doing this to her? Did he want to drive her crazy? harlotte thought of bears hibernating an entire season. The quickness of Will’s sleep, the completeness of it, as if he had fallen back into another world, seemed comparable only to an extreme state. It seemed unnatural for a human, better suited to a monster at the bottom of some pool, dreaming its dark, watery dreams. “Don’t fall asleep, Will,” she whispered breathlessly, though knowing it was too late. She looked at his still face. There was nothing there to show that he loved her. She could find no trace in the closed lids, flaring nostrils, or quiet brow of any memory of her. She was suddenly afraid he had com- pletely forgotten her, that no matter how much she tugged on his sleeping form, how much she wept, he would not come back for her. An endless gray corridor filled with people swimming, their bodies transparent, flowing back and forth . . . She remembered things she had read about out-of-the-body travel, how sometimes when we sleep the soul, the mind leaves the body and travels elsewhere. Or so the theory went. The one face suspended in the crush of arms and legs, looking at her, screaming for help. It had suddenly become lost! She was sure of it. Something had gone wrong; it could not find its way back . . . And what happens if the soul cannot find its way back? Sometimes when she was half asleep she suspected that was why she couldn’t remember her dreams; she was afraid to. The one soul lost, screaming for help . . . now agitating the others, the others aware of something wrong in the stream, something terribly wrong in the order ... the bodies bumping into one another, hurt- ing one another, battering the one. visible face as they travel by, desperately seeking the right exit from the corridor . . . they’d lost them . . . they couldn’t find their proper exits . . . She glanced warily at her husband’s body, almost afraid to examine him. She couldn’t help it; his body seemed nothing more than a way station, a receptacle for his dreaming self, an empty husk act- ing as a gateway for the endless flow of the dream- ing current. The face turning, looking at her, screaming silently, then looming suddenly, so close, so that she knows who it is, she knows it’s Will, it’s her husband Will ... She found herself screaming, crying, ripping at her husband’s pajamas. “Will, get up! Dear God, wake up!” The form on the bed jerked upright, turning its head in her direction. She couldn’t see the eyes because of the darkness, could not tell if there were teeth because the mouth was closed. She desperately wanted to see the eyes; she knew she could be sure if she saw the eyes. The figure reached over with his left hand and flipped on the bedside light. Charlotte stared at her husband as he reached out for her— again, with his left hand. She watched the hand as it came to rest on her shoulder. She looked back into his eyes, and the puzzled look there. “You’re . . . you’re left-handed,” she stated in a monotone. Then the man who was not her husband began examining her face with his trembling hand, and she examined the pale green eyes that were not her hus- band’s as they registered a lack of recognition. She began to cry, this stranger joining in, this man who had taken the wrong exit off the corridor, one too soon, or one too late. 03 76 IS HE A MADMAN ... OR A MESSIAH? PERHAPS THE ANSWER LIES IN THIS CASE HISTORY. j NOTE: This report is strictly confidential, and is for I the information of only the person to whom it is ad- dressed. No responsibility can be accepted if it is made available to any other person— including the patient. Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center 1420 Grattan St. Louis, MO 63104 CASE HISTORY BOYD, TERRELL ADMITTED 1/20/82 5-89-39/8 MALE IDENTIFYING DATA: This is the third MBMHC admission for this 19-year-old, single, unemployed black male, who was transferred from the City Jail for suicidal tendencies. INFORMANTS: Previous records; police files; pa- tient’s mother; patient himself. (Note: Patient is ex- tremely unreliable.) CHIEF COMPLAINT: “The snake in my backbone is biting my mind.” PREVIOUS ADMISSIONS: Two hospitalizations in MBMHC— one for three months in 1979 and one for five months in 1981. 79 . BREAKTHROUGH The first admission was in connection with the death of his 14-year-old sister, who fell out a win- dow. Patient was present in the same room she fell from, and began screaming hysterically and making compulsive gestures. He went totally rigid when an ambulance driver touched his shoulder, and was taken immediately to MBMHC, where he was treated with Haldol, Prolixin, and Cogentin. Patient later explained that he had been hav- ing an argument with his sister because she wouldn’t let him watch the television program he wanted to see. This distressed him because he was scheduled to receive a communique from his secret agent in Atlantis via that particular channel. His sister’s stub- bornness convinced him that she was actually in the pay of his enemies, and he had to protect himself from her. He accomplished this by means of mystic spells which enabled him to “push her with my mind.” His mother testified to the police that patient and his sister were arguing violently, but that he was standing across the room from her when she opened the window for fresh air, suddenly lost her balance, and fell out. Patient was discharged August 27, 1979, with a diagnosis of moderate mental retar- dation, etiology unknown, and with no medications. The patient’s second admission to MBMHC came after he was reported acting in a bizarre fashion on a street corner, telling passersby that he was the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi. Dur- ing this hospitalization, patient caused several dis- turbances. He convinced another patient that he had “cured” her by a “laying on of the hands.” This pa- tient, a 50-year-old woman, demanded immediate release and had to be forcibly restrained when she didn’t get the gate pass she wanted. As a result of the second incident, a nurse with ten years’ service had to be dismissed. She reported to her supervisor that she had seen a halo around the patient’s head, and said an angel should not be locked up in Malcolm Bliss. During that admission, patient refused sug- gested electroconvulsive therapy: “You’re not going to radiate my brains.” ECT not used. Patient was discharged October 10, 1981, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, chronic undifferentiated type, on Pro- lixin Decanoate and Cogentin. PRESENT ILLNESS: Patient admits he drinks on weekends, but denies any use of drugs. His only source of funds is Supplemental Security Income. About two or three weeks ago, he began receiving secret messages from his dead sister in magazines on a newsstand. She was warning him that the Wicked Old Ones were trying to use him to conquer the world, and that he had to be careful to do whatever she told him or he would cause a nuclear holocaust. She also told him that tv is a plot to weaken people’s 80 minds and prepare them to be loyal slaves. He heard his sister’s voice on the radio, and saw her on tv “when she could sneak past the Old Ones.” She sent him visions of the future and was. his guide. She told him who to make friends with and which people to avoid. “-She told me who was really a pawn of the secret masters of the world, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.” She taught him the secrets of the inner life of things. He can see through to utter reality. “What you think you see is just a shadow. You’re the one hallucinating, not me.” Patient believes he is latest in a long line of spiritual leaders, which in- cludes Jesus. “Like Mohammed and Buddha, and guys before what we call history began, and women too. The women didn’t get the attention they de- served, because they were women.” Patient is given to prophecies: “When I’m finally free I’m really go- ing to change things around. This world’s crazier now than when those others were here, and it needs a savior more than ever.” When his sister began telling him to fight back and “kill, kill, kill,” patient became frightened. Still, he appears to have obeyed her. He allegedly stole a shotgun from a neighbor and went out to shoot everybody she told him was “an enemy of the Earth and the People.” He allegedly waved a shotgun at a policeman while shouting insults. Patient is now transferred to MBMHC from City Jail for psychiatric evaluation following a suicide attempt. FAMILY HISTORY: Patient’s father separated from the family 15 years ago. Mother appears to have below average intelligence. Could tell me little about the father except that she was certain he was his parents’ seventh son— making patient, she stated, the seventh son of a seventh son. Patient has one brother in an institution somewhere in Colorado. His other brothers and sister have all required special schools. His mother also receives Supplemental Security Income. “I can’t work on account of my spells.” She is caretaker of an Aid to Families with Dependent Children grant for the two younger children remaining in the home. Both patient’s grandfathers were alcoholics. Records show maternal grandmother committed suicide. PERSONAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY: Patient says