A Graveyard for Lunatics (8 page)

“Me?”

“I told Manny Leiber to hire Roy, your tyrannosaurus buddy.

And I said we needed someone who wrote as well as Roy dreamed.
Voilà! You!
”

“Thanks,” I said, slowly.

Groc preened over his food, glad that I was staring at his chin, his mouth, his brow.

“You could make a fortune—” I said.

“I already do.” He cut a slice of pineapple. “The studio pays me excessively. Their stars are always booze-wrinkling their faces, or smashing their heads through car windows. Maximus Films lives in fear that I might depart. Nonsense! I will stay. And grow younger, each year, as I cut and stitch, and stitch again, until my skin is so tight that when I smile my eyes pop! So!” He demonstrated. “For I can never go back. Lenin chased me out of Russia.”

“A dead man chased you?”

Fritz Wong leaned forward, listening, mightily pleased.

“Groc,” he said, gently, “explain. Lenin with new roses in his cheeks. Lenin with brand-new teeth, a smile under the mouth. Lenin with new eyeballs, crystal, under the lids. Lenin with his mole gone and his goatee trimmed. Lenin, Lenin. Tell.”

“Very simply,” said Groc, “Lenin was to be a miraculous saint, immortal in his crystal tomb.

“But Groc? Who was he? Did Groc rouge Lenin’s smile, clear his complexion? No! Lenin, even in death, improved
himself
! So? Kill Groc!

“So Groc ran! And Groc today is where? Falling upward… with
you
.”

At the far end of the long table, Doc Phillips had come back. He advanced no further but, with a sharp jerk of his head, indicated that he wanted Groc to follow.

Groc took his time tapping his napkin on his little rosebud smile, took another swig of cold milk, crossed his knife and fork on his plate, and scrambled down. He paused and thought, then said, “Not
Titanic
, Ozymandias is more like it!” and ran out.

“Why,” said Roy, after a moment, “did he make up all that guff about manatees and woodcarving?”

“He’s good,” said Fritz Wong. “Conrad Veidt, small size. I’ll use that little son of a bitch in my next film.”

“What did he mean by Ozymandias?” I asked.

All the rest of the afternoon Roy kept shoving his head into my office, showing me his clay-covered fingers.

“Empty!” he cried. “No Beast!”

I yanked paper from my typewriter. “Empty! Also no Beast!”

But at last, at ten o’clock that night, Roy drove us to the Brown Derby.

On the way I read aloud the first half of “Ozymandias.”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

Shadows moved over Roy’s face. “Read the rest,” he said. I read:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

When I finished, Roy let two or three long dark blocks pass. “Turn around, let’s go home,” I said.

“Why?”

“This poem sounds just like the studio
and
the graveyard. You ever have one of those crystal balls you shook and the snow lifted in blizzards inside? That’s how my bones feel now.”

“Bushwah,” was Roy’s comment.

I glanced over at his great hawk’s profile, which cleaved the night air, full of that optimism that only craftsmen seem to have about being able to build a world just the way they want it, no matter what.

I remembered that when we were both thirteen King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same. We told each other that one day we would write and move a Beast as great, as magnificent, as beautiful as Kong, or simply die.

“Beast,” whispered Roy. “Here we
are
.”

And we pulled up near the Brown Derby, a restaurant with no huge Brown Derby on top, like a similar restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, five miles across town, capped with a derby large enough to fit God at Easter, or any studio bigwig on Friday afternoon. The only way you knew this Brown Derby was important was by the 999 cartoon-caricature portraits on every wall inside. Outside was quasi-Spanish nothing. We braved the nothing to step in and face the 999.

The maitre d’ of the Brown Derby lifted his left eyebrow as we arrived. A former dog lover, he now only loved cats. We smelled funny.

“Of course you have no reservations?” he observed, languidly.

“About
this
place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”

That rippled the fur on the maitre d’s neck, but he let us in anyway.

The restaurant was almost empty. People sat at a few tables, finishing dessert and cognac. The waiters had already begun to renapkin and reutensil some of the tables.

