‘Because there are no kids in the next apartment, and because I’ve watched every single movie that Boofuls ever made, over and over and over. If I don’t know Boofuls’ voice when I hear it, then nobody does!’
Morris pressed his grape into his mouth, burst it between his bright gold teeth, and flapped his chubby little hand at Martin dismissively, almost effeminately. ‘Martin, you’re letting this whole thing get to you, that’s all. It’s got to your brain! It happens, I’ve seen it happen before. Some writer called Jack Posnik wanted to make an epic war picture about the Philippine War, that’s another one of those hoodoo subjects. He ended up wearing an army uniform and calling himself Lieutenant Roosevelt.’
‘Morris,’ said Martin, ‘I went back to my room and my poster was wet. My poster of Boofuls had tear stains on it, I swear it!’
Morris looked at him narrowly. ‘Are you a Catholic?’ he asked him, and his tone was unusually fierce. ‘You know, I’ve heard of weeping madonnas, stuff like that –’
‘Morris, listen to me, for God’s sake. Think what kind of a story we’ve got here! Think what kind of a picture this could make!’
At that moment, Alison came padding into the room on wet bare feet. Today she was wearing a bright yellow bikini that scarcely covered her at all. She was a darker shade of brown than she had been before, apart from that white blob of sunscreen on her nose.
‘Martin!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought it was you!’
‘Well, I think I was just leaving,’ said Martin.
‘I guess you were,’ Morris told him. ‘But listen –
please
– for your own sake and for mine, too, let this Boofuls business rest for a while. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Next week, you and I will fly down to San Diego together, and we’ll spend a lazy weekend on my boat, yes? Fishing and eating and drinking wine, and we’ll talk this whole thing through, unh? See if we can’t come up with something a little more acceptable, yes? Something with a little more taste? And, you know, something you can
sell
, already, without raising everybody’s hackles.’
Martin looked at Alison, and Alison laid her hand possessively on Morris’ shoulder and gave Martin an encouraging smile. Nice girl, he thought, not so much of a
tsatske
as he had first thought. She deserved better than Morris and his chauvinistic garbage about jugs.
‘My mother used to adore Boofuls,’ she said by way of being conciliatory.
‘Sure,’ said Martin. Then, to Morris, ‘Enjoy the rewrite. I may be a
shlemiel
but I can still write first-rate dialogue.’
He walked back out into the hot sunshine. This was one of those times when he felt like buying himself a very large bottle of chardonnay and sitting in his room listening to ZZ Top records and getting drunk.
On his way home, he felt so hot that he stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought two frozen juice bars, one for himself and one for Emilio. When he arrived home, however, carrying one empty stick and one leaking juice bar, he found Emilio’s toy cars lying in the dust beside the front steps, but no sign of Emilio.
‘Emilio!’ he called around the side of the house. The sticky orange juice was already running down his wrist.
A small boy in a rainbow-striped T-shirt was walking a scruffy ginger mongrel along the sidewalk. ‘Hey, kid!’ Martin called. ‘How would you like a juice bar? It’s a little runny but it won’t kill you.’
The boy stuck out his tongue and ran away, sneakers pit-patting on the sidewalk, all the way to the corner of Yucca. