Cat's Pajamas (10 page)

“Please, people, let's focus,” said Kieran. “This won't work unless we focus.”

Screenwriter Oscar Millard had given my character three major scenes. In the first, Hunlun sternly reprimands her son for abducting the nubile Bortai from her fiancé, a Merkit chief named Targatai—not because it's wrong to treat women as booty, but because Bortai's father murdered Hunlun's husband. “Will you take pleasure with the offspring of your father's slayer?!” Hunlun asks Temujin. “She will bring woe to you, my son, and to your people!” In Hunlun's second major scene, she bemoans the Mongol casualties that attended both Temujin's initial seizure of Bortai and Targatai's attempt to reclaim her. “And what of your dead, those who died needlessly for this cursed child of Kumlek's?!” Hunlun's final sequence is her longest. While applying healing leaves and ointments to Temujin's arrow wound, Hunlun takes the opportunity to tell him that, thanks to his obsession with Bortai, he is losing track of his destiny. “Did I not hold our tribe together and raise you with but one thought—to regain your father's power and avenge his death?!”

I hadn't seen my work in
The Conqueror
since the world premiere, and I hated every frame of it. It took a full measure of willpower to ignore this embarrassing one-note performance and concentrate instead on conjuring an anti-radiation aura around my pan-and-scan form.

Despite all the encouragement from Kieran and the marijuana, I failed to build the necessary shield, and Duke didn't have any luck either. From the first shot of Temujin (our hero leading a cavalry charge) to the last (the Mongol emperor standing beside his bride as they proudly survey their marching hordes), Duke's Betamax simulacrum never once acquired anything resembling psychic armor. He made no effort to hide his disappointment.

“Doc, I think we're pissing in the wind.”

“Kinetotherapy takes time,” said Kieran. “Can you both come back tomorrow at two o'clock?”

“For grass of such quality, I'd watch this piece of crap every day for a year,” I said.

“Make sure you've got plenty of Jack Daniels on the premises,” said Duke.

The instant Kieran activated his television on Tuesday afternoon, the picture tube burned out, the image imploding like a reverse-motion shot of an A-bomb detonation. Of course it's not difficult to purchase a new TV set in New York City, and Jonquil accomplished the task with great efficiency. Our second kinetotherapy session started only forty minutes late.

As Kieran got the cassette rolling, Sweeney assumed his place in the shadows, Duke poured himself a shot of Jack Daniels, and I inhaled a lungful of pot. Today's weed was even better than yesterday's. Kieran might be a lunatic and a charlatan, but he knew his hallucinogens.

“Want to know the really scary thing about the Upshot Knothole tests?” I said. I'd spent my evening reading
The Tenth Circle of Hell,
Judith Markson's concise narrative of the Nevada Proving Ground. “By this point in history such devices were considered
tactical
—not strategic,
tactical!”

“Take it easy, Egghead,” said Duke.

“Time to watch the movie,” said Kieran.

“The monster that killed seventy thousand Hiroshima civilians is suddenly a fucking
battlefield weapon!”
I passed the joint to Kieran. “Isn't that
sick?
They even fired a Knothole bomb out of an
artillery cannon!
They called it ‘Grable'—from Betty Grable, no doubt—fifteen kilotons, same as the Hiroshima blast. A goddamn artillery cannon.”

As the screen displayed the opening logo, Kieran drew some illegal vapor into his body, then gave me back the joint.
AN RKO RADIO PICTURE FILMED IN CINEMASCOPE.

“Focus, my friends,” said Kieran. “Tune in the quantum vibrations.”

HOWARD HUGHES PRESENTS… THE CONQUEROR… STARRING JOHN WAYNE…

“Then there was ‘Encore,' dropped from a plane.” I sucked on the joint, inhaled deeply, and, pursing my lips, let the smoke find its way to my brain. “They suspended another payload from a balloon, dropped another from a steel tower.”

SUSAN HAYWARD… CO-STARRING PEDRO ARMENDARIZ… WITH ANGELA RAPPAPORT
—
THOMAS GOMEZ
—
JOHN HOYT
—
WILLIAM CONRAD…

“Battlefield atomic bombs.” I gave the joint to Kieran. He took a toke and handed it back. “What barbarous insanity.”

