Passing Through the Flame (10 page)

“—or you can use the built-in star characters against themselves. Imagine what you’d get casting Steve McQueen as a closet queen or Henry Fonda as a Nazi concentration camp commandant—”

Jeez, what an idea for a movie!
Citizen Kane
out of
Last Year at Marienbad..
.. A huge extended metaphor, a party that goes on forever in a house set up just that way, with every sort of reality, every conceivable sort of person. And way up in the attic or somewhere, a god of this little universe, playing with the controls, moving the sets around, changing the realities, mixing everybody up with each other, changing their lives. Sure! And you
never
see this guy, everything you know about him comes from the ways in which he manipulates the sets.... Paul grinned wickedly to himself. I’d call it
The Man Upstairs
, he thought.

It was a nebulous idea, but it fascinated Paul, impelled him to motion, made him forget Velva, hie personal situation, himself. He wandered into the next room: all ultramodern plastic furniture in bright primary colors. A vaguely sinister-looking albino black man was talking with the production head of MGM in an English accent that seemed genuine. This house, Paul thought, is Jango Beck’s little universe. What would
this
party tell us about Beck if Beck were The Man Upstairs? Figure that out, and you’ve got the key to the concept, you can construct another character the same way.

Into another room: wood panels, a phony fireplace, Danish modern couches and chairs. A short flamboyantly dressed man with straight black hair and an aura of nervous energy was reading a yellow manuscript to a group of people, acting out all the parts.

High-rolling hash dealers. Studio heads. The rock press. Pillhead musicians. Writers. Directors. Hollywood parasites. Some movie stars. That weird blond Indian. This guy reading his story. Velva Leecock. Barry Stein, Harry Marvin. A berserker stalking around like a killer cat. What does it all add up to? It all adds up to Jango Beck. But what does Beck add up to? Where do all these realities intersect? In the person of Beck—it’s his party, and nothing else seems to interconnect these scenes at all.

“—heard the moist sounds from the basement and went down with fur and silence into the darkness—”

Paul found himself possessed by the overwhelming desire to meet Jango Beck. The house, with its cinematic landscaping, its sets, these weirdly clashing realities and the people in them; everything was an externalization of the personality of the invisible Beck. It was a psychic silhouette of Beck in architecture, interior design, lighting, landscaping, and flesh. Beck in his own strange way was an artist, and this party was his art form, but it didn’t add up to anything that Paul’s mind could encompass. There was something Martian about it....

“—the little glass goblin begged, just as the great hairy paw slapped him into a million coruscating rainbow fragments—” Paul stepped through another archway. Abruptly, he was outside the maze: in a long, narrow hall running the width of the house behind it. To his right, a spiral staircase wound up into the big tower he had seen from outside the house. The long wall in front of him was a series of glass doors opening out onto a huge balcony.

He stepped out through the nearest door into the warm night air, fragrant with the sweet musk of the canyon vegetation. Pale stars shone feebly in the sky, utterly overwhelmed by the nightscape of Los Angeles spread out in a majestic arc far below the sweeping semicircular balcony.

Perhaps twenty or thirty people were out on the balcony, escaping for a few moments from the complex universe of the party into the night air. Paul walked to the railing and looked out over the city of lights. Tiny red and white strands of jewels—the headlights and taillights of cars—flowed between blocks of scintillating buildings, a pointillist abstraction of a city done with a palette of lights. To the south, three red lights revolved, and to the southeast, blue strobe flickers marked the airport. The city gave off a hushed whooshing vibration that he heard not with his ears but with the pit of his stomach. It was a staggering, oceanic vision of humanity’s greatness, and it was also an obscene geometric scar at the feet of the shaggy, tumbling mountains: a vast mechanical carcinoma on the geological body of nature.

“Get your fat ass out of my way,” said a mild voice behind him. Paul turned and saw the young woman in the kelly-green dress smiling at him. He also saw that she had intelligent gray-green eyes with lines of character around them and a slightly sad, slightly sarcastic cast to the configuration of her lips. She could’ve been a well-worn twenty-eight or a youthful thirty-five.

