Wake Up and Dream (14 page)

Then the director called and everything was powered down and the actress returned to her magazine as he conferred with the technicians and then, although still seriously dissatisfied in the manner of all directors Clark had ever encountered, called for a print, which meant that the studio would now invest the several hundred dollars required to process and synchronize the film into a viewable rough cut. With all this expensive equipment, the highly trained people paid to do little most of the time but stand around and wait—the sheer, abject
waste
—you could see at close hand on a feelie set where all the money went.

“Smoke?” Townsend offered a gold cigarette case as they stood by a catering truck with some chattering Mexican extras dressed as Eskimos.

Clark shook his head. “I got these.” He tapped a Lucky Strike out.

“This is
something
, eh?”

“Yeah.” He felt almost relaxed. They’d just had coffee and bacon rolls, and it was good to be back out in the cool and quiet of the open air.

“Looking a bit peaky if you don’t mind me saying so, ol’Danny boy.”

“I was up late.”

“Out celebrating the contract? I mean, you and your wife?”

“Matter of fact, we were.”

“
Must
get together with you both. There’s a party tomorrow night at Herbert Kisberg’s place. You both
absolutely
must come. Say, by the way,” he added, dabbing a spot of grease from his cheek with a handkerchief which matched his mustard necktie, “what you said a few weeks back in your letter…”

Letter?
“Yeah?”

“You know—about sending me that new draft with an entirely different approach to
Wake Up and Dream
.”

“Is that how I put it?”

“Pretty much word for word.”

“Can I ask you, Timmy—I’m just keeping track—what color is the draft you’ve got?”

Timmy Townsend thought deeply for a moment. which looked like something he wasn’t used to doing. “White, I think. Yeah. I’m certain of it.”

“You’ve never seen this blue draft which I said I’d send next?”

“No. Absolutely not. ’Course, I’d be more than happy to take a fresh look at wherever you’re at. I mean, we’re bound to need some rewrites…” Timmy Townsend waved a finger. “But I know you writers. Nothing’s ever quite the way you want it. But, believe me, Dan what you got already is fucking dynamite. Start dicking around with that and the whole thing might blow up.”

He was led across other dusty backlots to Post Production. In these offices the complex patterns of sounds, images and feelings were put together to create the final illusion.

A woman was singing operatically in a sound booth in one of the audio suites. Another was laughing. Sound engineers beyond glass screens turned dials and fed wire reels through the heads of recording machines. On the floor above, the scene wasn’t so dissimilar, at least superficially, as feelie engineers pondered cathode ray tubes or consulted frequency charts of the range of human emotions, although once more Clark felt his skin begin to crawl. Here, still as nothing more than a representation of a signal cast against luminous glass, was Bet Doonsday’s aura, and here was Slowly Simpson’s. To Clark, they looked more like shimmering green butterflies flown out of some unpleasant dream. Of course, a real star needed a strong and consistent aura—that sense of
presence
which you got when certain people entered a room—although it was an open secret in the industry, Timmy confided, that they were given artificial help in this area during the recording process, just the way they were with padded bras, stack heels—and added echo on the voice soundtrack. More and more these days, they were calling in specialists to provide that kick of happiness or terror which made a great feelie seem real.

Clark was shown where these extra tracks were laid down. Here, inside the wire rabbit hutch of a Faraday cage to keep out interference, a woman who could do happiness like no one else was laughing. Who cared if she had a face like the backside of a bus? And here a bearded man who’d spent his childhood being brutalized in a basement was screaming so hard before the cataractic eye of an iconoscope that his face seemed about to rip apart. This was raw emotion, pure and simple, and eminently marketable, which could be mixed into any kind of feelie which needed that extra punch. Many of these recordings, Timmy explained, would be sold on to other studios. Or, increasingly, to a wide range of other outlets. The commercial demand was growing so fast it was hard to keep pace.

“We and Motorola are already talking to Sears. Think how it would work in a food hall—not to mention the lingerie department, eh?” Timmy nudged Clark’s ribs. “The use of feelie tracks in retail is going to go
massive
. We’ve already got nibbles from Howard Johnson’s. It’d be like the scent of baking bread at a bakers, only a hundred times better… But I really can’t let you go without trying some of our finished product.”

