The Book of Illusions (14 page)

The cameraman.

That’s right. He shot all of Hector’s films at Kaleidoscope. When Hector and Frieda decided to start making movies again, he left California and went to live at the ranch. That was in 1940. He married my mother in 1946. I was born there, I grew up there. It’s an important place to me, Mr. Zimmer. Everything I am comes from that place.

And you never left?

I went to boarding school at fifteen. Then to college. After that, I lived in cities. New York, London, Los Angeles. I’ve been married and divorced, I’ve worked at jobs, I’ve done things.

But you live at the ranch now.

I moved back about seven years ago. My mother died, and I went home for the funeral. After that, I decided to stay on. Charlie died a couple of years later, but I’m still there.

Doing what?

Writing Hector’s biography. It’s taken me six and a half years, but I’m close to finishing now.

Little by little, it begins to make sense.

Of course it makes sense. I wouldn’t have come twenty-four hundred miles to hold things back from you, would I?

That’s the next question. Why me? Of all the people in the world, why did you choose me?

Because I need a witness. I talk about things in the book that no one else has seen, and my statements won’t be credible unless I have another person to back me up.

But that person doesn’t have to be me. It could be anyone. In your cautious, roundabout way, you’ve just told me that those late films exist. If there’s more work of Hector’s to be seen, you should contact a film scholar and ask him to look at them. You need an authority to vouch for you, someone with a reputation in the field. I’m just an amateur.

You might not be a professional movie critic, but you’re an expert on the comedies of Hector Mann. You wrote an extraordinary book, Mr. Zimmer. No one is ever going to write better about those films. It’s the definitive work.

Until that moment, she had given me her complete attention. Pacing back and forth in front of her as she sat on the sofa, I had felt like a prosecuting attorney cross-examining a witness. I had held the advantage, and she had looked me straight in the eye as she answered my questions. Now, suddenly, she glanced down at her watch and began to fidget, and I sensed that the mood had been broken.

It’s late, she said.

I misread her comment to mean that she was getting tired. That struck me as ridiculous, an altogether absurd thing to say under the circumstances. You’re the one who started this, I said. You’re not going to bag out on me now, are you? We’re just warming up.

It’s one-thirty. The plane takes off from Boston at seven-fifteen. If we leave within an hour, we’ll probably make it.

What are you talking about?

You don’t think I came to Vermont just to chat, do you? I’m taking you back to New Mexico with me. I thought you understood that.

You’ve got to be kidding.

It’s a long trip. If you have more questions to ask, I’ll be happy to answer them on the way. By the time we get there, you’ll know everything I know. I promise.

You’re too smart to think I’d be willing to do that. Not now. Not in the middle of the night.

You have to. Twenty-four hours after Hector dies, those films are going to be destroyed. And he could be dead now. He could have died while I was traveling out here today. Don’t you get it, Mr. Zimmer? If we don’t leave now, there might not be enough time.

You’re forgetting what I told Frieda in my last letter. I don’t do planes. They’re against my religion.

Without saying a word, Alma Grund reached into her purse and pulled out a small white paper bag. It was marked with a blue and green insignia, and underneath the picture there were a few lines of writing. From where I was standing, I could make out only one word, but that was the only word I needed to know in order to guess what was inside the bag.
Pharmacy
.

I haven’t forgotten, she said. I brought along some Xanax to make things easier for you. That’s the one you like to use, isn’t it?

How do you know about that?

You wrote a magnificent book, but that didn’t mean we could trust you. I had to dig around a little and check you out. I made some calls, I wrote some letters, I read your other work. I know what you’ve been through, and I’m very sorry—very sorry about what happened to your wife and sons. It must have been horrible for you.

You had no right. It’s disgusting to pry into someone’s life like that. You crash in here asking for my help, and then you turn around and tell me this? Why should I help you? You make me want to puke.

Frieda and Hector wouldn’t have allowed me to invite you unless they knew who you were. I had to do it for them.

I don’t accept that. I don’t accept a fucking word you’re saying.

We’re on the same side, Mr. Zimmer. We shouldn’t be shouting at each other. We should be working together as friends.

I’m not your friend. I’m not anything to you. You’re a phantom who wandered in from the night, and now I want you to go back out there and leave me alone.

I can’t do that. I have to take you with me, and we have to go now. Please, don’t make me threaten you. It’s such a stupid way to handle it.

I had no idea what she was talking about. I was eight inches taller than she was and at least fifty pounds heavier—a good-sized man on the verge of losing his temper, an unknown quantity who could burst into violence at any moment—and there she was talking to me about threats. I stayed where I was, watching her from my position near the woodstove. We were ten or twelve feet apart, and just as she stood up from the sofa, a fresh onslaught of rain came crashing down on the roof, rattling against the shingles like a bombardment of stones. She jumped at the sound, glancing around the room with a skittish, perplexed look in her eyes, and at that moment I knew what was going to happen next. I can’t explain where this knowledge came from, but whatever premonition or extrasensory alertness took hold of me when I saw that look in her eyes, I knew that she was carrying a gun in her purse, and I knew that within the next three or four seconds she was going to stick her right hand into the purse and pull out the gun.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my own body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt as if my skin had become transparent. I wasn’t occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

The gun was in her hand. It was a small silver-plated revolver with a pearl handle, no more than half the size of the cap guns I had played with as a boy. As she turned in my direction and lifted her arm, I could see that the hand at the end of her arm was shaking.

This isn’t me, she said. I don’t do things like this. Ask me to put it away, and I will. But we have to go now.

