A Graveyard for Lunatics (7 page)

“Lenin’s
makeup
man?” I said.

“Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.

He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
.

“Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You
write
monsters. Roy Holdstrom
builds
them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!”

“Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!”

An empty place.

“For who?” I asked.

Someone coughed. Heads turned.

I held my breath.

And the Arrival took place.

This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths. After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldn’t imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet.

There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen.

I put my hand out to take his. His hand turned, and I saw the mark of the driven spike in the middle of the wrist. He turned his other hand over, so I could see the similar scar in the middle of his left wrist. He smiled, reading my mind, and quietly explained, “Most people think the nails were driven through the palms. No. The palms could not hold a body’s weight. The wrists, nailed,
can
. The wrists.” Then he turned both hands over so I could see where the nails had come through on the other side.

“J. C.” said Fritz Wong, “this is our visitor from another world, our young science-fiction writer—”

“I know.” The beautiful stranger nodded and gestured toward himself.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

I stepped aside so he could sit, then fell back in my own chair.

Fritz Wong passed down a small basket full of bread. “Please,” he called, “change these into fish!”

I gasped.

But J. C., with the merest flick of his fingers, produced one silvery fish from amidst the bread and tossed it high. Fritz, delighted, caught it to laughter and applause.

The waitress arrived with several bottles of cheap booze to more shouts and applause.

“This wine,” said J.C., “was water ten seconds ago. Please!”

The wine was poured and savored.

“Surely—” I stammered.

The entire table looked up.

“He wants to know,” called Fritz, “if your name is really what you say it is.”

With somber grace, the tall man drew forth and displayed his driver’s license. It read:

“Jesus Christ. 911 Beachwood Avenue. Hollywood.” He slipped it back into his pocket, waited for the table to be silent, and said:

“I came to this studio in 1927 when they made
Jesus the King
. I was a woodworker out back in those sheds. I cut and polished the three crosses on Calvary, still standing. There was a contest in every Baptist basement and Catholic backwash in the land. Find Christ! He
was
found
here
. The director asked where I worked? The
carpenter’s
shop. My God, he cried, let me
see
that face! Go put on a
beardl
‘Make me look like holy Jesus,’ I advised the makeup man. I went back, dressed in robes and thorns, the whole holy commotion. The director danced on the Mount and washed my feet. Next thing you know the Baptists were lining up at Iowa pie festivals when I dusted through in my tin flivver with banners “THE KING IS COMING,” “GOING ON BEFORE.”

“Across country in auto bungalow courts, I had a great ten-year Messiah run, until vino and venality tattered my smock. Nobody wants a womanizing Saviour. It wasn’t so much I kicked cats and wound up other men’s wives like dime-store clocks, no, it was just that I was Him, you see?”

“I think I see,” I said gently.

J. C. put his long wrists and long hands and long fingers out before him, as cats often sit, waiting for the world to come worship.

“Women felt it was blasphemy if they so much as breathed my air. Touching was terrible. Kissing a mortal sin. The act itself? Might as well leap in the burning pit with an eternity of slime up to your ears. Catholics, no, Holy Rollers were worst. I managed to bed and breakfast one or two before they
knew
me, when I traveled the country incognito. After a month of starving for feminine acrobats, I’d run amok. I just shaved and lit out across country, pounding fenceposts into native soil, duck-pressing ladies left and right. I flattened more broads than a steamroller at a Baptist skinny dip. I ran fast, hoping shotgun preachers wouldn’t count hymens and hymnals and wallop me with buckshot. I prayed ladies would never guess they had enjoyed a laying on of hands by the main Guest at the Last Supper. When I wore
it
down to a nubbin and drank myself into a stupor, the studio’d pick up my bones, pay off the sheriffs, placate the priests in North Sty, Nebraska, with new baptismal fonts for the birth of my latterday kids, and tote me home to a cell on the backlot, where I was kept like John the Baptist, threatened with losing both my heads until they finished one last fish fry at Galilee and one more mystery tour up Calvary. Only old age and a dilapidated pecker stopped me. I was sent out to the bush leagues. Which was great for I ravened for leagues of bush. There was never a more woman-oriented man than this lost soul you see here. I was undeserving to play J. C. when, in thousands of theatres across country, I saved souls and lusted for dessert. For many years I have solaced myself not with bodies but with bottles. I’m lucky Fritz renovated me for this new film, in long shots, with tons of makeup. That’s it. Chapter and verse. Fade out.”

