Smoke and Mirrors

There was an awkward silence.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Pretty bad,” I said.

I told her everything that had happened to me so far. I told her how I felt.

“Why is it like this?” I asked her.

“Because they’re scared.”

“Why are they scared? What are they scared of?”

“Because you’re only as good as the last hits you can attach your name to.”

“Huh?”

“If you say yes to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it’s a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don’t risk losing status.”

“Really?”

“Kind of.”

“How do you know so much about all this? You’re a musician, you’re not in films.”

She laughed wearily: “I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?”

“No.”

“Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They’ve all got them.” Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and she put down the phone.

I couldn’t find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.

I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.

White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.

I stared at it gloomily.

“You okay?”

I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.

“You’re up early.”

“I slept badly. Too cold.”

“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”

“It never occurred to me.”

His breathing sounded awkward, labored.

“You okay?”

“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”

“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”

He nodded, slowly. “ ‘The Artist’s Dream’ . . . ” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”

I turned to go and then something occurred to me.

“Mister Dundas,” I said. “Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?” He shook his head.

“You never wrote a screenplay?”

“Not me,” he said.

“Promise?”

He grinned. “I promise,” he said.

I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of Sons of Man and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn’t want it, now that they had bought it.

I tried to write “The Artist’s Dream” some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.

I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.

I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:

I’m thinking about England in the rain,

a strange theatre on the pier: a trail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The fear should be of going bleak insane,

the magic should be like a fairytale.

I’m thinking about England in the rain.

The loneliness is harder to explain—

an empty place inside me where I fail,

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I think of a magician and a skein

of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.

I’m thinking about England in the rain . . .

The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain

and here’s a sword, a hand, and there’s a grail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,

tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.

I’m thinking about England, in the rain

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.

I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.

The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.

The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.

I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.