Memphis Movie (30 page)

“Su—” was all Eric got out.

The report from the gun sounded like a cannon. It echoed off the walls of the cavernous space seemingly for many minutes. No one had even turned around to see Suze Everingham's resolute entrance. Hence the gunshot sent many to the floor. At first, Eric thought she had hit everyone. Then he thought she had hit no one.

Then he saw the bright blossom of blood on Sue Pine's upper chest. Her shoulder had exploded and she seemed as dead as earth. Her eyes were rolled upward, a horrifying visage.

And, now Suze Everingham was spinning in a circle, the deadly firearm still ramrod straight in front of her. It was a mad, deadly dance. Eric dove to the floor himself. So, not even he saw the final shot, the one Suze turned on herself. It wasn't quite as loud, muffled by the inside of Suze Everingham's once-lovely head.

76.

Eden Forbes stepped off the plane in Memphis and sounded a sour note right away.

“It's goddamn hot here for this time of year,” he said. A toady answered something.

Sandy stood at the end of the velvet ropes, her face grim and lined. She managed a tight, counterfeit smile.

“Sandy, good to see you,” Eden said, bussing quickly past her cheek.

“Eden,” Sandy said.

“Can we get a drink here?” Eden said, already hustling toward a bar.

Once seated Eden's rosacea glowed as if his face were strung with Christmas lights. Neither spoke until the bourbon began to course through his system. The background of the airport terminal resembled a movie set. The people scurrying about could be grips and gofers and juicers and assistants to the assistant director. Sandy saw it as a scene almost ready to exist, a wavy premonition of future reality. The kind of reality she and Eric created.

Eden spoke: “So, what the hell are we gonna do?”

Sandy considered her answer carefully.

“Shut down shooting for a week. We're so close to being finished.”

“Out of the question,” Eden said, signaling the bartender for a second.

“Eden,” Sandy said. “A cast member is dead.”

Eden looked at Sandy as if she were the robot crew member in
Alien.

“No one is gonna die, Sandy. We just need to change horses.”

Now it was Sandy's turn to look quizzical.

“Eden, you don't know.”

“Of course I don't know,” he fairly spat. “I'm only the money. But, goddammit, when things aren't right I act. That's what I do. Ask anyone. Ask my shareholders. Ask the goddamn government investigations committees. I act. Sometimes I go off on a toot, but when the money starts to go down a hole, it's Eden Forbes Time.”

“No,” Sandy said, which gave Eden Forbes pause. He didn't hear “no” very often. “No, literally, a cast member is dead. Suze Everingham. She shot herself on set. After shooting our new ingénue, Sue Pine.”

“Jesus God,” Eden exploded. “Sue Pine is dead. She's the future. She's the thing that could save this sinking ship.” He was already reaching for his cell phone to call Eric.

Sandy wondered briefly at Eden's ability to exaggerate with so little knowledge.

“Sue Pine didn't die. She is in surgery and will be fine. She has a shattered shoulder, or collarbone, or something.”

“What the hell is happening?”

“I don't know. A love triangle, I think. Or perhaps a love hexagon, if I know Dan.”

“What's Dan got to do with it?” Eden exploded one more time. “Tell me Dan can go on.”

“Dan's fine. Dan's in clover.”

“Good, good.”

“Eden, your message. What did it mean? Why have you come?”

“Sandy, I want you to take over the movie. I'm firing Eric. He's washed up.”

Sandy's sour stomach went sourer.

“Eden, I don't know—”

“You gotta do it, Sweetheart. No one else can save this mess.”

“What—what are you basing this on?”

“I read, Sandy. I keep my nose to the ground.”

“Your ear.”

“Yes, I keep my ear to the ground. I know what I know.”

“I'm sorry now for everything I've said. I am sorry I am dragging this picture down. It's not Eric's fault. It's mine. I am death to the picture.”

“Nonsense. Eric came back to Memphis with his tail between his legs. He was chased out of Hollywood because he couldn't do it anymore. And when he was given this small project, he fucked it up, too. So—we move on. We finish the film under your name.”

Sandy felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Kicked by Francis the mule. Kicked in the stomach in a low comedy, in a farce, and left in charge by the Mindless Whirlwind from the Absurd. She suddenly felt so alone. Luke Apenail became vapor in her cosmos, became a phantom. She wasn't a writer; she was a ghost writer. And she certainly wasn't a director.

Then, in her mind, her restless mind, her peripatetic mind, she began to block out the final scene. The one she was proud of writing, where
Memphis Movie
became what it was meant to become. Where it became
her
film. It could work
this way
, her head told her. You can do it.

77.

That night Eric found himself alone in the vast house in Midtown Memphis. He could not get Mimsy on her cell phone. It seemed to pick up but there was never anyone there. He spoke to the silence.

What had happened today? he asked himself. Bad karma. It followed him like a stink. This movie had been doomed from the outset, the whole project ill-conceived.

Now, Eric was at loose ends. He felt suddenly friendless, cold, alone. He even tried Jimbo—Jimbo who was hired to be at his beck and call. But Jimbo had a date. Imagine that. Someone he met on set. Movies initiated more adultery than half a dozen harems. Eric thought the whole damn company had betrayed him with their concupiscence and their amoral lifestyles.

But, no. It wasn't literally true. There was Hope. He laughed to himself. There is always Hope. She seemed to float above it all. She was so pure, so professional, so truly an artist, that Eric felt honored just to know her. Should he call her tonight? No. She had left the Pyramid today nearly in tears. She glanced once toward Eric, Lot's wife's stolen peek. Her expression said it all: we tried to build art on a dunghill. Or that's how Eric read it.