There was a sound of laughter ahead, and we saw three women standing near a table, bending toward a man who was obviously leafing out cash to pay the night’s bills. The young women laughed, saying they would be outside window-shopping while he paid up, then, in a flourish of perfume, they turned and ran past me and Roy, who stood nailed in place, staring at the man in the booth.

Stanislau Groc.

“God,” cried Roy. “You/”

“Me?!”

Groc’s eternal flame snapped shut.

“What are you doing here?” he exclaimed.

“We were invited.”

“We were looking for someone,” I said.

“And found me and were severely put out,” observed Groc.

Roy was edging back, suffering from his Siegfried syndrome, dearly remembered. Promised a dragon, he beheld a mosquito. He could not take his eyes off Groc.

“Why do you look at me that way?” snapped the little man.

“Roy,” I warned.

For I could see that Roy was thinking my thought. It was all a joke. Someone, knowing that Groc ate here some nights, had sent us on a fool’s errand. To embarrass us, and Groc. Still, Roy was eying the little man’s ears and nose and chin.

“Naw,” said Roy, “you won’t
do
.”

“For
what
? Hold on! Yes! Is it the
Search
?” A quiet little machine gun of laughter started in his chest and at last erupted from his thin lips.

“But why the Brown Derby? The people who come here are not your kind of fright. Nightmares, yes. And myself, this patchwork monkey’s paw? Who could
I
scare?”

“Not to worry,” said Roy. “The scare comes later, when I think about you at three A.M.”

That did it. Groc ripped off the greatest laugh of all and waved us down in the booth.

“Since your night is ruined, drink!”

Roy and I glanced nervously around the restaurant.

No Beast.

When the champagne was poured, Groc toasted us.

“May you never have to curl a dead man’s eyelashes, clean a dead man’s teeth, rewax his beard, or rearrange his syphilitic lips.” Groc rose and looked at the door through which his women had run.

“Did you see their faces?” Groc smiled after them. “Mine! Do you know why those girls are wildly in love with me and will never leave? I am the high lama of the Valley of the Blue Moon. Should they depart, a door would slam, mine, and their faces fall. I have warned them also that I have hooked fine wires below their chins and eyes. Should they run too far too fast to the end of the wire—their flesh would unravel. And instead of being thirty, they would be forty-two!”

“Fafner,” growled Roy. His fingers clutched the table as if he might leap up.

“What?”

“A friend,” I said. “We thought we might see him tonight.”

“Tonight is over,” said Groc. “But stay. Finish my champagne. Order more, charge me. Would you like a salad before the kitchen shuts?”

“I’m not hungry,” said Roy, the wild disappointed Shrine Opera
Siegfried
look in his eyes.

“Yes!” I said.

“Two salads,” Groc said to the waiter. “Blue cheese dressing?”

Roy shut his eyes. “Yes!” I said.

Groc turned to the waiter and thrust an unnecessarily large tip into his hand.

“Spoil my friends,” he said, grinning. Then, glancing at the door where his women had trotted out on their pony hooves, he shook his head. “I must go. It’s raining. All that water on my girls’ faces. They will melt! So long. Arrivederci!”

And he was gone. The front doors whispered shut.

“Let’s get out. I feel like a fool!” said Roy.

He moved and spilled his champagne. He cursed and cleaned it up. I poured him another and watched him take it slowly and calm down.

Five minutes later, in the back of the restaurant, it happened.

The headwaiter was unfolding a screen around the farthermost table. It had slipped and half folded back together, with a sharp crack. The waiter said something to himself. And then there was a movement from the kitchen doorway, where, I realized, a man and woman had been standing for some few seconds. Now, as the waiter realigned the folding screen, they stepped out into the light and hurried, looking only ahead at that screen, toward the table.

“Ohmigod,” I whispered hoarsely. “Roy?”

Roy glanced up.

“Fafner!” I whispered.

“No.” Roy stopped, stared, sat back down, watching as the couple moved swiftly. “Yes.”

But it was not Fafner, not the mythological dragon, the terrible serpent, that quickened himself from kitchen to table, holding his lady’s hand and pulling her along behind him.