The feelie showing room had the usual plush chairs and reek of stale cigarsmoke which Clark associated with all showing rooms, but there were no loudspeakers, no screen, and no projection housing at the rear. All that stood between the open red curtains was a wide frame of thinly woven metal. Without the screen which would normally have been hung in front—and but for the rising buzz of the transformers and the fat wires which terminated around it—you might have thought this Bechmeir field generator to be a giant frying griddle.

The lights were dimmed in the traditional way, then Timmy clicked his finger to signal that someone should feed through the reels. Clark thought of that wraith he’d seen dancing between the two charged plates back at Erewhon, but here the field was spread across the breadth of a theater. Even before that pre-thunder buzz had increased and the black space before him began to glow, something cold and strange brushed past him. If such a sensation exists, this, he was absolutely certain, was how it felt to have someone—or something—walk across your grave.

The equipment here, of course, was all state of the art: new valves, high volts, maximum wattage. Push the field signal much higher, Timmy explained, sat beside Clark in a shuffle of nervous energies so bright you almost expected to see him start glowing as well, and people got nausea and headaches. Higher still, and you’d give them burns until you eventually fried their heads.
The Virgin Queen
was a relatively old feelie, and Clark had seen it in an old theater played on antique equipment. This was cutting edge.

With a faint crackling, the space before him filled into hazy curtain—a thing of no color at all at first, which danced and shifted as if caught in an invisible wind. Then the wind seemed to grow stronger—he could feel the chill of it—and the curtain flashed agitations of color, and those colors reached to something deep within. This, he thought, as spectral landscapes of plasm pulsed and faded before him, was how God must have imagined the universe before it existed. As a thing of pure spirit, as an outpouring of nothing but soul.

What Clark witnessed passed through the entire spectrum of emotions. Though the greens of happiness and the blues of contentments to the darkest reds of anger and the falling blacks of grief. And it wasn’t just humanity. Every living thing was alight in this different existence, this new way of seeing the world. Trees swayed in leafy waterfalls. Animals glowed like coals. But the auras of people were the true glory of creation in their flickering complexity. We aren’t simply moths or butterflies, Clark realized. We are all angels.

He saw the lantern blaze of a kid finding his presents on Christmas morning. He saw the dulling flicker of an old woman whose last friend has died. He saw a mother’s grief and the jarring fires of hatred. He saw the joy of a funfair, and tumbled from there into glorious coronas of unconditional love. But that fairground bumper-car tang was still sharp on the back of his tongue, and his hair pricked and his skin felt odd and slick within his clothes. With that hissing, with that crackling like distant fireworks, with that sparky, acidic smell and a feeling at the bottom of your belly that you got when the train you were in seemed momentarily to be moving when it wasn’t, the colors came and went. Greens and reds and flares of pure white, yes, but also the paler shades of everyday existence—those papery yellows and faded pinks and washed out blues of the workaday world. He saw them tumbling around him in strange snowfalls, and thought again of Daniel Lamotte, this guy whose life he was suddenly living, and the lost story that he was somehow chasing.

But the reels were still playing, and Timmy was still ablaze with enthusiasms. “You see this one here, Dan. Now, this is a real doozie. Our engineers have been working on it for months and it’s been a tricky little bastard, but we finally reckon we’ve got it right. Can you tell what it is? Can you guess? ’Course you can! It’s patriotism pure and simple. Just a question of mixing the right amounts of pride and down-home-sentiment, and then a touch of ambition, and then a whole lot more outright anger underneath it all than you’d probably expect. Can you
see
it? Can you
feel
it? Doesn’t that get your balls tingling and something coming up right there in the back of your throat like your momma’s just given you the biggest hug? Not giving away any secrets, old fella, when I tell you that Herbert Kisberg’s going to be announcing himself as a presidential candidate for the Liberty League in the next few days, and we’ll be using this recording in the fall rallies for sure. Even had a nibble from our friends across the pond. You know what that lot are like already with the salutes and the uniforms. Imagine how apeshit the crowds would go with this running when Adolph or Benito step up on stage. And imagine how much we could charge… !”