It was the first time a gun had ever been pointed at me, and I marveled at how comfortable I felt, at how naturally I accepted the possibilities of the moment. One wrong move, one wrong word, and I could die for no reason at all. That thought should have frightened me. It should have made me want to run, but I felt no urge to do that, no inclination to stop what was happening. An immense and horrifying beauty had opened up before me, and all I wanted was to go on looking at it, to go on looking into the eyes of this woman with the strange double face as we stood in that room, listening to the rain pound on top of us like ten thousand drums scaring up the devils of the night.

Go ahead and shoot, I said. You’ll be doing me a great service.

The words came out of my mouth before I knew I was going to say them. They sounded harsh and terrible to me, the kind of thing only a deranged person would say, but once I heard them, I realized that I had no intention of taking them back. I liked them. I was pleased with their bluntness and their candor, with their decisive, no-nonsense approach to the dilemma I was facing. For all the courage those words gave me, however, I’m still not sure what they meant. Was I in fact asking her to kill me, or was I looking for a way to talk her out of it and prevent myself from being killed? Did I really want her to pull the trigger, or was I trying to force her hand and trick her into dropping the gun? I’ve gone over these questions many times in the past eleven years, but I’ve never been able to come up with a conclusive answer. All I know is that I wasn’t afraid. When Alma Grund pulled out that revolver and pointed it at my chest, it didn’t strike fear in me so much as fascination. I understood that the bullets in that gun contained a thought that had never occurred to me before. The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through, and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you. I had chanced upon one of them in my living room that night. It appeared in the form of a gun, and now that I was inside that gun, I didn’t care whether I got out or not. I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare, and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go of who he is, it demands respect. It inspires awe in those who gaze upon it.

I can remember everything up to that point, everything up to the moment when I spoke those words and a little bit beyond, but after that the sequence becomes rather murky to me. I know that I shouted at her, pounding on my chest and daring her to pull the trigger, but whether I did that before she started to cry or after is not something I can remember. Nor can I remember anything she said. That must mean that I did most of the talking, but the words were rushing out of me so fast by then that I scarcely knew what I was saying. What matters most is that she was frightened. She hadn’t expected me to turn the tables on her, and when I glanced up from the gun and looked into her eyes again, I knew that she didn’t have the nerve to kill me. She was all bluff and childish desperation, and the moment I started walking toward her, she immediately dropped her arm to her side. A mysterious sound escaped from her throat—a muffled, choked-off stream of breath, an unidentifiable noise that fell somewhere between a moan and a sob—and as I continued to attack her with my taunts and badgering insults, shouting at her to hurry up and get it over with, I knew—and knew absolutely, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt—that the gun wasn’t loaded. Again, I don’t claim to know where this certainty came from, but the instant I saw her lower her arm, I knew that nothing was going to happen to me, and I wanted to punish her for that, to make her pay for pretending to be something she was not.

I’m talking about a matter of seconds, an entire lifetime reduced to a matter of seconds. I took a step, and then another step, and suddenly I was upon her, twisting her arm and tearing the gun out of her hand. She was no longer the angel of death, but I knew what death tasted like now, and in the madness of the seconds that followed, I did what was surely the wildest, most outlandish thing I have ever done. Just to prove a point. Just to show her that I was stronger than she was. I took the gun from her, backed off a few feet, and then pointed it at my head. There were no bullets in it, of course, but she didn’t know that I knew that, and I wanted to use my knowledge to humiliate her, to present her with a picture of a man who wasn’t afraid to die. She had started it, and now I was going to finish it. She was screaming by then, I remember, I can still hear how she screamed and begged me not to do it, but nothing was going to stop me now.

I was expecting to hear a click, followed perhaps by a brief percussive echo from the empty chamber. I put my finger around the trigger, gave Alma Grund what must have been a grotesque and nauseating smile, and started to pull. Oh God, she screamed. Oh God, don’t do it. I pulled, but the trigger didn’t go anywhere. I tried again, and again nothing happened. I assumed the trigger was stuck, but when I lowered the gun to have a proper look at it, I finally saw what the trouble was. The safety catch was on. There were bullets in the gun, and the safety catch was on. She hadn’t remembered to release it. If not for that mistake, one of those bullets would have been in my head.

S
he sat down on the sofa and went on crying into her hands. I didn’t know how long it was going to last, but once she pulled herself together, I assumed that she would get up and leave. What other choice did she have? I had nearly blown my brains out because of her, and now that she had lost our sickening contest of wills, I couldn’t imagine that she would have the heart to say another word to me.

I put the gun in my pocket. As soon as I was no longer touching it, I could feel the madness start to drain out of my body. Only the horror was left—a kind of hot, tactile afterglow, the memory in my right hand of trying to pull the trigger, of pressing the hard metal against my skull. If there was no hole in that skull now, it was only because I was stupid and lucky, because for once in my life my luck had won out over my stupidity. I had come within an inch of killing myself. A series of accidents had stolen my life from me and then given it back, and in the interval, in the tiny gap between those two moments, my life had become a different life.

When Alma finally lifted her face again, the tears were still running down her cheeks. Her makeup had smudged, leaving a zigzag of black lines across the center of her birthmark, and she looked so disheveled, so undone by the catastrophe she had made for herself, that I almost felt sorry for her.

Go and wash up, I said. You look terrible.

It moved me that she didn’t say anything. This was a woman who believed in words, who trusted in her ability to talk her way out of tough corners, but when I gave her that command, she stood up from the sofa in silence and did what I told her to do. Just the wan trace of a smile, the barest hint of a shrug. As she walked off and found her way to the bathroom, I sensed how badly she had been defeated, how mortified she was by what she had done. Inexplicably, the sight of her leaving the room touched something in me. It turned around my thoughts somehow, and in that first little flash of sympathy and fellow feeling, I made a sudden, altogether unexpected decision. To the extent that such things can be quantified, I believe that decision was the beginning of the story I am trying to tell now.