his childhood was miserable because the other children always made fun of him. When asked why they teased him so much, patient became evasive. He says he spent most of his time “reading, drawing, playing my guitar, and talking to the birds in Forest Park.” He shows no insight into how this early solitude affected his ability to relate to others, and to reality. When patient was 13, he was the object of His sister’s stubbornness convinced him that she was actually in the pay of his enemies, and he had to protect himsetf from her. He accomplished this by means of mystic spells which enabled him to “push her with my mind.’’ much media attention for being the center of sup- posed “poltergeist” activity, where dishes and many pieces of furniture in the apartment were broken by no visible means. This went on for several weeks, until his mother’s relatives in Mississippi found a “voodoo man” to come up north and perform an “exorcism.” Patient insists that “the Devil tried to enter me, just like that little girl in the movie, but I stopped him.” Not long after, patient had his first serious law violation, when he allegedly raped a girl two years older than himself. He denies the rape, but admits that, even then, a voice in his head was tell- ing him to do “evil, wicked things,” and that his in- ability to attract a girl friend “made me feel like I wasn’t a real man.” Patient has never been employed, although he claims to have looked extensively for work. “Nobody’s hiring. Nobody wants me. But I’d work hard. I really would. They just won’t let me have a chance. They never give me a break. Nobody wants me. Nobody’ll give me a chance.” Patient has had one girl friend. She was his own age, and he went out with her for several months. After she broke up with him, he beat her several times. Patient claims that, one night, he fired into her family’s apartment with a pistol, but “didn’t hurt anybody.” (This incident was never reported to the police.) Afterward, patient realized that “she was a devil messing with my soul. I didn’t want her anymore.” Denies any homosexual tendencies. Patient quit school at 16, on the verge of fail- ing all his subjects. “The teachers hated me for my holiness and my genius and tried to make me even stupider than they were. I wouldn’t let them brain- wash me.” According to his mother, patient is difficult to live with. He spends a lot of time in the bedroom he once shared with a younger brother. He forced the child to sleep on the front room couch so he could be alone. His sleeping patterns are irregular. He will often sleep all day and stay up all night. He is usual- ly quiet, but will sometimes play his guitar after mid- night, or turn his radio on loud. He talks to his dead sister. Sometimes he screams at his mother for no reason, leaves the home, and doesn’t come back for days. She has no idea where he goes at such times. He refuses to discuss this. The mother says patient usually played alone while he was growing up, rarely with his brothers and sister, that he never had any close friends, and that now nobody calls or visits him. When he was a child and she would scold him, he used to tell her: “My God the Father will punish you.” PHYSICAL EXAMINATION: Patient is tall and well-developed. Looks older than stated age. (See at- tached computer sheet.) MENTAL STATUS: On admission patient wore dir- ty jeans and an old shirt. Despite the freezing weather, at the time of his arrest he had on only a light jacket. He was awake and alert and well oriented to time, place, and person. No noticeable speech impairment: patient kept up a steady and rapid flow of words, but they were easily understood. The trend of his thoughts was more difficult to follow. He behaved in a bizarre fashion during the in- terview, continuously marring a number of “mystic passes.” These were to ward off evil spirits and other bad influences. “I can smell the sickness in this place, all the poor wretched souls destroyed by the demons of the world and held here in Purgatory with your mind-control techniques. But I won’t let you crush me. I’ll get to Heaven yet.” Patient’s affect and facial expressions were often inappropriate, going from scowls to laughter for no apparent reason. He expressed a great deal of hostility: “I think you’re from the Wicked Old Ones.” Nonetheless, he appeared unable to stop the flow of his speech, and cooperated in answering most of the questions. “You couldn’t understand me anyway, even if you really wanted to. Pm beyond consensus reality.” The patient claimed he could read minds. When asked what the interviewer was thinking at that moment, he said, “That’s easy. You think Pm crazy. You want to go home, relax, have a beer, and forget about me.” He has to keep his own mind shielded, or he would become the slave of “some terrible creatures under the Earth, below the North Pole.” Patient claims to see his father in dreams. Father appears as a wise old man dressed in white, “half priest, half witch doctor.” The father always gives patient good advice on how to run his life, then turns into a bird and flies away. Patient believes that every major event in his life had been preordained since the beginning of time 81 and is marked by unusual activity in the sky. He claims that at his birth, February 5, 1962, the planets were in a very rare astrological arrange- ment, and that novas, the discovery of new stars, in- creases in reported UFO activity, etc., have signaled other important times in his life. He says that the first eruption of Mount St. Helens marked his first admission to MBMHC. (Note: the dates do match.) He also said, “You won’t keep me here forever. I’ve got powerful friends, you’ll see. I’ve got a higher destiny to fulfill. I don’t krl*ow what it is yet, but when I find out you better beware. My friends will help me.” To “prove” how smart he is, patient took a pencil and paper and began writing frantically: “AMO ODIO AMO ODIO.” He repeated that forty times, then began, “Je suis le bon Dieu, je suis le diable.” And: “Quiero salvar el mundo, quiero destruir los viejos malos.” And: “Me iuvate, me delete.” And: “Je veux vivre, je veux mourir.” And: “Soy uno santo, soy uno pecador.” And finally: “Je veux etre complet.” He repeated each forty times. At the end, he translated each one into English, par- ticularly stressing the last sentence. He pounded the desk with his fist to emphasize his words. “I want to be whole!” Patient explained this trick by claiming that he knows every language on earth, plus all the dead languages and dialects ever spoken. He went on to write pages of meaningless scratchings which he claimed were an original essay on the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, written in Swahili, a translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into late Indo-European, and a section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in ancient Mayan. The patient “accomplished” this with a boisterous, smart-aleck flourish. He did not expect to be taken seriously. Patient claimed he could do serial sevens, counting backward by sevens from one hundred, but refused. He named Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and Johnson as Presidents, but called them “devils in disguise.” His fund of general knowledge is quite limited. He denies either suicidal or homicidal idea- tion, but was silent when reminded of the shotgun and his alleged attempt at hanging himself in the Ci- ty Jail. He understands the charges against him, but either does not know or does not care about the possible consequences. DIAGNOSIS: Schizophrenia, paranoid type. PLAN: Prolixin Decanoate, 3cc IM every 2 weeks Cogentin 2 mg twice a day Dalmane 30 mg h.s. prn for insomnia Thorazine 100 mg IM prn Robert Ludlow, M.D. Resident Physician Dictated: 2/23/82 Transcribed: 2/24/82 KXOK Radio News Broadcast, March 30, 198%: All thirty of the mental pa/tients who escaped from Malcolm Bliss Hospital last Friday night are still at large, but police sources say they expect to capture the men and women within forty-eight hours. Police say there is no evidence that any out- siders were involved in the bizarre escape. The disturbances providing patients with the opportunity to flee the institution resulted from an unusual, ex- tremely localized earthquake— net bomb explosions, as previously reported. The Missouri Division of Mental Health will reportedly use this incident to pressure Governor Kit Bond into restoring full funding for state mental facilities. Budget cuts have resulted in the layoff of hundreds of state' mental health workers since Governor Bond took office. Public Statement from Terrell Boyd, sent to all St. Louis area neivspapers, radio and tv stations, but never released: “The world is on the brink. Either we will decide to continue destroying ourselves and the planet, or we will pull back and choose life. I call on everyone to take sides now, to work for peace and the end of all forms of oppression. We could be liv- ing in paradise, but we have let the few prosper at the expense of the many. “I have found my power, my glory, and my calling now, and it’s time for me to act. It’s time for retribution, and time for healing. It’s time for guilty blood to flow instead of innocent. It’s time to plant trees. It’s time for the powerless to