Applause. The whole table clapped hands and called praise.

Eyes shut, J. C. bowed his head, left and right.

“That’s quite some story,” I murmured.

“Don’t believe a word of it,” said J. C.

The applause stopped. Someone else had arrived.

Doc Phillips stood at the far end of the table.

“My God,” said J. C. in a strong, clear voice. “Here’s Judas
now
!”

But if the studio doctor heard, it was not evident.

He lingered, studying the room with distaste, fearful of encounters. He resembled one of those lizards you see on the edge of a primeval forest, glinting his eyes around, terribly apprehensive, sniffing the air, touching the wind with probing claws, lashing his tail in little twitches, doom in all directions, no hope, only nervous response, ready to spin, rustle, run. His gaze found Roy and for some reason fixed on him. Roy sat up, stiffened, and smiled a weak smile at the doc.

My God, I thought, someone saw Roy stealing off with his box. Someone—

“Will you say grace?” called Fritz. “The Surgeon’s Prayer— O Lord, deliver us from doctors!”

Doc Phillips glanced away as if only a fly had touched his skin. Roy collapsed back in his chair.

The doc had come, out of habit. Beyond the commissary, out there in the bright high-noon sun, Manny and a few other fleas were doing backflips of anger and frustration. And the doc had come here to get away from it or search for suspects, I could not tell which.

But there he was, Doc Phillips, the fabulous physician to all the studios from the early handcranked cameras to the advent of shrieks and screams in sound to this very noon when the earth shook. If Groc was the eternal jolly Punch, then Doc Phillips was the glum curer of incurable egos, a shadow on the wall, a terrible scowl at the back of theatre previews, diagnosing sick films. He was like those football coaches on the sidelines of victorious teams, refusing to flash their teeth just once in approval. He spoke not in paragraphs or sentences, but clips and chops of shorthand prescription words. Between his ayes and nays lay silence.

He had been on the eighteenth green when the head of Skylark Studios sank his last putt and dropped dead. It was rumored he had sailed off the California coast when that famous publisher threw an equally famous director overboard to “accidentally” drown. I had seen pictures of him at Valentino’s bier, in Jeanne Eagels’s sickroom, at some San Diego yacht race where he was carried as sunstroke protection to a dozen New York movie moguls. It was said he had happy-drugged a whole studio star system and then cured them in his hideaway asylum somewhere in Arizona, near Needles. The irony of the town’s name did not go unsaid. He rarely ate in the commissary; his glance spoiled the food. Dogs barked at him as if he were an infernal mailman. Babies bit his elbows and suffered stomach cramps.

Everyone flinched and pulled back at his arrival.

Doc Phillips fastened his glare here and there along our group. Within instants, some few of them developed tics.

Fritz turned to me. “His work is never done. Too many babies arrived early behind Stage 5. Heart attacks at the New York office. Or that actor in Monaco gets caught with his crazy operatic boyfriend. He—”

The dyspeptic doctor strode behind our chairs, whispered to Stanislau Groc, then turned quickly and hurried out.

Fritz scowled at the far exit and then turned to burn me with his monocle.

“Oh master futurist who sees all, tell us, what the hell is going on?”

The blood burned in my cheeks. My tongue was locked with guilt in my mouth. I lowered my head.

“Musical chairs,” someone shouted. Groc, on his feet, said again, his eyes on me, “Chairs. Chairs!”

Everyone laughed. Everyone moved, which covered my confusion.

When they had done with churning in all directions, I found Stanislau Groc, the man who had polished Lenin’s brow and dressed his goatee for eternity, directly across from me, and Roy at my side.

Groc smiled a great smile, the friend of a lifetime.

