Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (36 page)

The filmed actor was expressive, and he was voiced by a masculine tenor who lent fire and discipline to the lyrics. (
The hand of God, not gentle but just
/

Descends upon the wicked by and by
, and so forth).

If the Secular Policemen by this brutish behavior had earned themselves a place in Hell, their city was already halfway there. We witnessed a montage of strikes, rioting, and fires, the tall buildings beginning to burn as if they had been built of kindling. Now the audience was introduced to Foster, the industrialist, who labored mightily to subdue a fire in his iron mill, which had been set ablaze by unruly workers; but he was forced back by the heat and fallen timbers. Against this backdrop of destruction Foster wiped his sooty brow and sang in resignation the
Aria: Gone, all that I have built.

All this was sorrowful enough to melt the hardest cynic's heart, but it wasn't finished. Eula appeared once more. She had left the scene of Boone's cruel arrest, only to find her family home engulfed in flame, and her mother and father crying out from a window from which they could not be rescued.

The flames consumed them. Overwhelmed with grief, Eula stumbled on to the jail where she believed Boone had been taken; but that building, too, had burned to the ground.

Several of the Eupatridian ladies in the audience were moved by this tragic scene, and they dabbed their eyes and blew their noses in a manner that distracted from Eula's excellently performed
Aria: Lost and alone among the ruins,
which was the conclusion of Act I.

The lights came up for an intermission. Many of the Eupatridians adjourned at once to the lobby; but Calyxa and Julian and I were young and staunch of bladder, and we kept our seats. Images from the film were still vivid in my mind's eye, and I began to think about the lost wonders of the Secular Ancients. I said to Julian, "The Secular Ancients made movies, didn't they?—you told me so, I think."

"Movies too numerous to count, though none survive, unless they've been locked away in the Dominion Archives." The Dominion's Cultural Committee kept a large stone building in New York City, Julian explained, where it preserved antique texts and documents and other items too blasphemous to be seen by the public. No one outside the licensed clergy knew what trea sures it contained.

"And their movies had recorded sound, and color photography?"

"They did."

"Then why can't we have such movies? Or at least a larger number of the ones we do make? I don't understand it, Julian. The simpler technologies of the past are no mystery to us. We may not have bountiful supplies of oil, but we can burn coal to much the same effect."

"We
could
 make movies with recorded sound," Julian said, "but the resources haven't been allotted that way. The same is true of that typewriter by which Theodore Dornwood seduced your ser vices. We could build a typewriter for every human being in Manhattan if we liked; but it would be a reckless expenditure of iron or rubber or what ever they make typewriters out of—materials the Senate assigns to Eupatridian manufacturers, who in turn supply the military with weapons and other necessities."

I had not thought of it in those terms. I supposed every Trench Sweeper in Labrador could be considered a typewriter not manufactured or a movie not produced. A painful bargain, but what patriot could disagree with it?

"An artist," Julian said, "or a small manufacturer or shop keep er, has to make do with what ever resources trickle down as surplus from above, or with second-pickings from some local Tip. The justice of this is debatable, of course." He turned to Calyxa. "What do you think of the film so far?"

"As drama?" She rolled her eyes scornfully. "And the songs—excuse me, the
arias
—are simple-minded. The female singer is good, though. A little flat in the upper registers, but bold and fluent overall."

I politely disagreed with her about the quality of the drama; but what she said about the music amounted to high praise, for Calyxa dispensed her approval grudgingly at the best of times.

Now the audience filed back into the auditorium and the lights were extinguished for Act II. The production resumed with yet another Spectacle: hundreds of ragged men and women fleeing the Fall of the Cities, set to a mournful trumpet eulogy and the rhythm of tramping feet. Among these individuals was the convicted pastor Boone, who (unknown to Eula) had escaped ahead of the flames. In one touching scene he came across his former captors, the brutal Secular Policemen, now starving and suffering from burns; and despite their sins against him he helped them renounce their apostasy, and led them to redemption in the moment of their deaths. Rising tear-streaked from this sacred task, Boone spotted a distant Banner of the Cross among the plod-ding refugees. He recognized it as a symbol of the nascent Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth—a union of all the Persecuted Churches—and he marked the event by singing his

Aria: In the wilderness, a flag.