seize power. It’s time for hate and fear and anger to win the world for the reign of kindness. “You can’t hide. You can’t escape my judg- ment. Love me. Fear me.” (0 82 SHOW B Y SHOW GUIDE TV’s Twilight Zone Part Twelve CONTINUING MARC SCOTT ZICREE’S SHOW-BY-SHOW GUIDE TO THE ENTIRE TWILIGHT ZONE TELEVISION SERIES, COMPLETE WITH ROD SERLING’S OPENING AND CLOSING NARRATIONS “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension— a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. ” I n the spring of 1962 The Twilight Zone was late in finding a sponsor for its fourth season. As a result, CBS programmed a new show, Fair Exchange, into its time-slot for the fall. Suddenly and without any prior warning, The Twilight Zone was off the air. One hundred two Twilight Zone episodes had been produced— sixty- nine of them by Serling himself— and Serling had mentioned several times in print that it might be a good idea to end things there. Nevertheless, the network’s decision came as an unpleasant surprise. “Anybody would rather quit than get the boot,” said Serling. “The ego demands that.” Negotiations were begun in a frantic effort to keep the series alive. Finally, CBS came up with a solution. As it had done with Gunsmoke and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, it would expand The Twilight Zone from a half-hour to an hour, to begin airing the next year as a mid-season replacement. One thing about the show, however, would be shortened: its name. From now on, it would simply be called Twilight Zone. Although he himself had originally conceived of the. series as being an hour in length (Serling’s original pilot script, “The Time Element,” aired on Desilu Playhouse in 1958, was sixty minutes long), Serling was dubious about this change of format. Others had no doubt: The Twilight Zone was not meant for an hour slot. “To me, Twilight Zone was a half-hour show,” says Douglas Heyes, director of such episodes as “The After Hours,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” “The Invaders,” and “The Howling Man.” “There was a fragile premise usually involved, some subtle trick or change that made the story. Those kinds of premises can’t be sustained over sixty minutes.” Heyes declined to direct the longer episodes. The new Twilight Zone debuted January 3, 1963. (Ironically, the show it replaced was Fair Exchange.) Though the hour-long episodes lacked the structural tautness of the half- hour shows, a number of them made up for this deficiency by providing deeper characterizations and more elaborate plots. Guided by producers Herbert Hirschman and Bert Granet, the fourth season boasted masterful scripts by Serling, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Reginald Rose, and Earl Hamner, Jr., plus marvelous acting by the likes of James Whitmore, Robert Duvall, Pat Hingle, Anne Francis, Jack Klugman, Ross Martin, Martin Balsam, and Burt Reynolds. Not all of the episodes were classics, though and Serling didn’t mince words with the press. “I have seen the bulk of the thirteen sixty- minute films already finished,” he told one reporter, “and frankly, some are very good £ind some not so good.” Later he was even harsher: “If you ask me , I think we had only one really effective show this season, ‘On Thursday We Leave for Home,’ the film about James Whitmore enjoying power so much he tries to keep others under him from leaving a distant planet. Yes, I wrote it myself, but I overwrote it. I think the story was g ood despite what I did to it.” In the spring of 1963, CBS renewed Twilight Zone for a fifth season, shortening it back to a half hour for the fall. The greater length had not attracted a larger audience; the experiment had been a failure. But fortunately, Serling— always a severe critic of his own work— had been hard on the hour shows. The change in format may not have been a success, but it left as its legacy a handful of stories that remain unique, beguiling, and memorable. Couftesy Marc Wanamaker, Bison Archives 103. IN HIS IMAGE Written by Charles Beaumont Based on his short story Producer: Herbert Hirsehman Director: Perry Lafferty Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens Music: Stock Cast Alan Talbot/Walter Ryder, Jr.: George Grizzard Jessica Connelly: Gail Kobe Old Woman: Katherine Squire Man: Wallace Rooney Girl: Sherry Granato Sheriff: James Seay Driver: George Petrie Hotel Clerk: Jamie Forster Double for Grizzard: Joseph Sargent “What you have just witnessed could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare. It isn’t— it’s the beginning. Although Alan Talbot doesn’t know it, he is about to enter a strange new world, too incredible to be real, too real to be a dream. It’s called the Twilight Zone. ” Leaving his New York City hotel at 4:30 A.M., Alan Talbot enters a subway station. The only other person there is an old woman, a religious fanatic who presses a pamphlet into his hands. Hearing odd electronic sounds in his mind, he pleads with the woman to leave him alone, but when she won’t— he throws her in the path of a speeding subway train. Ninety minutes later, he arrives at the apartment of his fiancee, Jessica Cornelly— whom he’s known for only four days— with no memory of the murder. Together, they start the long drive to Coeurville, Alan’s hometown, to meet his Aunt Mildred. During the drive, Alan dozes off, mumbles something about “Walter” and, strangely, upon awakening, tells Jessica he knows no one of that name. Reaching Coeurville, Alan begins Jessica’s tour and is met with a number of nasty surprises: there are buildings he has never seen before, which seemingly have been erected in the week he’s been gone; his key doesn’t fit the lock on Aunt Mildred’s house, and the stranger who answers the door claims he’s never heard of any such person; the university he works at is now an empty field; people he remembers tea seeing a week before have been dead for years; and in the graveyard, the tombstones marking his parents’ graves are gone, replaced by those of a Walter Ryder and his wife. Jessica doesn’t know what to make of this, but she loves Alan and intends to stick by him. But driving back to New York, Alan hears the odd noises and is filled with a murderous rage. He orders Jessica to stop, leaps from the car and demands she drive on. She obeys— unaware of Alan as he runs behind the car, insanely brandishing a large rock. Suddenly, another car rounds a bend and strikes him, putting a large gash in his arm. He looks down and sees, not blood, but lights, wires and transistors revealed just beneath his skin! Alan quickly covers the injury with a cloth, then has the driver drop him off at his hotel room. Looking in a phone book, he finds a listing for a Walter Ryder, Jr. He goes to the address and, disconcertingly, his key does fit this door. He steps inside and comes face to face with . . . Walter, a shy and lonely man who is his exact double! Walter explains that Alan is a robot that he created eight days ago. Although he left Coeurville twenty years earlier, he used his hazy recollections of the place to give Alan a fictitious past. His intention was to create an artificial man in his own image— but with none of the defects. However, Alan is flawed; a week ago, he attacked Walter with a pair of scissors, then fled. He’s insane, and he can’t be fixed. Desperate, Alan tells Walter of Jessica and insists— despite Walter’s protests that it’s not possible— that Walter make another Alan, a perfect one, for Jessica. He fishes the crumpled pamphlet out of his pocket and jots down her address, but the sight of the pamphlet triggers anothef fit; murderously, he attacks Walter. Later, answering a knock at her door, Jessica is relieved to see Alan, who reassures her that everything is going to be fine. Fortunately for her, this isn’t really Alan— it’s Walter. Alan is back in Walter’s lab, deactivated— for good. “In a way, it can be said that Walter Ryder succeeded in his life’s ambition, even though the man he created was, after all, himself. There may be easier ways to self- improvement, but sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line— through the Twilight Zone. ” Photos courtesy the Serling Archives, Ithaca College School of Communications 104. THE THIRTY-FATHOM GRAVE Written by Rod Serling Producer: Herbert Hirschman Director: Perry Lafferty Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens Music: Stock Cast Chief Bell: Mike Kellin Capt. Beecham: Simon Oakland Doc: David Sheiner McClure: John Considine O.O.D.: Bill Bixby Lee Helmsman: Tony Call Helmsman: Derrick Lewis Ensign Marmer: Conlan Carter Sonar Operator: Charles Kuenstle ASW Officer: Forrest Compton Jr. O.O.D.: Henry Scott Sailor #1: Vince Bagetta Sailor #2: Louie Elias “Incident one hundred miles off th& coast of Guadalcanal. Time: the present. The United States naval destroyer on what has been a most uneventful cruise. In a moment, they’re going to send a man down thirty fathoms to check on a noise maker— someone or something tapping on metal. You may or may not read the results in a naval report, because Captain Beecham and his crew have just set a course that will lead this ship and everyone on it into the Twilight Zone. ” Onboard the destroyer, sonar picks up a sunken submarine on the ocean floor— and a persistent