WRITTEN BY OSCAR MILLARD… ASSOCIATE PRODUCER RICHARD SOKOLOVE… MUSIC BY VICTOR YOUNG…

“Your opinion's been noted, Egghead,” said Duke.

PRINT BY TECHNICOLOR… DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JOSEPH LA SHELLE… PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY DICK POWELL…

And then the movie came on: Temujin abducting Bortai from the Merkit caravan (a kind of medieval wagon train)… Hunlun criticizing her son's choice in sex objects… Targatai attempting to steal Bortai back… Hunlun denouncing the bloodshed that has accrued to Temujin's infatuation… Temujin traveling to Urga and allying with Wang Khan… our hero falling to the Mongol arrow and hiding in a cave… Bortai returning to her depraved Tartar father… Jamuga inadvertently leading Kumlek's henchmen to his blood brother… Temujin struggling beneath the weight of an ox-yoke as his captors march him toward Kumlek's camp (an image that inspired one of Stuart's students, in a paper that received a B-minus, to call Wayne's character a Christ figure)… our hero standing humbled before the Tartar chief… Bortai becoming conscious of her love for Temujin and forthwith aiding his escape… Temujin arriving half-dead in the Mongol camp…

At no point in this cavalcade of nonsense did either Temujin or his mother acquire a perceptible shield against the omnipresent radiation. But then, as my third major scene hit the screen—Hunlun treating her son's wound—something utterly amazing occurred. A rainbow aura, glowing and pulsing like Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, materialized on Hunlun's head and torso as she uttered the line, “Would that I could cure the madness that possesses you!”

It's the pot, I told myself. I'm high on hemp, and I'm seeing things.

“Good God!” I gasped.

“You've done it, Ms. Rappaport!” shouted Kieran.

“I see it too!” cried Duke. “She's got a damn rainbow around her!”

“Wang Khan—he will betray you into disaster,” insisted Hunlun, “or rob you of your spoils in victory.”

But then, to my dismay, the crone's anti-radiation suit started to dissolve.

“Concentrate!” cried Kieran

My cloak continued to fade.

“Focus, Egghead!” demanded Duke.

I stared at the screen, concentrating, concentrating.

Hunlun insisted, “Were you not blinded by lust for this woman?”

“Lust?!” echoed Temujin. “You, too, are blind, my mother—blinded by your hatred for her.”

“Shields at maximum, Ms. Rappaport!” shouted Kieran. “We're going to make you well!”

In a full-spectrum flash, red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet, Hunlun's aura returned. “Daughter of Kumlek!” she sneered.

“Way to go, Ms. Rappaport!” exclaimed Kieran.

“Congratulations!” cried Duke.

“Even if you were right about Wang Khan, yet I would venture this unaided,” said Temujin. Sealed head to toe in her luminous armor, Hunlun glowered at her son. “For I will have Bortai,” he continued, “though I and all of us go down to destruction.”

The scene ended with a dissolve to Jamuga riding through the gates of Urga, whereupon Kieran picked up the remote control and stopped the tape. It would be best, he explained, to quit while my triumph was at its zenith and the quantum vibrations were still folding back into the space-time continuum.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Duke.

“Soon it will come to pass that the gamma rays never even penetrated your body.” Kieran ejected the cassette. “Ms. Rappaport, I must applaud you. By reweaving the cosmic tapestry, you have conquered your past and reshaped your future.”

“That aura wasn't real,” I said, wondering whether I believed myself. “It was an illusion born of Jack Daniels and marijuana.”

“That aura was more real than the bricks in this building or the teeth in my jaw,” said Kieran.

Duke caught my eye, then waved his shot glass in Kieran's direction. “Told you this guy's a pro. Most swamis don't know their higher planes from a hole in the ground, but you're in good hands with Doc Morella.”

“I hope you're not jealous, Duke,” I said. “There was no aura. It was just the booze and the dope.”

“I've had a full life, Egghead.”

For the third time in a week I contemplate the Castle Bravo explosion while drinking a glass of sherry.

The mushroom cloud, I realize, is in fact a Nuclear Age inkblot test, a radioactive Rorschach smear. In the swirling vapors I briefly glimpse my has-been diva from
The High and the Mighty
as she speculates that nobody will miss her if the airliner goes into the drink. Next I see my
Alamo
character, the insufferably selfless Blind Nell, giving her husband permission to enter into a suicide pact with the boys instead of wasting his life taking care of her. And now I perceive the school teacher in
Lock and Load,
telling Duke to be the best obsessive-compulsive loose-cannon police captain he can be.