I said, “What was Doc’s hurry? What’s going on?”

“Pay no attention.” Groc calmly eyed the commissary doors. “I felt a shudder at eleven this morning, as if the rear of the studio had struck an iceberg. Madmen have been rushing around ever since, bailing out. It makes me happy to see so many people upset. It makes me forget my melancholy job of turning Bronx mud ducks into Brooklyn swans.” He stopped for a bite of his fruit salad. “What do you guess? What iceberg has our dear
Titanic
struck?”

Roy leaned back in his chair and said, “There’s some calamity at the prop and carpenters’ shop.”

I shot Roy a scowl. Stanislau Groc stiffened.

“Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “A small problem with the manatee, the woman’s figure, carved from wood, to go on the
Bounty
.”

I kicked Roy under the table, but he leaned forward:

“Surely that wasn’t the iceberg you mentioned?”

“Ah, no,” said Groc, laughing. “Not an Arctic collision but a hot-air balloon race, all the gas-bag producers and yes-men of the studio are being called into Manny’s office. Someone will be fired. And then—” Groc gestured toward the ceiling with his tiny doll hands—“falling upward!”

“What?”

“A man is fired from Warner’s and falls upward to MGM. A man at MGM is fired and falls upward to 20th. Falling
upward
! Isaac Newton’s
reverse
law!” Groc paused to smile at his own wit. “Ah, but you, poor writer, will never be able, when fired, to fall upward, only down. I—”

He stopped, because…

I was studying him as I must have studied my grandfather, dead forever, in his upstairs bedroom thirty years ago. The stubble on my grandpa’s pale waxen skin, the eyelids that threatened to crack and fix me with the angry glare that had frozen Grandma like a snow queen in the parlor for a lifetime, all, all of it as clean and clear as this moment with Lenin’s necrologist/cosmetician seated across from me like a jumping jack, mouse-nibbling his fruit salad.

“Are you,” he asked, politely, “looking for the stitch marks over my ears?”

“No, no!”

“Yes, yes!” he replied, amused. “Everyone looks! So!” He leaned forward, turning his head to left and right, skinning his hairline and then his temples.

“Lord,” I said, “what fine work.”

“No. Perfect!”

For the thin lines were mere shadows, and if there were flea-bite stitch scars, they had long since healed.

“Did you—?” I said.

“Operate on myself? Cut out my own appendix? Perhaps I am like that woman who fled Shangri-La and shriveled into a Mongol prune!”

Groc laughed, and I was fascinated with his laughter. There was no minute when he was not merry. It was as though if he ever stopped laughing he would gasp and die. Always the happy bark, the fixed grin.

“Yes?” he asked, seeing that I was studying his teeth, his lips.

“What’s there so funny to laugh at,” I said, “always?”

“Everything! Did you ever see a film with Conrad Veidt—?”

“The Man Who Laughs?”

That stopped Groc in mid-dust. “Impossible! You lie!”

“My ma was nuts for films. After school, she’d pick me up from first, second, third grade to go see Pickford, Chancy, Chaplin. And… Conrad Veidt! The gypsies sliced his mouth so it could never stop smiling all the rest of his life, and he falls in love with a blind girl who can’t see the awful smile and he is unfaithful to her but, scorned by a princess, crawls back to his blind girl, weeping, to be comforted by her unseeing hands. And you sit in your aisle seat in the dark at the Elite Cinema and weep. The End.”

“My God!” exclaimed Groc, and almost not laughing. “What a dazzling child you are. Yes!” He grinned. “
I
am that Veidt character, but I was not carved into smiles by gypsies. Suicides, murders, assassinations did it. When you are locked in a mass grave with ten thousand corpses and fight upward for air in nausea, shot to death but not dead. I have never touched meat since, for it smells of the lime pit, the carcass, and the unburied slaughter. So,” he gestured, “fruit. Salads. Bread, fresh butter, and wine. And, along the way, I sewed on this smile. I fight the true world with a false mouth. In the face of death, why not these teeth, the lascivious tongue, and the laugh? Anyway,
I
am responsible for
you
!”