clanging coming from within the sub! One sailor jokingly says it’s ghosts, a suggestion that causes Chief Bell— a man seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown— to faint. Diver McClure is sent down to investigate. He finds the sub considerably damaged, with evidence of having been strafed. Although it is of American design, the numbers on it are inaccessible. McClure taps on the outside and gets a tapping response from within: someone definitely seems to be inside. And yet no subs are listed as being in that area. Later, the sub shifts slightly and its numbers become legible; it is an American sub, sunk by the Japanese on August 7, 1942— over twenty years ago! Meanwhile, in sick bay, Chief Bell feels some mysterious force beckoning to him. Looking in the mirror and down the corridor, he sees the ghosts of young seamen, their clothes drenched, motioning for him to join them. The doctor dismisses this as a hallucination, but he has no explanation for the seaweed he finds in the corridor! Then McClure discovers something beside the sub— dogtags with Chief Bell’s name on them. Bell confesses to Captain Beecham that he was assigned as a signalman on the sub during World War II, and that it was sunk because he accidentally dropped a signal light, knocking off its red filter and exposing its light to the enemy. He alone survived and now, burdened by tremendous guilt, he feels the ghosts of his crewmates are seeking their revenge. Beecham argues that the sub was surrounded, it wasn’t Bell’s fault. Bell doesn’t seem to hear. Hysterical, he slips the dogtags on, rushes from the room, runs to the side of the ship, dives overboard and drowns. Later, a team of divers enters the sub. McClure reports to the Captain that a sheared section of periscope was swinging, and that, no doubt, accounted for the sounds. Very probably, but then what about the disquieting fact that one of the dead men had a hammer in his hand . . . ? “Small naval engagement, the month of April, 1963. Not to be found in any historical annals. Look for this one filed under ‘H’ for haunting— in the Twilight Zone. ” 86 105. VALLEY OF THE SHADOW Written by Charles Beaum ont Producer: Herbert Hirschrnan Director: Perry Lafferty Dir. of Photography: Robert W. Pittack Music: Stock Cast Philip Redfield: Ed Nelson Ellen Marshall: Natalie Trondy Dorn: David Opatoshu Father: James Doohan Girl: Suzanne Cupito Evans: Dabbs Greer Connelly: Jacques Aubuchon Gas Attendent: Sandy Kenyon Man #1: Henry Beckman Man #2: Bart Bums Man #3: King Calder Man #4: Pat O’Hara “You’ve seen them,. Little towns, tucked, away far from the main roads. Y.ou’ve seen them, but have you thought about them ? What do the people in these places do? Why do they stay? Philip Redfield never thought about them. If his dog hadn’t gore after that cat, he would have driven through Peaceful Valley and put it out of his mind forever. But he can’t do that now, because whether he knows it or not, his friend’s short cut has led him right into the capital of the Twilight Zone.” Lost and nearly out of gas, reporter Philip Redfield pulls into Peaceful Valley, a small town that seems quite commonplace— until his dog gives chase to a cat and a little girl uses a bizarre gizmo to make it disappear. The child’s father returns the dog, claiming it simply ran around the side of the house, but Redfield is not convinced. Stopping at the local hotel in an effort to get his dog a steak, he makes the acquaintance of Ellen Marshall, an attractive tov/n resident, and finds that the hotel has no guests and that the most recent paper is dated 1953. Ellen tries to convince him that the hotel is full, then asks him to leave. Angrily, Redfield departs —and drives smack into ar invisible wall that wrecks his car ari d kills his dog. A number of townspeople come to his aid and, once he is out of sight, one of them uses a device to bring the dog back to life. Redfield is taken to the town chambers, where he meets Dorn, Evans, and Connelly, who tell him he is never going to leave Peaceful Valley. Redfield tries to escape, but Dorn uses a device to teleport him from the doorway into a chair. He then explains that, one hundred years earlier, a stranger— who may or may not have been from outer space— arrived in the town. He brought with him the equations for a miraculous new energy source and a number of devices made possible by these equations: the force field that stopped Redfield from leaving, instruments to move and reshape matter, even to reverse the flow of time. The people of Peaceful Valley are free to use these for their benefit, but forbidden to reveal them to the outside world until such time as the earth is at peace. Redfield argues that the townspeople have a moral responsibility to share their secrets, but they won’t hear of it. They give him two choices: to either stay in Peaceful Valley ... or die. Naturally, Redfield elects to stay. Kept prisoner in a house by a force field, he pleads with Ellen— who has fallen in love with him— to help him escape. Later, he finds the force field down and Ellen waiting for him in his car. Redfield rushes to the town chambers, removes the contents of the safe where the equations are supposedly stored, uses a machine to create a .38 pistol, and shoots Dorn, Evans, and Connelly when they try to stop him. Once they’re outside the town, Ellen tells Redfield to look at the papers he’s taken— the pages are all blank. She teleports him back to the town chambers, where Dorn, Evans, and Connelly await. It was all a test— and Redfield has failed. They aim a machine at him, and he finds himself back in his car, prior to the moment his dog jumped out to chase the cat, with no memory of the events he’s experienced in Peaceful Valley. Longingly, Ellen watches him from a distance as he drives out of town. “You’ve seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You’ve seen them, but have you thought about them? Have you wondered what the people do in such places, why they stay? Philip Redfield thinks about them now and he wonders, but only very late at night, when he’s between wakefulness and sleep— in the Twilight Zone. ” #7 to help him. Staying in the shadows, he advises Peter on ways to win over crowds to his way of thinking. Peter quickly adapts; soon, his speeches are filling up halls. His shadowy benefactor reappears, supplying money with which to pay the rent on the hall and offering new and shocking advice: The movement now needs a martyr. Peter complies; he orders frank, a loyal deputy, to murder Nick, a devoted, but stupid follower. The deed is done, and Peter’s audience grows. Dismayed by this turn of events, Ernst interrupts one of Peter’s speeches and denounces him. Peter pleads with him to stop; when Ernst refuses, he slaps him viciously. Ernst sadly departs, but his strategy has worked— the crowd no longer sees Peter as a charismatic leader. Peter is left alone in the hall. The shadowy figure enters, furious that Peter so utterly bungled the confrontation with Ernst. Angrily, Peter demands that the figure emerge from the shadows and reveal himself. He does— it is Adolph Hitler himself! Now he’ll give the orders. He throws Peter a Luger and commands him to kill Ernst. Believing himself to be made of steel, Peter enters Ernst’s apartment and shoots him. Later, a detective and a policeman arrive at the hall to arrest Peter for complicity in Nick’s murder. He tries to run, then shoots at them. They return the fire, and Peter collapses, bleeding from a bullet wound. Unbelieving, Peter says, “There’s something very wrong here . . . Don’t you understand that I’m made out of steel?” “Where wiU he g o next, this phantom from another tir.w, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare— Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, every place, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any hitman being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.” (S 106. HE’S ALIVE Written by Rod Serling Producer: Herbert Hirschman Director: Stuart Rosenberg Dir. of Photography: George T. Clemens Music: Stock Cast Peter Vollmer: Dennis Hopper Ernst Ganz: Ludwig Donath Adolph Hitler: Curt Conway Frank: Paul Mazursky Nick: Howard Caine Stanley: Bamaby Hale Heckler: Bernard Fein Gibbons: Jay Adler Proprietor: Wolfe Brazell “Portrait of a bush-league Fuhret named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors, he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. There’s something he looks for, and finds in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment, Peter Vollmer will ply his trade an another kind of comer, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone. ” Peter Vollmer, the leader of a small band of American neo-nazis, wants power— but all his racist, streeteomer speeches net him are verbal attacks and fistfights. After one such speech, he seeks solace from Ernst Ganz, an elderly concentration-camp survivor who has known Peter since he was an abused child and who has been like a father to him. Although Ernst despises Peter’s views, he takes pity on him and lets him stay the night. Later, however, Peter is awakened by someone outside his window, a man who shares his philosophy and wants ©1960 by Rod Sorting Photos courtesy the Sorting Archives, Ithaca College School of Communications A Passage for Trumpet by Rod Serling THE ORIGINAL J . 