Ramone was having breakfast when Martin arrived at The Reel Thing; his custom-made sneakers, purple and white and natural suede, perched on the counter like exhibits unto themselves. He was dark, shock-headed, with multiple-jointed arms and legs, and one of those ugly spread-nosed Latino faces that you couldn’t help liking. His breakfast was a giant chili dog, with everything on it, and a bottle of lime-flavored Perrier.
‘Hey, Martin!’ he cried, waving one of his spidery arms.
Martin came over and leaned tightly against the counter, close to the cash register.
‘Allure, Ramone,’ he greeted him. Saying ‘allure’ instead of ‘hello’ had been kind of a private joke between them ever since they had gone downtown together one evening to watch a Brazilian art movie, in which everybody had said ‘allure’.
‘
Allure, Juanita
.’
‘
Allure, Gaspar
.’
Ramone said, ‘That ginger-headed girl was in here, yessday afternoon, asking about you.’
‘Yeah?’ said Martin. ‘That ginger-headed girl’ was a student from his Monday evening tele-writing class, Norma, who had considered his
A-Team
rewrites ‘miraculous’; and had wanted to take him to bed to ‘you know, transfuse the talent’.
The Reel Thing was more than a store: it was a shrine. Anything and everything that was important to movie buffs was assembled here. Shirley Temple dolls in sailor suits and cowboy outfits and Scottish plaids. Buck Rogers disintegrator guns and rocket ships. Tom Mix pocket knives and six-shooters. And box after box after box of signed studio glossies – Joan Crawford and Adolphe Menjou and Robert Redford and Dorothy Dell.
The whole store smelled of forty-year-old movie programs and dust and old clothes and stale cigarette smoke from a thousand long-forgotten parties. But anybody who cared for movies could spend hours in here, touching with reverence the gowns of Garbo; or the white Stetsons of William Boyd; or the short-sleeved shirts of Mickey Rooney. The artifacts were nothing at all. It was what they conjured up that made them valuable.
Martin picked up a yellowed copy of
Silver Screen
with the enticing headline ‘What It Takes to Be a 1939 Girl’.
‘Did you look at the stuff?’ Ramone asked him, scooping up chili and pickle with his fingers.
Martin dropped the magazine back into its rack. ‘Oh yes, I looked at the stuff, all right.’
‘No good?’ asked Ramone.
‘Depends what you mean by no good.’
Ramone’s tabby cat, Lugosi, was resting on a stack of
Screenlands
, his paws tucked in, his eyes slitted against the sunlight that came in through the window.
Martin stroked him under his chin, but Lugosi opened his eyes and stared back at him in irritation, his vexation emphasized by the way one pointed tooth was caught on his lip. Lugosi was definitely a one-man cat.
Ramone said, with his mouth full, ‘It was genuine Boofuls stuff, I saw the paperwork. It was auctioned by M-G-M along with a whole lot of Shirley Temple properties.’
‘I bought the mirror,’ said Martin. Then, ‘Listen Ramone, can you get some time off? I have to talk this over with
some
body.’
Ramone wiped his hands on a paper napkin, rolled it up, and tossed it with perfect accuracy into a basket. ‘I was going out to Westwood, anyway. Kelly can take care of the store. Kelly!
Dónde está usted?
’
A small girl with owlish designer spectacles and a long blond braid down the middle of her back came into the store from the back. She wore a loose white T-shirt with the slogan ‘Of All the T-shirts in All the World I Had to Pick This One’.
‘
Hasta luego
, Kelly,’ said Ramone, picking up his car keys. ‘I’m going down to Westwood with Fartin’ Martin here to look at that stuff in Westwood.’
‘Kay,’ said Kelly in a nasal Valley accent, and began to shuffle movie programs. Ramone whistled to his cat Lugosi and Lugosi jumped down straightaway and followed them out of the store.
The ‘stuff in Westwood’ proved to be disappointing. Two crushed and faded cocktail gowns that were supposed to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. The nervy middle-aged woman who was selling them chain-smoked and paced up and down. ‘They have stains on them,’ she said at last, as if this were the selling point that was going to make all the difference.