It was what we had been looking for for many long weeks and arduous days. It was what I might have scribbled on paper or typed on a page, with frost running up my arm to ice my neck.

It was what Roy had been seeking every time he plunged his long fingers into his clay. It was a blood-red bubble that rose steaming in a primeval mud pot and shaped itself into a face.

And this face was all the mutilated, scarred, and funeral faces of the wounded, shot, and buried men in ten thousand wars since wars began.

It was Quasimodo in his old age, lost in a visitation of cancer and a prolongment of leprosy.

And behind that face was a soul who would have to live there forever.

Forever
! I thought. He’ll
never
get out!

It was our Beast.

It was all over in an instant.

But I took a flash photo of the creature, shut my eyes, and saw the terrible face burned on my retina; burned so fiercely that tears brimmed my eyes and an involuntary sound erupted from my throat.

It was a face in which two terribly liquid eyes drowned. A face in which these eyes, swimming in delirium, could find no shore, no respite, no rescue. And seeing that there was nothing to touch which was not reprehensible, the eyes, bright with despair, swam in place, sustained themselves at the surface of a turmoil of flesh, refused to sink, give in, and vanish. There was a spark of the last hope that, by swiveling this way or that, they might sight some peripheral rescue, some touch of self-beauty, some revelation that all was not as bad as it seemed. So the eyes floated, anchored in a red-hot lava of destroyed flesh, in a meltdown of genetics from which no soul, however brave, might survive. While all the while, the nostrils inhaled themselves and the wound of mouth cried Havoc, silently, and exhaled.

In that instant I saw Roy jerk forward, then back, as if he had been shot, and the swift, involuntary motion of his hand to his pocket.

Then, the strange ruined man was gone, the screen up in place, as Roy’s hand came out of his pocket with his small sketch pad and pencil and, still staring at the screen as if he could x-ray through it, never looking at his hand as it drew, Roy outlined the terror, the nightmare, the raw flesh of destruction and despair.

Like Doré, long before him, Roy had the swift exactitude, in his traveling, running, inking, sketching fingers, that required only a glance around at London crowds and then the turned faucet, the upside-down glass and funnel of memory, which spurted out his fingernails and flashed from his pencil as every eye, every nostril, every mouth, every jaw, every face, was printed out fresh and complete as from a stamped press. In ten seconds, Roy’s hand, like a spider plunged in boiling water, danced and scurried in epilepsies of remembrance and sketch. One moment, the pad was empty. The next, the Beast, not all of him, no, but most, was there!

“Damn!” murmured Roy, and threw down his pencil.

I looked at the Oriental screen and then down at the swift portrait.

What lay there was close to being a half-positive, half-negative scrawl of a horror briefly glimpsed.

I could not take my eyes away from Roy’s sketch, now that the Beast was hidden and the maitre d’ was taking orders from behind the screen.

“Almost,” whispered Roy. “But not quite. Our search is over, junior.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

For some reason I scrambled to my feet. “Goodnight.”

“Where you going?” Roy was stunned.

“Home.”

“How you going to get there? Spend an hour on the bus? Sit-down.” Roy’s hand ran across the pad.

“Stop that,” I said.

I might as well have fired off a gun in his face.

“After weeks of waiting? Like hell. What’s got into you?” ,

“I’m going to throw up.”

“Me, too. You think I like this?” He thought about it. “Yeah… I’ll be sick, but this first.” He added more nightmare and underlined the terror. “Well?”

“Now I’m really scared.”

“Think he’s going to come out from behind the screen and get you?”

“Yes!”

“Sit down and eat your salad. You know how Hitchcock says, when he finishes having the artist draw the setups for the scenes, the film is finished? Our film is done.
This
finishes it. It’s in the can.”

“How come I feel ashamed?” I sat back down, heavily, and would not look at Roy’s pad.

“Because you’re not him and he’s not you. Thank God and count his mercies. What if I tear this up and we leave? How many more months do we search to find something as sad, as terrible as this?”