Slowly the quotidian seeps into my consciousness: my TV set, my VCR, my sherry, the cat on my lap—each given form and substance by my dawning awareness that the film called
Lock and Load
does not exist.

Was it just the booze and the dope? I simply couldn't decide, and Stuart had no theories either. Despite his unhappiness with postmodern scorched-earth relativism, despite his general enthusiasm for the rationalistic worldview, he has always fancied himself an intellectually vulnerable person, open to all sorts of possibilities.

“Including the possibility of a mind-body cure,” he said.

“A mind-body cure is one thing, and Kieran Morella's deranged quantum physics is another,” I replied. “The man's a goofball.”

“So you're not going back?” asked Stuart.

“Of course I'm going back. Duke's paying for the weed. I have nothing to lose.”

Kieran normally spent his Wednesdays downtown, teaching a course at the New School for Social Research,
Psychoimmunology 101: Curing with Quarks,
and Thursdays he always stayed home and meditated, so Duke and I had to wait a full seventy-two hours before entering Treatment Salon Number Three again. In a matter of minutes we were all primed for transcendence, Duke afloat on a cloud of Jack Daniels, Kieran and me frolicking through a sea of grass. Our therapist announced that, before we tried generating any more quantum vibrations, we should take a second look at Tuesday's breakthrough.

“Whatever you say, Doc,” said Duke.

“It was all a mirage,” I said.

“Seeing is believing,” said Kieran.

I retorted with that favorite slogan of skeptics, “And believing is seeing.”

Kieran fastforwarded the
Conqueror
cassette to Hunlun treating Temujin's wound. He pressed
Stop,
then
Play.

Against my expectations, Hunlun's aura was still there, covering her like a gown made of sunflowers and rubies.

“Thundering Christ!” I said.

This time around, I had to admit that the aura was too damn intricate and splendid—too existentially
real
—to be a mere pothead chimera.

“It's a goddamn miracle!” shouted Duke.

“I would join Mr. Wayne in calling your gamma-ray shield a miracle, but I don't think that's the right word,” said Kieran, grinning at me as he pressed the rewind button. “‘Miracle' implies divine intervention, and you accomplished this feat through your own natural healing powers. How do you feel?”

“Exhilarated,” I said. Indeed. “Frightened.” Quite so. “Grateful. Awestruck.”

“Me too,” said Duke.

“And angry,” I added.

“Angry?” said Duke.

“Mad as hell.”

“I don't understand.”

“Anger has no place in your cure, Ms. Rappaport,” said Kieran. “Anger will kill you sooner than leukemia.”

As with our first two sessions, Duke's third attempt at kinetotherapy got him nowhere. Temujin went through the motions of the plot—he seized Bortai, speared Targatai, met with Wang Khan, suffered the Tartar arrow, endured imprisonment by Kumlek, won Bortai's heart, fled Kumlek's camp, conspired with Wang Khan's soothsayer, captured the city of Urga, appropriated Wang Khan's forces, led the expanded Mongol army to victory against the Tartars, and slew Kumlek with a knife—but at no point did Duke's celluloid self acquire any luminous armor.

My character, on the other hand, was evidently leading a charmed life. No sooner did Hunlun admonish Temujin for courting his father's murderer than, by Kieran's account at least, I once again molded reality to my will, sheathing the crone's body against gamma rays. When next Hunlun entered the film, lamenting the pointless slaughter Temujin's lust has caused, she wore the same vibrant attire. Her final moments on screen—treating her son's wound while criticizing his life-style—likewise found her arrayed in an anti-radiation ensemble.

“Duke, I'm really sorry this hasn't gone better for you,” I said.

The late Jamuga, now transformed into Temujin's spiritual guide, spoke the final narration, the one piece of decent writing in the film. “And the great Khan made such conquests as were undreamed of by mortal men. Tribes of the Gobi flocked to his standard, and the farthest reaches of the desert trembled to the hoofs of his hordes…”

Saying nothing, Duke set down his whiskey bottle, rose from his recliner, and shuffled toward the Betamax.

“At the feet of the Tartar woman he laid all the riches of Cathay,” said Jamuga. “For a hundred years, the children of their loins ruled half the world.”