Then came a final waft of salt air like the stirring of a subterranean ocean, and the field generator faded to static gray. Clark was dazed and blinking like a sleeper awakening from a week long bender when finally Timmy led him back out into the sunlight, but the different world he’d glimpsed floating up there before him wouldn’t go away. He could feel the auras of the feelie houses seeping out around him like the smog which was rising up from the freeways to haze this late afternoon. He could taste the sour nickel tang at the back of his throat, and a crawl under his fingernails like he’d been trying to drag himself out from under the earth.

A new world had been forming itself around him, and he’d barely noticed. It was a world where every white American could own the latest Cadillac and streamline fridge—and where all the black, brown and the yellow ones made obliging servants. Armies of these happy Aryans would soon be sitting at home relaxing in the aura of a Buddhist master, or laughing uncontrollably, or fuming with righteous anger, at whatever on their new feelie radiogram was currently spilling out. They would always eat hungrily at their drive-in diners, and shop with a genuine passion for new things, and worship with true reverence, and lounge through midsummer heatwaves in the delicious feel of being cool. Soon, they would be able to spend their entire lives rutting like teenagers in the first flush of love with all worry and pain extinguished until they died smiling, surrounded by their relentlessly adoring family…

“You won’t be a stranger now, will you?” Timmy asked as Clark climbed back into the Delahaye in the Production parking lot. “Where’s the best place to contact you, Your house up in Woodsville…” A look of
you writer’s
puzzlement crossed his broad face. ”Or that place on Bunker Hill… ?”

C
LARK’S FIRST THOUGHT
when he pulled into Blixden Avenue and saw the lights of a black sedan blinking blue through the dusk was that the Gladmont Securities guy had tracked him to Downtown. His next, as he saw the LAPD badge on the side, was that Timmy Townsend had reported the damage to the Delahaye’s window, under the impression he was doing him a favor. His last was that it was already too late to turn around.

There were two uniformed officers. One had been speaking to the kid Roger. The other stood on the steps of Blixden Apartments amid an assortment of residents. Barbara Eshel was there, along with two thin looking men and a hunched old woman with a gypsy headscarf.

He parked the Delahaye, pulled the keys, climbed out and checked that his glasses were still on his face. The cop who’d been talking to Roger waddled over. For all his lumbering gait, he wore a somber expression of a variety Clark had rarely seen on an LAPD officer’s face.

“Are you Mr Daniel Lamotte?”

He pocketed the keys. The cop’s gun was still in his holster. Everyone on the street was looking over at them. “That’s me. What can I do to help?”

The cop was big and pink. You could hear the bubble of his breathing. The other cop who was coming down the steps to join them was young and fit. They often matched them up that way, although they both seemed oddly nervous. Clark had met cops in a whole variety of situations, but he was still struggling to get a feel for what was going on here. “I’m Officer Doyle. My colleague over there is Officer Reynolds. We just need to have a word with you, fella. You got a room or somewhere we could talk?”

“Can’t we just do this out on the street?”

Instead of asking Clark what the hell sort of game he was playing, Officer Doyle just nodded. Signaling to his pal to stay back, he put a soft arm on Clark’s shoulder and led him a short way down Blixden Avenue. They sat down together on a wall beside the street postbox. The cop looked down at the cracked sidewalk and pulled at his earlobe. Finally, he looked up.

“We’ve been trying to get hold of you now for a few hours. You
are
Mr

Daniel Lamotte, right? That place up in the hills—”

“Erewhon? Up above Stone Canyon? I sometimes work down here. I’m a writer—”

“Yeah.” The cop’s lungs simmered. “So we found out.” He licked the sweat from his lips. “It’s your wife. I’m sorry, but there’s no easy way of telling you this. Fact is, there’s been a body found. We got a report from some hikers about a red Cadillac Series 90 Sedan parked on a scenic byway up toward the San Bernardino Mountains. There was a dead woman inside the car, a hose was poked in though the side window from the exhaust and the engine was still running. The plates and the ID match April Lamotte.”