A Graveyard for Lunatics (35 page)

“What?”

“I found that I
liked
power.”

“What?!”

“Power. I
loved
it. Stockbrokers, big corporate men, all that crap. Incredible. I was
drunk
! I loved running the studio, making decisions, and all done without board meetings. All with mirrors, echoes, shadows. Do all the films that should have been done years ago, but never
were
! Rebuild
me
, my universe! Reinvent, recreate my friends, my creatures. Make the studio pay in cash as well as flesh and lives and blood. Figure who was most responsible for trashing my life, then, then, one by one, squash the nitwits, mash the cohorts of the ignorant and the yes-men to the twits. The studio had run me; now
I
ran the studio. God, no wonder Louis B. Mayer was insufferable, the Warner Brothers shooting powdered film clips up their veins all night. Until you’ve run a studio, buster, you don’t know what power is. You not only run a city, a country, but the world beyond that world. Slow motion, you say; people run slow. Fast, you say; people leap the Himalayas, flop in their graves. All because you chopped the scenes, ran the actors, told the starts, guessed the ends. Once I got in, I was high on Notre Dame every night laughing at the peasants, diminishing the giant runts who had hurt my pals and killed the gyroscope that always spun in my chest. But now the gyroscope whirred again, lopsided crazy, off its pivot. Look out there, at what I did, almost everything torn down. The Beast started, but I finished it. I knew if I didn’t stop I’d be carted off to a madhouse-dairy to be milked for paranoia. That, and the Beast dying, pleading for one last go with the priest and the bells and candles and confessionals and: forgive. I had to give him back his studio so he could give it back to you.”

Roy slowed, licked his dreadful lips, and was silent.

“There’s one thing, several things, not clear—” I said.

“Name them.”

“How many people did Arbuthnot kill in the past few days. And how many people did—” I had to stop, for I could not say it.

Roy said it for me: “How many did Roy Holdstrom, Beast Number Two, spoil?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t kill Clarence, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Thank God.”

I swallowed hard and at last said: “At what point—oh, God— when—?”

“When what?”

“At what hour… on what day… did Arbuthnot stop… and
you
take over?”

Now it was Roy’s turn, behind the murdered face, to swallow. “It was Clarence, of course. In the catacombs, I heard voices on the phone systems, at every tomb intersection. Voices
in
the tunnels themselves. One way or another lifting the receivers, or hiding alert, I pulled back or followed the shadows moving to bury. I knew Clarence was due for burial, five minutes after the Beast’s rampage at his apartment. I saw and heard, at a distance, Doc hustling through the tunnels, taking Clarence to some damned lost crypt. I knew then they’d soon find I was alive, if they didn’t suspect already. I wonder, did they ever check the incinerator to find not my real bones but my mock-up skeleton? And next:
you
!
You
knew Clarence. They might have seen you at his place, or at my apartment. If they added it up they’d have buried you alive. So, you see, I had to take over. I had to become the Beast.

“Not only that, I shut down the studio, to test my power, to see if they jumped at my voice, did what I said. With the studio emptying out it made it easier to kill the villains, take care of my possible assassins.”

“Stanislau Groc?” I said.

“Groc… ? Yeah. He got us into this in the first place. Hired me for starters, because I could freshen up creatures, just as he tarted up old dead Lenin. Put a bug in Arbuthnot’s ear to hire you, maybe. Then made the body that was propped on the wall to scare the studio folks
and
Arbuthnot, then invited us to the Brown Derby for the bestial revelation. Then when I made the clay Beast and frightened everyone, shook them down for cash.”

“You killed Groc, then?”

“Not quite. I had him arrested at the gate. When they brought him to Manny’s empty office and left him alone and the mirror swung back, he just up and died when he saw me there. Doc Phillips now, ask me about him.”

“Doc Phillips?”

“After all, he cleared away my so-called ‘body,’ right? Him and his eternal pooper-scoopers. I met up with him in Notre Dame. Didn’t even try to run. I pulled him up with the bells. I just wanted to scare him. Get him up high and shake until, like Groc, his heart stopped. Manslaughter, not murder. But, being pulled up, he got tangled, got frantic, all but hung himself. Did I do it? Am I guilty?”

Yes, I thought. And then: no.

“J. C. ?” I asked, and held my breath.

“No, no. He climbed up on the cross two nights ago and his wounds just didn’t shut. His life ran out of his wrists. He died on the cross, poor man, poor drunken old J. C. God rest him. I found him and gave him a proper resting place.”

“Where are they all? Groc and Doc Phillips and J. C.”

“Somewhere. Anywhere. Does it matter? It’s all bodies out there, a million of ’em. I’m glad one of them isn’t—” he hesitated—”you.”

“Me?”

“That’s what finally made me cease and desist. About twelve hours ago. I found I had you on my list.”

“What!?”

“I found myself thinking, If he gets in the way, he dies. That put an end to it.”

“Christ, I should hope so!”

“I thought, Wait, he had nothing to do with this whole dumb show. He didn’t put the crazy horses on the carousel. He’s your pal, your friend, your buddy. He’s all that’s left of life. That was the turnaround. The road back from madness is knowing you’re mad. The road back means no more highway, and you can only turn. I loved you. I love you. So I came back. And opened the tomb and let the true Beast out.”

Roy turned his head and looked at me. His gaze said: Am I on report? Will you hurt me for what I have hurt? Are we still friends? What made me do whatever I did? Must the police know? And who will tell them? Must I be punished? Do the insane have to pay? Isn’t it all a madness? Mad sets, mad lines, mad actors? Is the play over? Or has it just begun? Do we laugh now or weep? For what?

His face said, Not long from now the sun will be up, the two cities will start, one more alive than the other. The dead will stay dead, yes, but the living will repeat the lines they were still saying just yesterday. Do we let them speak? Or do we rewrite them together? Do I make the Death that rides fast, and when he opens his mouth will your words be there?

What
…
?

Roy waited.

“Are you really back with me?” I said.

I took a breath, and went on. “Are you Roy Holdstrom again and will you just stay that way and not be anything else but my friend, from now on, yes? Roy?”

Roy’s head was down. At last he put out his hand.

I seized it as if I might sway and fall to the streets of the Beast’s Paris, below.

We held tight.

With his free hand, Roy worked at the rest of his mask. He balled the substance, the torn-away wax and powder and celadon scar in his fist and hurled it from Notre Dame. We did not hear it land. But a voice, startled, shot up.

“God
damnl
Hey!”

We stared down.

It was Crumley, a simple peasant on the Notre Dame porch below. “I ran out of gas,” he called. “I kept going around the block. And then: no gas.”

“What,” he shielded his eyes, “in hell’s going
on
up there?”

Arbuthnot was buried two days later.

Or rather reburied. Or rather, placed in the tomb, carried there before dawn by some friends of the church who didn’t know who they carried or why or what for.

Father Kelly officiated at the funeral of a stillborn child, nameless and so not recently baptized.

I was there with Crumley and Constance and Henry and Fritz and Maggie. Roy stood far back from us all.

“What’re we doing here?” I muttered.

“Just making sure he’s buried
forever
,” observed Crumley.

“Forgiving the poor son-of-a-bitch,”. Constance said, quietly.

“Oh, if people out beyond knew what was going on here today,” I said, “think of the crowds that might come to see that it’s over at last. Napoleon’s farewell.”

“He was no Napoleon,” said Constance.

“No?”

I looked across the graveyard wall where the cities of the world lay strewn-flat, and no place for Kong to grab at biplanes, and no dust-blown white sepulcher for the tomb-lost Christ, and no cross to hang some faith or future on, and no—

No, I thought, maybe not Napoleon, but Barnum, Gandhi, and Jesus. Herod, Edison, and Griffith. Mussolini, Genghis Khan, and Tom Mix. Bertrand Russell, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, and The Invisible Man. Frankenstein, Tiny Tim, and Drac—

I must have said some of this aloud.