0 TELEVISION SCRIPT FIRST AIRED ON CBS-TN? MAY 20, 1960 TZ CLASSIC TELE PLAY CAST Joey Crown. . . .Jack Klugman Baron Frank Wolff Nan Mary Webster Pawn Shop Owner . . .Ned Glass Gabe. John Anderson Truck Driver .... James Flavin Pedestrian Diane Honodel ACT ONE FADE ON: 1. SHOT (ART) OF AN ODD LOOKING SKY With strange clouds that drift across the sky. PAN DOWN for LONG ANGLE SHOT of a road that stretches out across a barren landscape punctuated by odd rock croppings and an occasional gnarled-branched tree. The CAMERA STARTS MOVING DOWN this road at a fast clip heading toward a far out horizon. Over this we hear a narrator’s voice. NARRATOR’S VOICE This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality; a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable. (a pause) You go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of the mind itself. Ladles and gentlemen, you’re entering the wondrous dimension of imagination. Next stop- At this moment we’ve reached the end of the road and are just a moment away from what appears to be a precipice leading out into nothingness. Concurrent with the next line of narration the lettering springs up in front of the camera almost as if on a hinge. NARRATOR’S VOICE The Twilight Zone! The CAMERA MOVES through into the lettering, smashing it into bits, and then continuing on through until we are suspended in night sky. A SLOW PAN DOWN to opening shot of the play. 2. EXT. ALLEY NIGHT LONG ANGLE SHOT LOOKING DOWN ON JOEY CROWN A thin little man with deep, piercing eyes set-in a small, old-young face, who stands near a set of concrete steps that lead to the rear door of a small bistro. From inside we can hear the sounds of a jazz combo. 3. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY In his hand he carries a trumpet case. 4. LONG ANGLE SHOT LOOKING OVER HIS SHOULDER As a watchman opens the rear door and through it we get an uninterrupted view of the bandstand deep inside the building. A trumpet player has just risen to his feet to do a single. 5. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As his hands and feet twitch and excitedly keep time with the music. The trumpet player finishes with a flourish. There’s tremendous applause 90 and shouts, then we see the musicians leaving the stand for a break. 6. MED. CLOSE SE!OT THE DOOR As two of them come out, lighting up cigarettes!. One of them stops, nods toward Joey, and the two men exchange whispered conversation. The leader of the group, Baron, comes out between them. One of them whispers something to him. He nods and looks toward Joey, then walks down the steps toward him. 7. MED. CLOSE SE[OT JOEY As Baron comes up to him. Joey forces a smile, wets his lips, swallows. JOEY What do you say, Baron? (he taps the trumpet case) I brought my baby. I thought you might, need somebody with a horn. BARON (shakes his head) Not tonight, Joey. The last time you played trumpet for me you loused it up. I had to share you with a bottle, (he shakes his head) You and that horn don’t belong together anymore. 8. TWO SHOT JOEY AND BARON JOEY (pointing to himself with injured innocence) A bottle? Me? Baron ... I forgot what it tastes like! Six, seven months, Baron . . . I’m way up on the wagon! The CAMERA DOLLIES IN for EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT of him as he talks volubly, excitedly, desperate to convince; the words tumbling out on top of one another torrentially. What am I -some kind of a kook? Listen,’ Baron, I know what that stuff does to mel I ain’t an old man. Me and the horn 'got a lot of years left. I could be a number one boy! What am ’I gonna do -just chuck it all away on some bum hablt?_ Listen, baby, that’s a mellow horn! That’s sweet music I got in there. You know yourself when I pick that thing up and blow I can make ’em cry- 9. FLASH SHOT HIS HAND Clutching at his coat as something drops inside. 10. FLASH SHOT A PINT BOTTLE OF LIQUOR Falling on the concrete step at his feet and smashing. 11. CLOSE SHOT BARON As he stares down at it and then slowly up into the face of Joey Crown. 12. CLOSE SHOT JOEY - His eyes look down at the bottle and remain there. 13. MED. CLOSE SHOT BARON As he swipes at the remnants of the broken bottle with his foot and kicks it off the step down into the alley. 14. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE TWO MEN BARON A guy has so many friends, Joey -why do you suppose he plays around with his worst enemy? He looks down at the remnants of glass on the steps. Then he takes a bill out of his pocket and hands it to Joey. BARON For old times, Joey, huh? Joey nods, unable to speak. BARON (gently) For old times when you had it. A magic horn. Harry James and Max Kaminsky and Berrigan and Butterfield -a little of all of them. And you traded it off for some bad hooch -and you got took! You got the crummy end of the stick. (a pause as he looks at the other man intently and not without compassion) Why, Joey? 15. CLOSE SHOT JOEY His lips tremble. JOEY Because . . . because I’m sad. Because I’m nothin’. Because I’ll live and die in a crummy one-roomer with dirty walls and cracked pipes. I’ll never have a girl because I’m an ugly little gnome. I’ll never be anybody because half of me is that horn. I can’t even talk to people . . . not without the horn. That’s half of my language. (he turns slowly and starts down th# steps continuing to talk now more to himself) But when I’m drunk, Baron .... when I’m drunk I can’t see how dirty the walls are. I don’t see the cracked pipes. I don’t even know the clock’s running . . . that the hours are going by. Then I’m Gabriel. I’m Gabriel with a golden horn. And when I put it to my mouth it comes out jewels. It comes out a symphony. It comes out the smell of flowers and summer nights. It comes out ... it comes out beauty. (a pause) When I’m drunk, Baron. Only when I’m drunk. 16. MOVING SHOT WITH HIM a £ he starts down the alley. Over his shoulder we see Baron staring after him under the light. JOEY Oh man ... I got so much 91 •V Ai» A Passage for Trumpet misery ... I got so much sadness. I’m nothin’. I’m just plain ordinary nothin’. Man, I’m tired of hanging around. 17. DIFFERENT ANGLE OF HIM As he stops and leans up against the wall, burying his face against it. Then he looks down at the trumpet case he’s holding in his hand, puts it gently on the ground, opens it up, takes out the trumpet. He holds it in his hands, touches it, fondles it, then puts it to his lips and starts to play. The notes in the beginning are crystal clear and have great beauty. Then he hits a sour mote and then another and* then with frustration and anger and a desperate hopelessness, he just blows into it hard, emitting noises, a harsh, grating, discordant blast. 18. LONG ANGLE SHOT LOOKING DOWN AT HIM As he carries the trumpet down the alley with him blowing on it and almost crying into it. Over this shot we hear the narrator’s voice. NARRATOR’S VOICE Joey Crown, a little man who made music. A little man with a funny face, whose life is a quest for impossible things . . . like flowers in concrete ... or like trying to pluck a note of music out of the air and put it under glass to treasure. Joey Crown . . . who in a moment will try to leave the earth and discover the middle ground . . . the place we call . . . The Twilight Zone! FADE TO BLACK: OPENING BILLBOARD FIRST COMMERCIAL ' 19. EXT. ROOF NIGHT ANGLE SHOT LOOKING DOWN STEPS That lead up from the floor of the building toward the roof. Joey still has on his cheap tuxedo, but the tie has been pulled off, the shirt disheveled. He carries the trumpet case and what remains of a bottle. 20. MOVING SHOT WITH HIM As he walks across the roof and stops at the wall. He closes his eyes for a moment and then looks out at the lights of the city. A sudden wind whips up and flaps the clothes that hang on the line. 21. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he looks up toward the shirts that are hanging there. 22. MED. CLOSE SHOT CLOTHESLINE The arms of the shirts wave and shift in the wind. 23. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY He holds up the bottle grinning drunkenly, proffers a toast to the clothesline then finishes up the bottle and throws it over his shoulder. Then weaving a little, he opens up his trumpet case and takes out the trumpet, stares at it, blows briefly into its mouthpiece, pushes down the valves a couple of times, blows a clear, loud note. Then he lifts his head back and in a kind of half musical chant - JOEY “I got a right to sing the blues ... ” (he plays the melody on the trumpet) “ . . . I got a right to feel low down.” (he blows again on the trumpet that passage of the melody) “I’ve got a right to hang around, down around the river ...” He picks up the trumpet again, but this time can’t blow it, drops it to his side, stands there, shoulders hunched, head bent over, looks across the roof suddenly to see a girl standing there. This is a plain jane, but terribly, terribly gentle. A sweet, undistinctive kind of face, but a face that comes with wfirmth and femininity even so. GIRL Don’t stop. Play some more. FADE ON: 92 He cocks his head at her bewilderedly. JOEY Play some more? (he- shakes his head) I can’t. I can’t play anymore. I think I know what it is now. It isn’t that! 24. CLOSE SHOT THE BOTTLE As he sends it rolling across the roof with his foot 25. TWO SHOT THE TWO OF THEM JOEY (drunkenly) It is indeed a fact. The reason I can’t blow the horn anymore is that . . . well, it’s, it’s simply that too much of me is in there. Too much of me . . . my ugliness. Too much of Joey Crown. Shabby, sour, and very small. He bends over, half falling, to retrieve the bottle, picks it up, examines it, then throws it away. He wets his lips in an agony of yearning, then looks up suddenly at the girl. JOEY Miss ... I don’t suppose you could lend- He stops, shakes his head, puts the trumpet back in the case, lurches back to his feet, starts toward the door. 26. CLOSE SHOT GIRL GIRL You won’t play anymore? 27. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE TWO OF THEM He stops and looks at her. JOEY No, ma’am. I have played my last note. My very last note. No more. (and then a little quizzically, half drunk, half whimsically, half very sad) It’s been very nice making . your acquaintance, ma’am. You look like a very nice girl. A very sweet girl. You’re new here and I could have ... I could have shown you around. I could have taken you to places where they play some nice jazz. There was a time . . . there was a time when I would have liked you to hear me play. (and then disjointedly) It’s been very nice making your acquaintance. Very, very nice. He stands there for a moment as if suddenly not knowing where he is or what he is doing, then turns and starts down the steps. DISSOLVE TO: 28. INT. PAWN SHOP DAY A bell tinkles over the door as Joey Crown enters carrying his trumpet case. The pawn shop’s owner is a little fat man who wears a jeweler’s glass strapped around his head. He sizes up Joey glancing briefly down at the trumpet. 29. CLOSE SHOT OWNER As he looks at the trumpet case obviously disappointed, then looks across the room toward a display case. 30. MED. CLOSE SHOT DISPLAY CASE It is loaded with trumpets, saxaphones, etc. 31. TWO SHOT THE TWO MEN OWNER Back again, huh? Joey puts the trumpet case up on the counter. The owner looks at it perfunctorily. OWNER Eight and a half. JOEY Eight and a half? The owner freezes, starts to push the case away. JOEY (hurriedly) All right -eight and a halfl The owner scribbles on a pad, turns it around and thrusts it at Joey. OWNER Sign there. Joey nods and then numbly starts to sign his name. The owner lights half of a cigar that’s been lying on the edge of the counter. OWNER ■ I got enough instruments now to equip Sousa’s band. I need another bugle like I need my taxes raised! Joey hands him back the paper, then reaches out and touches the trumpet case, with a strange, lingering gentleness. OWNER (acidly) Why don’t you kiss it goodbye? 32. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he opens the case, picks up the trumpet, stares at it for a long time, then very, very gently puts it back. A Passage for Trumpet 33. TWO SHOT The owner rings up the cash register and tosses him the hills and silver on the counter. Joey picks it up, crumples it in his hand, turns and starts toward the door. 34. CLOSE SHOT OWNER Looking after him. OWNER Changin’ jobs? (points to trumpet) Don’t need it, huh? 35. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY AT DOOR There is a silence. JOEY Don’t need it? He turns to look toward the trumpet. * 36. CLOSE SHOT TRUMPET 37. CLOSE SHOT JOEY JOEY Like I don’t need lungs. (he looks down at the crumpled money) Too late though. Because . . . because I’m gonna walk next door and get me a bottle. I’m gonna finish it in about twenty minutes and then . . . (he turns now, resting his forehead against the door) And then Pm not gonna need lungs either! He walks out the door. DISSOLVE TO: 38. EXT. STREET DAY TILT SHOT FRONT OF SALOON ADJOINING PAWN SHOP As Joey reels out of the bar. He stands on the sidewalk for a minute, his head back, his eyes closed. Then he lurches around to look toward the pawn shop window. 39. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD THE WINDOW The pawn shop owner is just placing his trumpet on display. Alongside of It he has 94 just stuck a cardboard sign which reads, “$S5.” 40. DIFFERENT ANGLE OWNER’S P.O.V. LOOKING TOWARD JOEY Who walks over to the window and presses his face against it. 41. CLOSE SHOT OWNER’S HAND On price sign which he hangs onto for a moment. 42. CLOSE SHOT OWNER As he looks up defensively toward Joey. 43. REVERSE ANGLE OWNER JOEY’S P.O.V. The owner’s voice sounds muffled through the glass. OWNER A man’s got to make a profit! Understand? I got .an overhead too, you know. Guys like you don’t understand that! I mean . . . what’s money to a musician? What kind of responsibilities somebody like you got? Nothin’. Not a thing. 44. DISTORTED CLOSE SHOT JOEY’S FACE THROUGH THE GLASS His eyes close. JOEY Yeah . . . nothin’. Nothin’ at all. No responsibilities ... no nothin’. Then he opens his eyes, stares at the trumpet longingly for a last fleeting moment, then turns and walks toward the curb. 45. PROFILE SHOT OF HIM As he steps off the curb, looks briefly toward an oncoming truck. 46. EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT FULL FRAME JOEY’S FACE As he looks straight ahead and steps off the curb into the path of the truck. 47. CLOSE SHOT TRUCK DRIVER’S FACE As he screams and slams on the brakes. 48. CLOSE SHOT WOMAN PEDESTRIAN As she hides her eyes and screams. 49. FLASH SHOT CLOSE UP LOUDSPEAKER Over a record store next to the pawn shop. On it a trumpet is just hitting high C, a shrill, wailing blast ‘that joins the screams. 50. PAN SHOT DOWN TO THE WINDOW of the pawn shop. Supered over the trumpet lying there Is the reflection of the body of Joey Grown lying face down In the gutter. FADE TO BLACK; END ACT ONE ACT TWO FADE ON; 51. EXT. STREET NIGHT TOPHAT SHOT Looking down a gutter at the end of which lies Joey Crown in exactly the same position where the truck left him . . . People walk back and forth, the sound of their conversation and laughter hanging over the scene. Off in the distance we can hear the indistinct sound of a jazz band, occasional traffic, etc. 52. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he opens his eyes. A neon light overhead flashes across his face at intervals. He lies there motionless for a while, collecting his senses, and slowly reaches down to touch his body, then his face, then with some difficulty, he gets to his feet and tries to clean himself off. He stands there for a moment shakily then stares down the sidewalk. 53. MED. LONG SHOT POLICEMAN Who walks along swinging a billy club. He looks in Joey’s direction. 54. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY Nervously swallowing. He holds up his hands shakily in the semblance of a wave. JOEY I can assure you . . . officer ... I’m not what you’d call drunk! There was this big truck that went by and, man, it gave me a kiss! But you can ask Officer Flaherty . . . he’s usually on this beat and he could vouch for me that I’m not the kind of guy that runs around - He stops, looking at the policeman. 55. CLOSE SHOT POLICEMAN He looks off as if he didn’t even hear Joey. 56. EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT JOEY As his face changes into one of total bewilderment. Not only is the cop not listening, he is looking directly through Joey as if he weren’t even there. He swings his billy club again, whistles softly through his teeth, and continues to walk down the sidewalk, leaving Joey standing 'there staring wide-eyed at him. 57. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY He wipes his lips, feeling the dryness of them, then he wets them and looks anxiously up and down the street. His eyes stop on the bar. He walks a few feet toward it and then _ stops, pats at his pocket and finds a cigarette, sticks it in his mouth, pats again trying to find matches. A man and a girl go by. JOEY Excuse me, buddy . . . you wouldn’t happen to have a- The man and the girl continue on by, not even looking at him. Joey turns to another man coming from the opposite direction. JOEY Excuse me, pal -would you have a light - The man continues on past. Joey stands there and shakes his head, then half smiles, turns and walks a few feet down the sidewalk. 58. TRACK SHOT WITH HIM As he walks, finally pausing in front of a small movie house. A bored girl sits in the ticket booth, her face covered by a movie magazine she’s reading. 59. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he looks through the bars. JOEY Movies better ’n ever? The girl continues to read, ignoring him. 60. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY JOEY (smiling) I ain’t a masher, miss. I know the girl that usually works here. Grade. I was gonna tell her about what happened to me. Me and a Mack truck tangled and the next thing I knew I’m- 61. EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT JOEY JOEY Well 1 , look . . . you could at least be courteous! You’d think I was in someplace like New Delicatessen, India. Like I’m some kind of untouchable. I mean ... at least when you talk to people . . . and if you ask them for a simple thing like a match or somethin’ - He stops abruptly. The CAMERA ZOOMS INTO A TIGHTER CLOSE SHOT FULL FRAME as he very slowly starts to turn to look toward the camera. The CAMERA NOW MOVES AROUND so that it’s shooting across Joey’s profile toward one side of the lobby which is covered by full-length mirrors. 62. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE MIRRORS We see the reflection of the girl, the booth, the front of the theatre - but no Joey! •V h A Passage for Trumpet 63. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY As he turns and walks directly toward the camera then stops just a few feet from it. The CAMERA SWINGS AROUND so that it’s shooting over his shoulder toward the theatre. Again there’s the reflection of everything - but not his ! He whirls around in sudden and desperate fear, both knuckles going to his mouth, his eyes agapel JOEY Well, now look . . . well, now listen here . . . somebody pullin’ a gag? Somebody trying to shake me up? Well, now look 4 . . 64. DIFFERENT ANGLE As he runs over to the ticket booth, almost smashing his head against the- bars. JOEY Look, miss, what’s going on? Is somebody tryin’ to- 65. EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he turns and looks toward the camera. His eyes look away as suddenly something begins to register. He turns his head to look toward the mirrors again. 66. LONG SHOT THE MIRRORS 67. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY MIRRORS’ P.O.V. As he walks slowly toward the mirrors. When he gets just a few feet away, he holds out a hand to touch what is obviously the glass surface. His hand moves up and down it and then falls to his side. His head goes down and he stands there motionless for a long moment. Then he looks up. JOEY (with a quiet plaintiveness) 96 I’m dead! That’s it! I’m just plain old deceased! 68. TRACK SHOT JOEY As he walks back over to the front of the theatre and stands there. People pass him and he looks from face to face. JOEY Hey, man . . . I’m a ghost! That truck made it after all! 69. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE PEOPLE As they go back and forth. JOEY Understand? I’m haunting you! I’m a ghost! 70. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he looks away. JOEY (thoughtfully, with a sad, twisted smile) So at last! For the first time in the very short life of Joey Crown! He was successful at somethin’! Then he takes a deep,' resigned breath, and starts to walk down the sidewalk. DISSOLVE TO: 71. INT. BAR Just a few people around. A couple at the far end of the bar, another couple in a booth, the bartender wiping the bar with a methodical, circular wipe. 72. MED. LONG SHOT THE DOOR As Joey enters, walks over to the bar, sits down at a stool directly in front of the barfender, taps his fingers on the bar top. JOEY Charlie off, huh? (a smile as the bartender doesn’t respond at all) You don’t Lear me neither, huh? He looks down the bar. 73. LONG SE!0T TOWARD COUPLE AT FAR END JOEY None of you can hear me? (he turns back toward the bartender, then swings around On the stool to look toward the booth) Nobody sees me, huh? (a pause as he turns to stare toward the bartender reflectively, quietly) I used to come in here a lot. I don’t recognize any, of you people . . . and of course you wouldn’t have noticed me. (he shrugs) I mean ... I’m. not the kind of a guy anybody ’d notice 1 I mean . . . you know ... I’m kind of like a ... a little blob or somethin’ 1 But Charlie . . . Charlie used to give me a drink every now and then on the house. He was a real nice guy. You know what he did one time? [ (he turns on the stool to stare i toward the booth) You know what he did? He went and got an old Tommy Dorsey record from way back. When I was playin’ with him. And on the record there’s this long single with me on the horn. And Charlie goes and orders it like a big surprise for me and puts it on the jukel (he shakes his head at the fondness of the recollection and smiling) Would you believe it? Nice thing like that from old Charlie . . . 74. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As the smile fades. JOEY When I was alive! 75. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he gets off the stool, walks over to the juke box. 76. LOW ANGLE SHOT LOOKING UP TOWARD HIM As he stands there silently for a moment. 77. DIFFERENT ANGLE As he turns and walks across the room toward the door, then he stops, turns, his eyes scanning the room, the booths, ! the faces, the whole place. 78. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he looks away thoughtfully. JOEY Funny thing, though. I mean ... if this is it, what happens? I mean ... I just go walkin’ from place to place like this? You know this could wear a guy! I mean . . . nobody to talk to . . . nobody to listen to . . . The door behind him opens and a couple goes by. •Oh, excuse me- (then he grins) Not that you care, huh? Just a plain old nothin’ little ghost! Plain old nothin’ little man . . . now a plain old nothin’ little ghost! He takes a deep breath again, turns and walks out. DISSOLVE TO: 79. EXT. ALLEY OUTSIDE BISTRO NIGHT Taking in a shot of Joey as he walks slowly, almost aimlessly down the alley. PAN UP FROM HIM toward the now open door leading into the bistro. We hear the music and the applause and laughter of the people. Then there’s a silence as we see the trumpet player stand up and start to play. The CAMERA SWINGS BACK AROUND for a shot of Joey as he stops, listens. 80. LONG SHOT THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR As the trumpet player goes through several more passages and then ends on a flourish, swinging the trumpet wide and throwing it up into the air. The crowd screams its applause. Then a watchman closes the door, cutting out the noise. 81. MED. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he looks away, then suddenly starts as we hear the sound of yet another trumpet, this one close by. 82. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he whirls around, his eyes searching, as the clear, precise notes of the trumpet continue. 83. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he looks down the alley in the opposite direction. 84. LONG SHOT OVER HIS SHOULDER OF A MAN Just finishing playing. 85. TRACK SHOT JOEY As he walks toward the man, marveling at the music. When he gets to within just a few feet of the man, the man stops playing, puts the trumpet down and smiles at Joey. 86. TWO SHOT THE TWO OF THEM JOEY Go ahead. It’s cornin’ out beautiful! MAN (grins) Thanks. 87. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY As his eyes suddenly narrow. He cocks his head. JOEY You said thanks? MAN Thanks. 88. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE TWO OF THEM JOEY You hear me? MAN I hear you. JOEY You see me? MAN Very clearly! JOEY (shakes his head, mystified) You a ghost too? MAN (laughs lightly) • Not really. JOEY I am. I stepped out in front of a large vehicle this morning. 97 •V A Passage for Trumpet (he grins a little ruefully) It ain’t good for the health - believe me! MAN (smiles and hands out the trumpet) You want to blow on this a while, Joey? JOEY (takes it, fingering it lovingly) Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to. You mind? MAN (points to instrument) Whatever you like! Joey wets his lips and starts to put the trumpet to them and then stops, stares at the man. JOEY * Joey!' You called me Joey! MAN Joey Crown. That’s the name, isn’t it? JOEY (nods numbly) Yeah. That’s the name. But we ain’t ever been introduced, MAN Not formally. But I know who you are. You play a nice trumpet. I know. I’m an expert on trumpets. JOEY You ain’t no slouch on it, that’s for sure. MAN (points to trumpet) Go ahead. 89. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he puts the trumpet to his nfouth and starts to play. Within a moment we can see that he’s recaptured the essence of its music. It has a beautiful, bluesy, haunting, wonderfully magic quality. It moves and pulsates and fills the air; the notes are warm and sweet -rich and full. Joey stops abruptly and stares at the man. JOEY How come you know who I am? You say you’re not a ghost? You’re not dead? MAN No. I’m not dead. 90. CLOSE SHOT THE MAN MAN (he says this very deliberately and intently) Neither are you, Joey! 91. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As his eyes go wide. JOEY I’m not? 92. CLOSE SHOT THE MAN MAN (he shakes his head) By no means. 93. TWO SHOT JOEY AND THE MAN JOEY You mean . . . the people in the bar . . . the girl in the ticket booth . . . the people in the street . . . MAN They are dead. They’re the ghosts, Joey. They just don’t know it. Sometimes to make it easier we have to work it that way. We let them go on in a life that they’pe familiar with . . . and they never know for a long while. But that’s why they can’t hear you. You’re the one that’s alive. JOEY (absolutely bewildered) But . . . like I said ... I stepped off that curb- MAN That you did. And right now, Joey, you’re in a kind of limbo. You’re neither here nor there. You’re in the middle. You’re between the two. The real and the shadow. (a pause, very intently) Which do you prefer, Joey? 94. EXTREMELY TIGHT CLOSE SHOT JOEY JOEY Which do I prefer? (he turns away and then looks down at trumpet) I want another chance. (he looks up) I thought I was getting dealt from the bottom. (he shakes his head) But I just ... I just forgot how much there was for me. I forgot about the music I could make on the horn . . . and how nice it sounded. And goin’ to Charlie’s and talkin’ to people and maybe . . . maybe goin’ to the movies now and then. I never won a beauty contest . . . but I had friends. I had good friends. (a pause) Somewhere along the line ... I just forgot the good things. That’s what happened. I just forgot. MAN You’ve got a choice, you know. JOEY A choice? 