“Hello,” he said. “What happened to your entourage of freeloaders?”

“They’re stuffed, drunk, stoned, and now they’re going to get laid. The rock press, God bless ‘em, dry them out, and get them out of my hair.”

“Are those guys really of importance to anyone?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? A
Rolling Stone
review certainly sells some records, and the
Flash
probably means something too. The rest of them are minor leaguers, but at least they come cheap. Feed them a couple of times a month, load them down with record albums, booze, dope, and fancy T-shirts, let the important ones get to ball a girl backup singer with a third-rate group once in a while, and they’ll follow you anywhere. Jango buys the whole pack of them out of petty cash, and I suppose you get what you pay for.”

“You know Jango Beck?”

She laughed a wan little laugh. “I work for Jango. Once in a while I sleep with the Great Man. Nobody
knows
Jango Beck.”

“He sounds fascinating.”

“He is. So is a snake.”

“But you work for him. And you sleep with him.”

“I told you, he’s fascinating.”

“But as you said, so is a snake.”

“Well, we both know what kind of symbol a snake is, don’t we?” she said. “This is a weird conversation. Here we are maybe trying to pick each other up, and all we can talk about is Jango Beck.”

“Well, this is his little universe, isn’t it?” Paul said. “Anyway, I’m not trying to pick you up, at least not now. I’m with
—Jeez!”
He suddenly realized that Velva must’ve been waiting for him back in Beck’s maze for, how long, twenty, thirty, forty minutes? She must be busting a gut—if she hasn’t picked up a producer by now.

“Pity,” said the woman in the green dress. “You seem interesting. Fast. I like the pace of your head, whoever you are. I don’t suppose you could ditch the girl you’re with....”

“A gentleman never ditches a lady.... But there’s a fifty-fifty chance the lady will ditch me.”

“Well, if she does, I’ll be drifting around. Just look for a lot of drunks in fancy T-shirts and ask for Sandra Bayne.”

She turned, walked back toward the glass doors, blew him a mock kiss, and disappeared into the house, into the confusion of the party. Paul stood there watching her go, wondering whether he would ever see her again. After a decent interval, he followed her back inside.

Back in the hallway, facing the series of arches that led back into the party, it dawned on Paul that he hadn’t the slightest idea of how to get back to the room that Velva was in. He remembered that she was in the room with green light and semicircular couches, but where was
that?
Between the dealers’ den and the strobe room? The dealers’ den and the black-light room? And even if I remembered the location, how would I get there?

Paul realized that he had absolutely no concept of the order in which he had passed through the rooms, or how many rooms there were, or the pattern of their interconnections. He might as well be in the movie he had conceived, where the rooms kept shifting and changing, for all the orientation he had. He had moved from one set to the next like a character in a film—scene! cut! scene! cut! scene!—flick, flick, flick from one reality to the next without any sense of topological transition. There was noting to do but plunge back into the movie and see how it came out. There couldn’t be
that
many rooms, anyway....

He picked an archway at random and found himself in a world of cool blues: navy rug, ice-blue walls, blue globe lamps, and inflatable plastic furniture in glacial colors. A man in a brown suit was talking to the blond Indian, while in a far corner the albino black was exchanging heavy glances with a tiny dark beauty in a sari.

“—can’t offer you any more than Guild minimum up front, but he’s willing to talk about a piece of the producer’s profit—”

“—but personally, Miss Devi, I find the ambience in Calcutta strangely to my taste—”

The long-haired military-looking bruiser strode into the room, still scanning faces and shadows for enemies. Or, Paul thought, possibly for victims. There was a flash of recognition between him and the black albino: fear on the one hand, something sly on the other.

“Hello, Chris,” the albino said in a soft stage whisper.

“Are you here on business, Cornelius?”

“You know I’m not masochist enough to work for Jango Beck. I haven’t your fortitude.”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

The albino laughed as an answer.

“Don’t walk past any dark alleys, Jerry, and you can be sure I’ll be doing the same,” Chris said, backing out of the room.

I wonder what two realities just crossed, Paul thought. Chris obviously works for Beck, and for some reason seeing Cornelius here scared him. The plot thickens. But I would’ve shot that out on the balcony, framed against the big black drop.