‘Stains?’ asked Ramone, holding one of the gowns up.
‘For goodness’ sake, you know,
stains
,’ the woman snapped back. ‘Robert Kennedy.’
Martin, who was sitting back on the lounger watching Ramone at work, shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t conceive of anything more tasteless than trying to sell Marilyn Monroe’s cocktail gowns with Robert Kennedy’s stains on them.
Ramone dropped the gowns back on the chair. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t offer you anything for these. There’s no authentication, nothing. They’re different sizes, too. They could have belonged to two different people, neither one of whom was Marilyn.’
‘You’re doubting my word?’ the woman said stiffly.
‘That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is, thanks – but no thanks.’
They took a walk along the beach. There was a strong ocean breeze blowing and it ruffled their clothes. Lugosi followed them at a haughty distance, occasionally lifting his head to sniff the wind.
‘I never knew cats liked the seashore,’ Martin remarked.
‘Oh, Lugosi loves it. All that fish, all those birds. He’d go swimming if he could find a costume the right size.’
Ramone took out a cheroot and lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with the name
Indiana Jones
, his hands cupped over the flame.
‘How about that woman with the Marilyn Monroe dresses,’ said Martin. ‘Wasn’t she something?’
‘If they were genuine, I would have given her a hundred fifty apiece,’ Ramone told him.
‘How do you know they weren’t?’
Ramone shook his head. ‘You get an eye for it; a touch for it. Marilyn never would’ve worn anything that looked like that. A
shmatteh
, that’s what the Jewish people call dresses like that. And besides, there are no pictures of Marilyn wearing them, either of them, and if she
ever
wore two tight low-cut gowns, like that, don’t you think that somebody would’ve taken pictures? She was a chubby broad, to say the least.’
When he saw Martin looking at him in surprise, he grinned and said, ‘It’s true! I can remember every Marilyn Monroe picture ever, in my head. And James Dean. And Jayne Mansfield.
And
what they were wearing.’
Martin said, ‘I want you to come take a look at this boy in the mirror. I want you to tell me that it’s Boofuls.’
Ramone blew out smoke. ‘Pretty far-out shit, hunh?’
‘You don’t have to believe me until you see it for yourself.’
‘I believe you!’ Ramone replied, spreading his arms. ‘Why shouldn’t I believe you? I come from a very superstitious family.’
‘I just don’t know what to do,’ said Martin. ‘I mean, supposing it really is him? Supposing there’s some way of getting him out of there?’
‘Like the tennis ball, you mean? Well, I don’t know. It’s pretty far-out shit. But whatever happened, if you did it, if you got him out, you’d be sitting on some kind of a gold mine, hunh? You’re the guy who wants to make a Boofuls musical, and what do you got? You got the actual Boofuls. And all this stuff about him being chopped up, well, they’re going to have to forget that, aren’t they, if he’s all in one piece?’
‘I guess so,’ Martin agreed, a little unhappily. ‘It was just the way that he tried to grab Emilio and pull him into the mirror – well, that scared me. It’s possible that nothing would have happened … I mean, maybe this particular mirror has some kind of weird scientific property which allows objects to pass right through it. Maybe Emilio could have gone to play in mirrorland and come back whenever he felt like it.’
‘Do you
really
think that’s possible?’ asked Ramone.
Martin shook his head. ‘If the same thing happens to Emilio that happened to that ball … well, maybe he could get inside the mirror, but I’m not at all sure we’d ever get him out again.’
Ramone tossed away his cheroot and stood for a moment with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the ocean. ‘You know I come down here every time I feel that life is terrible, that people are mean and small and bitter, that human ambition is just a crock of shit.’
He paused, watching the gray water glittering in the sunshine. ‘And you know something?’ he said. ‘Looking out at all that infinity, looking out at all that water, all that distance, that does nothing for me, whatsoever. So the sea is big, so what, that doesn’t make life any better.’
They drove back along Sunset in Ramone’s patched-up Camaro, with Lugosi sitting primly in the back seat. Together, they sang two or three verses of ‘Whistlin’ Dixie’; and then fell silent.
‘That’s it, then,’ said Martin, unlocking the sitting room door and ushering Ramone inside.
