WAS (36 page)

His mother backed away from him. "I'm all right. You keep sitting," she said. Vapor wreathed out of her mouth, like steam. She found her way to another garden chair, uncertainly, nervously.

At first Jonathan thought it was cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth. But then he saw that she was sitting in a field of snow. Sparkles of sunlight blasted back up from it, like sand in his eyes. It was cold, where his mother was.

She leaned forward, uncertain how to begin. This was not the confident businesswoman that his mother had become. Now in her sixties, Jonathan's mother had lost all sense of fear and, because of that, all sense of style.

This was his young and insecure mother, who had no assurances how well her life would turn out, who wanted everything to be new and modern, who threw out anything old, who was a model but who still did not believe she was beautiful. This was his mother when she was younger than he was now. Poor ghost.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

"Did you ever notice," she began, hesitantly, "how in biographies they never tell you much about the adult's relationship with his parents?"

"Yes," said Jonathan. Indeed he had, being interested in history The words flowed out of his mouth slowly and messily like molasses.

"It's because people are embarrassed by it," said his mother. There were no creases in her cheeks, no patches of scaly skin on her wrists. Her lipstick was ruby red and her hair black.

"It's embarrassing for everyone. Embarrassing for the child who needs to become independent. How can you be independent when there is someone who still calls you their child? For the parents, it's a constant reminder how old they are and how strange life is. They look at the face of a forty-year-old man and say, I gave birth to him. I held his hand as a baby."

Jonathan couldn't see what was happening behind the snow-blind sunglasses.

"When you were first born," his mother said, "I took you out into a field of snow, like this one." She held out her hands, and showed him the Canadian field. "I held you up against my cheek and it was as though I were launching you into the future. It seemed to me you were like a branch, that would grow into the year 2000."

Somehow they were back in Los Angeles.

"You won't see the year 2000, will you?" his mother said.

"No," whispered Jonathan.

"I used to think there was some compensation," his mother said. "When you were a baby, and I realized there was something wrong with you, when you rocked and wouldn't speak, when you tore things up, I asked everyone what I had done wrong. Then I saw. You could draw. You could make those heads out of clay. And I thought: There always is some compensation. When you quit university the first time, and I saw you act at Stratford, I thought: There's the compensation. Even when you left me, left all of us and came here to do whatever it was you did in all those bars, I thought: He's got to be there to make it. He's got to be there for his profession."

She looked around at his garden, at the L.A. sun. "But there's no compensation, Jonathan. There's no one to pass anything on to. You'll die, and the future will be only silence. You'll die and there won't be anything left."

Somewhere there were birds singing in bushes.

"I went back to our old house. The one your father built. It has had eight owners since we left. I walked through its rooms. Everything had been torn out, replaced. Even the stone fireplace your father built. Even the tree we planted that had your name. The shoebox at the end of the hall, even the patio out back."

"What?" Jonathan began, words trailing limply. He meant to ask, what did the owners think, with you wandering through their rooms.

"They didn't see me. I wasn't really there." She admitted it, shyly, with a sad shrug of her shoulders.

"You never told me," she said. "You never told me anything about yourself. You shut me out. You were embarrassed. You should always pay attention to embarrassment, Jonathan. It means there is something too tangled to deal with. And humor, when people turn things into a joke. Or when they make them weird or spooky. It means that there is something people cannot face."

She took off her sunglasses, and looked at him directly.

"Have you ever noticed, Jonathan? Being an actor. Has it ever occurred to you that there are only two genres that can deal with family life? One of them is comedy." She smiled ruefully. "And the other is…"

Her voice went rough and deep and harsh and menacing, and her face blossomed out like a flower in time-lapse photography, burst out in an eruption of scar tissue and deformation, marks where knives had passed.

"The other is horror!"

Jonathan howled and threw himself back in his chair, nearly knocking it over. He lost all of his breath, he couldn't pull in air, and his heart was thumping.

He looked around his garden, and there was no one there, and it was dark. When had the sun set?