Paul stepped through an arch and into the strobe room, where three couples were twined around each other in the flashing light, kissing and writhing like flickering figures in an ancient stag film. Paul laughed—an image of Sandra Bayne zipped through his mind like a quick single-frame flash-forward—and he went through the next archway, finding himself in the greenly lit room where he had left Velva.

But Velva wasn’t there, and neither was John Horst. A few of the crowd of minor actors, actresses, and writer types were still there, talking to each other and to the black man in the cream-colored suit from the hashish den. Did Velva actually manage to get it on with John Horst? More power to her! If she’s taken care of, maybe I can find Sandra Bayne. That makes two people to look for, increases the odds of my finding at least one of them. If Velva’s disappeared on me, that gives me the right to disappear on her. On the other hand, I
did
leave her sitting here a long time. Maybe she just got pissed off. Well, if I don’t find her before I find Sandra Bayne....

It was too complicated to try to figure out a logical progression. The only thing to do was to keep in motion and deal with whichever of them he found first. The problem was figuring out which one he
hoped
he’d find first, and that, by its nature, was a bullshit problem.

So, keeping in motion, Paul pepped back into the black-light room. Artie, the fat rock critic, was talking with the three musicians on the couch, while the five groupies, their bodies melted, their heads nodding, stared at the huge day-glo poster, the great bush of hair, the spiral eyes, the slightly sardonic mouth, all done up in solarized globs of green, blue, and red. It has to be Beck, he thought. Who else’s face would he plaster across a whole wall? But the solarized poster of Jango Beck told him nothing; the face was fragmented into abstract smears of color, rendered inhuman and entirely enigmatic.

Artie waved a heavy hand at him as he walked across the room and favored him with an entirely false smile of recognition. Paul reciprocated as he passed by on his way out of the room.

Now he was in the room where the idea of
The Man Upstairshad
first come to him, lit by the synthetic firelight globe on its tall pedestal. But the blond Indian and his listeners were gone; instead, John Horst was sitting on a couch with the handsome matron in the blue cocktail dress, listening to the short dynamic man who earlier had been reading the yellow manuscript. He still clutched the manuscript, waving it around, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

“—so when he said that, I just went blaargh! and dived across the entire table at the spastic son of a bitch! Knocked the cretinous model submarine right into Irwin’s lap—”

“Pardon me, Mr. Horst...”

Horst looked up at Paul with an expression of suppressed patrician annoyance. “Yes?” he said curtly, while the short man glowered.

Paul suddenly felt peasantlike and stupid and angry at the two of them for making him feel that way. He could read their faces like director’s instructions in an overwritten script. Horst was assuming that he was faced with some upward-crawling parvenu who was attempting to make his lordly acquaintance, and the short man was pissed off because some bumbling nerd had interrupted his schtick.

“Ah, I’m looking for the lady I was with,” Paul said. “A very good-looking blonde in a very tight blue dress. Last time I saw her, she was in a room with you.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t notice,” Horst said icily.

“If you find her, ask her if she has a nymphomaniac sister,” the short man said. “Jesus, the people that wander around at Beck’s parties!”

Searching his mind for a snappy comeback without success, Paul stood there for a moment feeling both angry and dull as the two of them refused to take any further notice of his presence. Someday... someday...
ah, shit!
He gave up, stepped through another archway, and changed realities again.

He was back in the first room he and Velva had entered from the main salon: soft red light, cushions on a beige rug, incense burning in the lap of a brass Buddha. But the whole ambience had changed. About a dozen vastly diverse people were sitting around on the cushions eating off plates from the buffet—rock critics, a few actors, agent-looking guys, starlets, businessmen in business suits. The room had become simply the first place people found to sit down after they had gotten their food. Two of the original inhabitants—the man in the silk suit with the blond hair and beard and a thin dark girl in an embroidered silk dress—still sat at one of the hookahs, smoking hashish and giggling quietly to each other. It looked like a bunch of actors from some other picture taking their lunch break on a disused exotic set, while two ghosts from the last film shot there hung on ectoplasmically.