Ramone gave a soft whistle and padded toward the mirror on squeaking sneakers, holding Lugosi in his arms so that the cat’s body hung down. ‘That’s some piece of glass. Nice frame, too. Who’s the dude in the middle?’
‘Pan, I think. Or Bacchus. One of those woodsy Roman gods.’
‘He’s a dead ringer for Charlton Heston, if you ask me. Do you think Charlton Heston ever posed for mirrors? You know, before he became famous?’
Ramone tentatively touched the mirror’s surface, then stepped back. ‘It’s something, isn’t it? What did she ask you for it?’
‘Five hundred,’ Martin lied.
‘Well,’ said Ramone, ‘I think she took you. I wouldn’t have paid more than two-fifty, two seventy-five. But it’s a piece of glass, isn’t it?’
‘There’s the ball,’ said Martin, and pointed out the blue and white ball on the desk. Ramone glanced at it, then glanced at the tennis ball in the mirror.
‘Now, that is what I call
extrano
,’ said Ramone. He peered at the blue and white ball carefully, and then he said, ‘Is it okay if I pick it up?’
‘Sure. I’ve picked it up. It doesn’t feel any different from any other kind of ball.’
Ramone threw the ball in the air and caught it, watching himself in the mirror with delight. ‘How
about
that!’ he said, laughing. ‘In here I’m throwing a blue ball; in there I’m throwing a totally different ball.’
‘Try throwing it at the mirror,’ Martin suggested, walking across to the windowsill to get the bottle of wine. ‘That’s it, directly at the mirror.’
‘Heyy …’ said Ramone. ‘I just thought of something. If this ball here isn’t the same as the ball in the mirror, maybe that guy in the mirror who looks like me – well, maybe he isn’t me. Maybe he’s somebody who
looks
like me, okay, but isn’t.’
Martin poured them each a glass of chardonnay. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ he suggested.
‘Hee! Hee!’ Ramone laughed; and then called to his reflection in the mirror. ‘Hey, buddy, are you me, or are you just somebody pretending to be me? Because, let’s be truthful here, you’ve got your right arm on your left side and your left arm on your right side, and I sure don’t. Why don’t you take down your pants and let’s see that skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which side of your ass it’s on?’
‘You didn’t tell me you had a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on your ass,’ said Martin.
Ramone looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t either. I was joking, all right. But you say one word!’
‘Anyway,’ said Martin, ‘try throwing the ball at the mirror. Not too hard. You don’t want to break it.’
Winding his arm back, Ramone said, ‘This is it! This is Rip Collins, just about to make the pitch of his whole career!’
‘Just not too hard, okay?’ Martin told him.
Ramone threw, and the ball smacked against the mirror. Lugosi the cat immediately jumped for it, dancing toward his own reflection. The blue and white ball bounced off the glass and rolled back into the room, but to Martin’s horror,
Lugosi dived halfway into the mirror’s surface right up to his middle, as if he had dived into water
.
It looked as if Lugosi had turned into an extraordinary headless beast with a tail at each end, and two pairs of hind legs that clawed and scratched and struggled against each other to get free.
‘Get him out!’ yelled Ramone, his voice white with terror. ‘Martin – for God’s sake – get him out!’
Martin scrambled down onto the floor and caught hold of Lugosi’s narrow body. He could feel the cat’s rib cage through his fur, feel his heart racing. Lugosi’s hind legs lashed out wildly, and his claws scratched Martin all the way down the inside of his arm.
Ramone did what he could to keep Lugosi’s legs from pedaling, while Martin tried to drag him out. But Martin could feel that same irresistible force that he had felt when he tackled Emilio: that same relentless sucking.
‘Martin! Help him!’ Ramone shouted. ‘Holy shit, Martin – he’s being pulled in!’
The force was too strong, too demanding. The cat’s body was dragged through Martin’s hands, inch by inch, even though he clung on so tightly that he was pulling out clumps of tabby fur. His body, his hind legs, his shuddering outstretched paws, all of them vanished one by one. His reflection shrank too – until at the very end there was nothing but a single dark furry caterpillar that appeared to be waving in midair, and that was the tip of his tail.