Eric felt near the end of something. Not just the movie, which part of him—that stone hard, cold part of him that did things, that
created
—knew could still be finished, could even be made
great. Eric felt the end was near, as if Charon awaited outside instead of some lackey driver named Hassle Cooley. What had happened to Hassle Cooley? What was the last conversation he had had with the nutty driver? Cooley was explaining to him that in the complete Zapruder film—which he had
seen
—Kennedy lives. Now, like JFK, Hassle had disappeared also.

And, in thinking about disappearances, Eric's mind conjured another vision: a young sprite, barefoot and fey, dancing in the rainbow mist of the sunrise. Where had he seen that recently? That Ridley Scott film with Tom Cruise? No, it wasn't on TV, was it? Eric sat on the edge of his bed and held his head in his hands. His mind wouldn't cohere. Then he saw her whole: Camel's amanuensis. If that's what she was. Camel's sylph. She danced on light.

And then—and Eric knew it before it occurred—his father sat across from him, studying his son's despair with the cool of the dead. His face, craggy and beautiful, seemed to hang in the room like another light. Like a secondary image caused by signal interference. Eric could only raise his head and meet its eye—a cold eye, Yeats's cold eye.

“Eric,” his father said. The voice was less distinct. Perhaps he was at the end of his haunting.

“Father,” Eric said back. He felt weary, too weary to even parlay with his dead father.

“You feel a failure. You feel that you have reached the end.”

“The end . . .” Eric said. He was losing steam.

“When God closes a door he opens a window.”

“Right, so you can jump out of it,” Eric said.

Eric's father's ghost chuckled.

“That's good,” he said. “That's very good.”

Now Eric had to smile. He made the ghoul laugh. Making the Ghoul Laugh. That's not a bad title.

“Eric, listen to me now. I don't have much time left.”

“Ok, Dad.”

“When you were young, son, you had such ambition. Such raw ambition. It frightened your mother and me somewhat. You were so driven. You wanted to read the right books, know the right art, see the right movies. You fell into existentialism as if it were a calling, like Mormonism or being a butcher. And you saw the world as an absurd place, a place run by morons. And you made Sartre's nausea your nausea. You see? You see what, as a parent, I was forced to confront. Refute Sartre? No, I couldn't. I could only hope that out of that pool of nausea you would rise and do something significant. And, for a while, you did. Your ambition held your nausea in check, and you added something to the old workaday world. You made films. Now, I like your films, Eric. I always have. If I never said so, well, chalk it up to an old man's reticence, the reticence of my whole generation. But, now, Eric, the old nausea is back. You are finding the world strange and unwelcoming. Eric, it
is
an absurd world, full of alien objects and strange people who will always be strangers. Still, why should we find this nauseating? Have you asked yourself that? If it's a given that the world we inhabit we will never fully understand, isn't that cause for celebration? The artist must tackle that strangeness, without letting it rub off on him, without being consumed by the
bêtise
.”

Eric's father's ghost rested. His eyes seemed rheumy and lifeless.

Why was he lecturing me about Sartre here at the end? Eric thought. Was this speech left over from his time on Earth, something he had always wanted to say but could not?

“Eric, I am your father,” the ghost now said, faintly. “That's all I came back to tell you. I am your father and that never goes away, is not diminished even by death's darkling cloud. Be brave, son. It's all we have left . . .”

The voice was even weaker now. Eric leaned in.

“All . . . we . . . have . . . Eric . . .”

The room was so dim Eric was not sure the specter was still there. He was about to reach out his hand when it spoke again.

“And, Eric. Love those women. Love them, son.”

And he was gone. The room seemed brighter suddenly.

Still Eric felt alone. He lay back on the pillow, his hands behind his head. He did feel nauseated. Was that only suggested by the ghost? Eric thought about dying. He thought about the work he was leaving behind, his legacy. He saw that some of it was good; he was happy some of it would go on without him.

Then he sat up. If he was to die, here, now, in this rented house in Midtown Memphis, who would speak for him? Who would write his obituary?

And, instinctively, he reached for his nightstand book. It was not there. Someone had taken his Samuel Beckett. In its place was a book entitled
We Are Their Heaven: Why the Dead Never Leave Us
.

“Sandy,” he whispered into the space around him. And then a moment later, “Oh, Mimsy.”

78.

Interior. Camel's bedroom. Crepuscular desinence.

As Camel's life leaked out of him, he began composing a poem in his head. The poem would spin out like gossamer or like the indurate substance with which caterpillars cocoon themselves. The poem would be his eternal shroud.

Lorax sat on the bed next to her Camel. She was as naked as Eve. Her face was so lovely that Camel avoided looking at it lest it break his poem apart like so much dreamstuff.

When the poem was finished Camel was not sure whether he would find the strength to write it down. Lorax had surrounded him with flowers from their garden, virtually stripping it bare. It was now a field of stalks. The vegetables had all been harvested and distributed around the neighborhood. In the coming weeks they would be consumed in households as far away as the Evergreen Historical District and the Cooper-Young Historical District. Folks, portly and gaunt, happy and morose, jaunty and earthbound, would spear a bit of squash or zucchini or banana pepper, and chew it with newfound thoughtfulness. There would be words burning and bubbling in heads formerly unpoetic. There would be linguistic splendor sprouting on tongues formerly tame. And there would be gastric tempestuousness born that would remind many Memphians that they were alive and
animal and walking around in a flesh suit that worked 85 percent of the time and that was a damn lovely thing. Such was the magick of Camel's gardening.

Now, Camel turned his kindly face toward Lorax, his salvation and the joy of his last days. He smiled their secret smile and Lorax let a tear fall, one tear as crystalline as a glint from an icicle.

“Is this the final time, Camel?” she asked, holding his heavy, hoary hand in hers.