Eula, unknown to Boone, was part of the same mass of vagrant urbanites.

When hunger threatened to overcome her she was forced to beg help from Foster, the former industrialist. Foster, traveling in a wagon, explained that he was aiming to reach a certain rural plantation he owned. His behavior toward Eula was impeccably kind and chaste, and although she still loved Boone she believed the pastor had been killed in the fire; so she accepted Foster's gifts with a relatively free heart. Eula's plaintive second-act song, accompanied by piano rather than full orchestra, was

Aria: I will take this offered hand.

Then Foster and Eula—growing ever closer—traveled in Foster's horse-drawn wagon through a montage of scenes of the degraded world of the False Tribulation. There were ruined houses, dust- blown farms, starved cattle, fallen Airplanes, rusted Automobiles, and so forth. Eventually, and after arduous adventures, they came to a hilltop town not far from the rural property Foster owned. This town had survived the Fall of the Cities intact, and was protected by the steadfast Christianity of its population. The inhabitants had erected a huge symbol of their faith at the highest point of land, prompting Foster's
Aria: What shines on that far hill? A cross!

The Act concluded with Eula's astonished glimpse of one of the many clerics who had assembled in this virtuous town to join in the work of defending its piety: none other than Boone, her former intended husband.

The curtain closed on this breathless discovery.

This time the three of us adjourned to the lobby during the intermission.

While attending to human necessity I discovered yet another of the unanticipated luxuries of the Eupatridian class: indoor plumbing so immaculate that the enameled receptacles for gentlemen gleamed as if freshly polished, and were scented with lemon. Amazing, what subtle easements human ingenuity can contrive!

I made my way back to my seat in time for Act III.

Act III was that portion of the movie in which a Choice, prominent in the title, was set before poor Eula. That would provide great opportunities for the actresses portraying her (both voice and on film) to exert themselves; but first we saw Foster facing a dilemma of his own. His plantation, not far from the pious town where he and Eula had taken refuge, was in a shambles. The wheat crop had been trampled by hungry refugees, and what remained could not be harvested for lack of help. Meanwhile refugees crowded into town on a daily basis, hoping to be fed. Clearly the solution was to use landless vagrants as field-hands—but he couldn't
hire
 any, in the classic sense, because he had no money with which to pay them. In any case farm work (which guaranteed a daily meal) was so desirable that the mob would have fought for it.

Therefore Foster worked out an ingenious solution:
Aria: All that may be sold generosity may buy,
he sang, accepting pledges of lifelong indenture from men willing to forego daily wages.
⁵⁵
To enforce the arrangement, and to make a success of it, he required the assistance of the clergy in general, and Pastor Boone in particular.

Thus Eula was treated to the sight of her contending suitors united in the creation of that new and more pious America which would grow from the ruins of the old. Foster was ignorant of Boone's prior relation to Eula; but Boone was introduced to Eula at a social gathering and recognized her at once.
Quickly discerning the nature of her intimacy with Foster, Boone pretended ignorance,
⁵⁶
and Eula played along. This culminated in a walk by Boone through a moonlit meadow, where he performed his melancholy
Aria: I give to God that which the Earth denies, renouncing terrestrial love in favor of the more dependable heavenly variety.

Eula, listening from a place among the trees, wept almost as copiously as the ladies in the theater.
⁵⁷

Foster proposed to her in a scene of the following day. Eula did not accept his proposal at once, but went to see Boone for advice. She approached him as a penitent to a pastor—neither of them acknowledging their prior acquaintance, though both were painfully conscious of it—and told him the story of everything that had happened to her since the Fall of the Cities, culminating in Foster's proposal. She had seen her former betrothed, she said, whom she had believed dead; and she still loved him authentically; but she loved Foster as well, and her mind was all in a confusion.