95. TWO SHOT THE TWO OF THEM MAN It’s not too late. JOEY Well, if I’ve got a choice . . . (his voice builds in excitement and relief) Then I want to go back! Understand? I want to go back. 96. CLOSE SHOT THE MAN He smiles and nods. MAN All right. You go back. (then intently) But, Joey ... no more stepping off curbs. You take what you get and you live with it. Sometimes it’ll be sweet frost:.ng and nice 98 gravy . . . and sometimes it’ll be sour and go down hard. But you live with it, Joey. (he points to trumpet and takes it from Joey) That’s a nice talent you’ve got. To make music? To move people ... to make them laugh and make them cry, to make them tap their feet . . . and make them what to dance? . . . That’s an exceptional talent, Joey. Don’t waste it. (then he winks, smiles and waves) See you around. He turns and starts down the alley. 97. LONG ANGLE SHOT LOOKING AT HIM FROM ABOVE As he walks, Joey standing stock still, watching. 98. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY JOEY (waving and calling out) Hey! Hey, mister! 99. DIFFERENT ANGLE THE MAN As he walks toward camera toward end of alley. MAN What is it, Joey? JOEY (over his shoulder behind him) I 'didn’t get your name? MAN (continuing to walk) How’s that? ' JOEY I didn’t get your name! The man- has now reached -the far end of the alley. He stops and turns around slowly. MAN My name? (a smile, a pause) Gall me Gabe. 100. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he runs toward the man and then stops a few feet from him. JOEY Gabe? 101. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD MAN JOEY’S P.O.V. MAN Gabe. Short for Gabriel. (he holds up trumpet and waves with it) Goodbye, Joey! 102. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY As he runs toward camera and then stops. He’s now on the street exactly as he was before. People going back and forth. Joey looks in both directions then stands there bewildered. He walks slowly and numbly down the sidewalk until he is suddenly in front of the pawn shop. 103. REVERSE ANGLE LOOKING TOWARD JOEY THROUGH WINDOW Prom inside pawn shop. Joey turns and walks toward the window. He stops, staring inside. 104. REVERSE ANGLE OVER HIS SHOULDER AT WINDOW OF PAWN SHOP There is the trumpet lying there with the price tag as before. 105. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he stares at it, suddenly filled up with emotion. There are sounds of an off-camera scream, and the screech of brakes. 106. FLASH SHOT JOEY As he whirls around, his eyes open. And then he disappears. THE CAMERA PANS DOWN to the window. There is the reflection of a group of people clustered around Joey, who is just rising to his feet. The truck driver bulls his way through the crowd, grabs Joey and pulls him off to one side. 107. TWO SHOT JOEY AND TRJJCK DRIVER TRUCK DRIVER (very hurriedly looking around) I couldn’t see you, pal. Just stepped right out in front of me! It’s lucky I just grazed you. JOEY (benumbed and a little weakly) That’s okay. No harm done. TRUCK DRIVER (nervously) Well, look . . . (he pulls a bill out of his pocket) I’m fourteen years without an accident. I’d be obliged if, well, you know ... no insurance companies, no doctors, no nothin’ like that. (he hands Joey the bill) ' Be a nice guy, huh? Joey looks down at the bill bewildered, then when he looks up .the truck driver is already heading away from him. 99 108. DIFFERENT ANGLE JOEY As he looks down at the bill in his hand again, shakes his head, then suddenly looks across at the pawn shop. 109. CLOSE SHOT HIS FACE As he suddenly grins a big, enveloping smile and he starts toward the pawn shop hurriedly. 110. FULL SHOT LOOKING THROUGH WINDOW OF PAWN SHOP AT JOEY As he enters. In pantomime we see him point to the trumpet and hold out the bill. The pawn shop owner looks surprised, goes over to the window, pulls out the trumpet, sticks it in the case, handing it to Joey and getting the bill in return. DISSOLVE TO: 111. EXT. LONG ANGLE SHOT ROOF NIGHT LOOKING DOWN AT JOEY As he sits on the ledge and plays the trumpet, just winding up a tune, going up and down the scale and then letting the last note drift off into the night. He puts down the trumpet, smiles down at it. GIRL’S VOICE (O.C.) You play it beautifully. 112. CLOSE SHOT JOEY As he looks up abruptly. 113. TWO SHOT Taking in Joey and the girl. 100 JOEY (smiles) Thank you. I gave it up this morning. (then he looks down at trumpet again) But I’m takin’ her back! (he pats the trumpet, fondles it) Me and the bugle . . . ’til death do us part. GIRL I’m new here. I’ve never been in New York before. I just moved in. My name is Nan . . . JOEY My name is Joey. Joey Crown. (then with a crooked grin) All the guys in New York . . . they ain’t little apes like me! NAN (a gentle smile) You’re the nicest I’ve seen, Joey, truly. The very nicest. And I love your music. 114. CLOSE SHOT JOEY JOEY (wide eyed) Honest? GIRL (smiles, nods) Honest. Will you play some more, Joey? JOEY Sure. Sure, I’ll play some more. I’ll play whatever you like. For as long as you like. You know . . . you know you may like it here. It’s not a bad town. GIRL (smiles) I’m sure it isn’t. Maybe . . . (and then very shyly looking away) Maybe you'll show me some of it, Joey. JOEY Me? The smile again that stretches from ear to ear, the face that lights up like a hundred watt bulb, and at this moment we see a beauty in that face, and a sensitivity, and a gentleness. JOEY Sure. Sure, I’ll show you everything. I’ll show you theLBattery, Central Park. I’ll show you Fifty-second Street and we’ll hear some good jazz. I’ll take you to Charlie’s -you’ll like Charlie’s -it’s a great place. And he’s got a record of mine when I was playin’ with Dorsej't The CAMERA STARTS TO PULL AWAY and we continue to hear Joey’s voice, voluble, excited, delighted, and the girl standing there taking it all in, and loving it. The CAMERA CONTINUES TO PAN until the two figures are two small, tiny, indistinct little people and Joey’s voice has drifted off into the night. NARRATOR’S VOICE Joey Crown . . . who makes music. And who discovered something about life. That it can be rich and rewarding and full of beauty . . . Just like the music he played. (a pause) If a person would only pause to look and to listen. Joey Crown . . . who got a clue ... in The Twilight Zone! FADE TO BLACK: THE END IS In April’s TZ NEW JOURNEYS OF THE IMAGINATION AND ALWAYS THE UNEXPECTED Three Prize Stories The Winners of Twilight Zone’s Writing Contest Full-Color Preview: - u Paul Schradir directs Nastassia Kinski in ‘The Cat People’ V* Special] ’ . Rod Segno's m LastlflA. Ifl in THE CAT PEOPLE, a daring modern remake of the classic horror film— previewed in full color . . . Terror follows you through every twist and turn in SNAKES AND LADDERS by Ramsey Campbell, author of The Parasite and The Face That Must Die ■ ■ • Terror from the deep was the specialty of fan- tasy master William Hope Hodgson, whose sagas of the sea crawled with giant squids, man-eating crabs, and ghost pirates, and who created unforgettable nightmare visions of the future in The House on the Borderland and The Night Land. In April’s TZ, we present a profile of Hodgson by Mike Ashley, plus his classic tale of aquatic horror, THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT . . . Robert Sheckley gives you the word on the latest books, Gahan Wilson casts a cool cartoonist’s eye on the new movies, and Jack Sullivan brings you up to date on music that will transport you to the Twilight Zone . . . Marc Scott Zicree transports you back to the original hour-long programs in his SHOW-BY-SHOW GUIDE TO TV’S ‘TWILIGHT ZONE’ . . . There’ll also be superb new illustrations, rare stills from the tv series, and pho- tos of a TWILIGHT ZONE REUNION . . . It’s all between covers for just two bucks in TZ’s First Anni- versary Issue. Don’t miss this one! ing talent . . . And you’ll get a special glimpse of the man who inspired that search in ROD SERLING’S LAST INTE R VIE W— an intimate, no- holds-barred conversation with The Twilight Zone’s creator, in its original, never-before-published form Harlan Ellison returns in DJINN, NO CHASER. One year ago, Ellison led off TZ’s Premiere Issue with a story about the Holy Grail. Now he’s back in a lighter vein with a very tall tale about Aladdin’s Lamp— and what happens when it falls into the hands of two modern-day newlyweds . . . Watch out for tine Thing in the Well! He’s known as OLD FILLIKIN. You’ll meet him in the chilling new fantasy by Joan Aiken, bestselling author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, The Whispering Mountain, and other tales of childhood . . . And beware THE THING FROM THE SLUSH, who makes life rather difficult for an sf magazine’s slush-pile reader in a hilarious new story by George Alec Effinger . . . You’ll watch Paul Schrader (Hardcore, American Gigolo) direct Nastassia Kinski 102