I was dreaming, he told himself. That was all; I was dreaming.

But he knew his eyes had been open, and he knew he had been awake. He knew his mind was beginning to go. He didn't have as much time as he had thought.

Behind the locked door, the telephone began to ring again, over and over.

Finally, in 1981 when he was thirty years old, Jonathan had been offered a leading role in a film.

It was a horror movie. His agent described the script, euphemistically, as "powerful." The character was so disfigured that Jonathan had assumed no one would know it was him under the makeup.

The film was called
The Child Minder
. Jonathan played a character called Mort. Mort's face had been slashed by his father when he was a child. The face looked like a crazy quilt, all swellings and stitches. The character Mort loved children, and he loved killing them.

Mort hung them from meat hooks. He pressed cheese-cutting wire through them. Mort kissed them as he killed them and called them "my sweet baby, my sweet child."

Jonathan needed the money. It was with a sense of dread that he showed up at 5:00 a.m. in the scanty little trailer on location in Santa Monica. He assumed he would dry again. He often did, without warning. Despite his reputation for brilliance, Jonathan would sometimes unaccountably be unable to act. It was unaccountable even to himself.

Ira had read the script and described it with one word: pornography.

But as the layers of latex accumulated, destroying his face, Jonathan found he began to feel pity for the character he saw being built up in the mirror. Jonathan found a voice for him-desperate, wild with sadness and humor and betrayed good grace. His voice would be cultured, his laugh hysterical and poisoned. There was something solid there, as solid as history, that Jonathan could grasp.

Jonathan stepped out of the trailer into a gray California morning. He walked toward the lights and stepped into their magic circle. Jonathan spun on his heel once, and something alive reared out from him, took over his face, took over his voice box and his cheek muscles. The latex on his face was as unresponsive as scar tissue. That was right, too.

Children. What the world does to children. Cuts them, scars them, imprisons them, destroys them. It was all so terrible as to be a horrible joke, an embarrassment, a subject for comedy, comedy or terror.

They filmed the last scene first.

"Hey," said the director, a beefy, forty-year-old ex-cameraman. "You know, that's really good." He was surprised. They were on to something.

MEET MORT, said the billboards. HE LOVES KIDS. TO PIECES.

The Child Minder
was a monstrous success. For some reason, young teenagers were willing to pay to see people their own age tortured and killed in various ways. Market research showed that many of them went to see
The Child Minder
two or three times.

Ira never went to see it at all. "I just think it's a terrible shame that the only thing this society can find to do with your talent is that garbage."

Jonathan disagreed. There was something to Mort, something he couldn't define. Mort meant something.

There was a sequel. Mort had died at the end of the first film.
Child Minder II
resurrected him in a studio-bound hell.

Hell was full of the souls of children. They were made to sing merry school songs, chained to desks. They were drilled by tormenting demons in gray clothes with spectacles and fangs and rulers that beat wrists until hands dropped off.

There was a race of dwarves in Hell. They wore black leather harnesses, just like in certain L.A. bars. They had interesting deformities that took the better part of a day to create in makeup, and they flayed people alive. They sang and danced as they worked, like a Disney movie played backward. At the climax, Hell was harrowed by a visiting priest, and Mortimer escaped in a blaze of fire, out into the real world, an eternal spirit, to kill again and again in a chain of sequels. Mort was the wounded spirit of the eternal hatred of children.

In each of the films, all of the adults were either fools or drunks, wrapped up in work or sleazy sex. They had failed their children utterly. The children were left to defend themselves.

Mort materialized out of their parents. In sequences of special effects, he slimed his way out of parents' sleeping, snoring mouths. Mortimer was wept out of their eyes, to coagulate on the floor. He climbed out of the television set as adults watched the news impassively. The news, in the form of armed alerts, terrorism and serial murders, continued to flicker on Mortimer's face. The children died, slowly, horribly.