Boone, overcome with feeling, eventually spoke. "Many things have changed since the end of the old world," he said, the voice actor giving this speech all the quirks and quavers of suppressed emotion while synchronizing his words precisely with the vocal movements of the actor on the screen. "We're embarked on a new relationship with the sacred. It's the twilight of an old way of life, and the dawn of a new. Vows from prior times are not broken but annulled. Your marriage if you make it will surely be blessed—[a long choked pause]—despite, despite what came before."

Eula turned her brimming eyes to his. "Thank you, Pastor," she said; and if she said anything else it was drowned out by the sniffling in the audience.

Eula's return to Foster was bittersweet. She accepted his attentions with an
Aria: I pledge to thee,
followed by scenes of a spectacular Wedding, with many poignant glances cast between Eula and the noble Pastor, and at last a lengthy
Ensemble/ Medley:

The hand of God, not gentle

What shines on that far hill?

I pledge to thee,

the cast being joined by a Chorus, with much ringing of bells, and exclamations by the trumpet section, and a triumphant final refrain over a distant image of that Christian town, its wheatfields plowed by contented indentured folk, and the
Sixty Stars and Thirteen Stripes waving optimistically over it all.
⁵⁸

There was protracted applause as the curtain fell. I applauded at least as vigorously as anyone else—perhaps more so. I had not known that the Cinematic Illusion could exist on such an exalted scale, sustained by the painstaking efforts of so many skilled performers working in close concert. It was as much a revelation to me as the plumbing in the Gentlemen's Room.

We followed the crowd outside. The movie had generated in my mind a sort of Patriotic Glow, which was compounded by the glow of the city. It was the last quarter of the nightly four-hour Illumination of Manhattan, and artificial lights glittered along Broadway like legions of fireflies all in harness.

Even the skeletal remains of the antique Sky-Scrapers seemed infused with an electric liveliness. Coaches and taxis passed in great profusion, and scarlet Banners of the Cross, draped from eaves and lintels in anticipation of Independence Day, fluttered in the pleasant breeze. I told Julian how impressed I was, and asked him to forgive me for doubting all his boasts about New York City and the movies.

"Yes, it was a tolerably good show," he said, "a very pleasant evening out, all in all."

"Tolerably good! Are there better?"

"I've seen a few that topped it."

"Good?" Calyxa asked skeptically. "And you notorious for your agnosticism? Pretty as it might be, isn't
Eula
 an insult to your profoundest beliefs?"

"Thank you for asking," Julian said, "but no, I don't feel particularly insulted by it. If I am an
agnostic,
 Calyxa, it's because I'm also a
realist
."

"There was no realism in the film that I could discern—just a simple-minded version of what they print in the Dominion readers."

"Well, yes—considered as history it was feeble and propagandistic—but it could hardly be anything else. You saw the Dominion stamp at the beginning of it. No film-maker can proceed without submitting his script to the Dominion's cultural committees.
Realistically,
 these matters are exempted from art, since they're beyond the artist's control. But in structure, pacing, dialogue, photography, harmony between the screen and the voice performances—everything over which the film-makers
did
 exercise a shaping influence—it was above reproach."

"Above reproach, then," Calyxa said, "in everything except what matters."

"Do you mean to say the singing didn't matter?"

"Well ... the singing was fine, admittedly ... and the singers didn't write the script... ."

"My point exactly."

"So it was a beautiful, stupid thing. Wouldn't it be even more beautiful if it were slightly less stupid?"

"I don't disagree. I would love to make a movie that wasn't just beautiful but also thoughtful and true. I've thought about it often. But the world isn't rigged to allow such a thing. I doubt anyone on Earth has the power to overrule the Dominion in these matters, except possibly the President himself." Then Julian, as if startled by his own thought, blinked and smiled. "Of course that's not something we can expect of Deklan Comstock."

"No," Calyxa said, searching his face. "No, certainly not of
Deklan
 Comstock."