“Quiet,” said Crumley,
sotto voce
.

And Arbuthnot’s tomb door, with flowers inside, and the body of the Beast, slammed shut.

I went to see Manny Leiber.

He was still sitting, like a miniature gargoyle, on the rim of his desk. I looked from him to the big chair behind him.

“Well,” he said. “
Caesar and Christ
is done. Maggie’s editing the damn thing.”

He looked as if he wanted to shake hands, but didn’t know how. So I went around, collected the sofa cushions, like in the old days, piled them, and sat on them.

Manny Leiber had to laugh. “Don’t you
ever
give up?”

“If I did, you’d eat me alive.”

I looked beyond him to the wall. “Is the passage shut?”

Manny slid off the desk, walked over, and lifted the mirror off its hooks. Behind it, where once the door had been, was fresh plaster and a new coat of paint.

“Hard to believe a monster came through there every day for years,” I said.

“He was no monster,” said Manny. “And he ran this place. It would have sunk long ago without him. It was only at the end he went mad. The rest of the time he was God behind the glass.”

“He never got used to people staring at him?”

“Would you? What’s so unusual about him hiding out, coming up the tunnel late at night, sitting in that chair? No more stupid or brilliant than the idea of films falling off theatre screens to run the world. Every damn city in Europe is starting to look like us crazy Americans, dress, look, talk, dance like us. Because of films we’ve won the world, and are too damn dumb to see it. All that being true, what, I say, is so unusual about the given creativity of a man lost in the woodwork?!”

I helped him rehang the mirror over the fresh plaster.

“Soon, when things calm down,” said Manny, “we’ll call you and Roy back and build Mars.”

“But no Beasts.”

Manny hesitated. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“
Unh-unh
,” I said.

I glanced at the chair. “You gonna change that?”

Manny pondered. “Just grow my behind to fit. I been putting it off. I guess this is the year.”

“A backside big enough to tackle the New York front office?”

“If I put my brains where my butt is, sure. With him gone I got a lot to shoot for. Want to
try
it?”

I eyed the chair for a long moment.

“Naw.”

“Afraid once you sit you’ll never get up again? Get your can out of here. Come back in four weeks.”

“When you’ll need a
new
ending
for Jesus and Pilate
or
Christ and Constantine
or—”

Before he could pull back, I shook his hand.

“Good luck.”

“I think he
means it
,” Manny said to the ceiling. “Hell.” He turned and went to sit in the chair. “How’s it feel?” I asked.

“Not bad.” Eyes shut, he felt his whole body sink down into his seat. “A man could get used.”

At the door I looked back at his smallness frozen in so much bigness.

“You still hate me?” he asked, eyes shut.

“Yes,” I said. “You me?”

“Yeah,” he said.

I went out and shut the door.

I walked across the street from the tenement, Henry paced me, guided by the sound of my footsteps and the jolting of his valise in my hand.

“We got everything, Henry?” I said.

“My whole life in one suitcase? Sure.”

At the curb on the far side we turned.

Someone, somewhere fired an invisible and soundless cannon. Half of the tenement, gunshot, fell.

“Sounds like the Venice pier being torn down,” said Henry.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like the roller-coaster coming apart.”

“Yeah.”

“Or the day they tore up the big red train trolley-car tracks.”

“Yeah.”

The rest of the tenement fell. “C’mon, Henry,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“Home,” Blind Henry said and nodded, pleased. “I never had one of those. Sounds nice.”

I had Crumley and Roy and Fritz and Maggie and Constance over for a last go-round before Henry’s relatives arrived to take him back to New Orleans.

The music was loud, the beer was copious, blind Henry was officiating at the discovery of the empty tomb for the fourteenth time, and Constance, half loaded and half-undressed, was biting my ear when the door to my small house burst wide.

A voice cried: “I got an early flight! Traffic was awful.
There
you are! And I know you, you, and
you
.”

Peg stood in the door pointing.

“But who,” she shouted, “is that half-naked
woman
!?”