Market research showed that there had to be a murder every ten minutes or the audience got bored. In each ending, virtue triumphed in a blaze of light, and another generation would be left to grow up in peace. Except that as each sequel ended, Mort's face would be glimpsed, reflected in a pair of adult sunglasses or waiting for a bus, reading a newspaper. CHILD MURDERED, the headline would scream. With each return, Mortimer made more money.

Jonathan started to get letters. Many of them were from boys, wanting to know about the makeup and the special effects. Some of the letters were from girls who wanted to know about his emotional life. Was he as lonely as he seemed in the movie? Did he have someone to love him? One letter was from a woman who claimed to be a vampire. Was he one himself? Did he want to become one?

Jonathan became a star interview, in a certain kind of magazine.

In full color, the magazines showed how rubber bodies were made so that the skin and flesh could be pulled off in realistic detail as the arms writhed, as the arteries pumped out jets of blood. There were faces of women, with tiny pig eyes and huge mouths the size of footballs full of teeth. The center-page spread would be of Jonathan as Mort, his face in healed sections.

Jonathan endeared himself to the market by showing in the interviews that he had once been a fan of horror movies himself. He would lapse into lines of Bela Lugosi's dialogue. He would pay tribute to the grand old Gothic tradition. He might allow himself a touch of yearning for a time when fear was achieved through suggestion rather than bloody detail. He tried to explore what he thought he saw in the character of Mort. The audience found all of this flattering.

Jonathan was invited as Guest of Honor to something called a Con. It was a convention for fans of what was described as dark fantasy. Darkcon it was called.

Darkcon was held in Baltimore. Jonathan had never seen Baltimore. He spent three days in the city and still didn't see it. He saw the inside of the convention hotel instead.

It was a large, modern facility, with polished corridors and carpets and polite young women in orange jackets wearing name-tags. They smiled behind desks. The smiles grew uneasy as men in long hair, beards and black T-shirts began to take over the hotel.

Jonathan was welcomed by the Con committee and given a pack of publications-program books, more magazines. A plump, fresh-faced young man called Karl had been assigned to him. Karl was in charge of Guest Relations. He took Jonathan on a tour.

The Con had a bookroom, full of paperbacks in black jackets. Just inside the entrance there was a row of realistic, severed heads, caked in blood. Outside the bookroom, a little child was screaming, being pulled inside by her mother. Behind the severed heads, the book dealers were chuckling.

The Con had an art show. Its largest piece consisted of five realistically re-created nude corpses, hanging from hooks over a fan of rusted, bloodstained buzz saws.

Jonathan stood before it, with an expression of rapt and dazzled wonder.

"Toto," he said, in a little girl's voice. "We must be over the rainbow!"

As a Canadian, Jonathan seemed to spend half his life signaling Americans that he had told them a joke. He wiggled his eyebrows and leered at Karl. Karl suddenly grinned and covered one eye with a hand. "Oh, I get it!" he said. Karl's skin was brown, but his cheeks were very pink and his thick eyebrows almost met. Jonathan found himself feeling tender toward him.

A tall, thin woman approached them, all angles. Her hair flew everywhere, and her eyes were bright, and she was the same age as Jonathan. He placed her perhaps a bit too quickly. An ex-hippie, he judged, one of his own kind, a kindred spirit.

"I did the metalwork," she announced, pointing to the buzz saws.

"I'm… impressed," said Jonathan, choosing his words carefully. "You've put a lot of effort into it." Looking again, he had to admit that the metalwork was beautifully done. He suddenly saw the woman in his mind, slim in overalls, with a blowtorch.

"This is Moonflower," said Karl, coughing, shuffling. "She's famous," he added. "She does my fanzine."

"How… This is a strange question. You're obviously talented."

"I usually draw elves," Moonflower said. "And seagulls and stars. Stuff like that."

"Right. So where do the corpses fit in?"

"You're asking me that?" Moonflower seemed surprised. "The elves and this. They're the flip side of the same thing."

Karl and Jonathan had lunch together in the Con buffet. Eye of Newt was on the menu. Karl was obviously starstruck by Jonathan. Jonathan found this charming. To please Karl, Jonathan found himself becoming Mortimer.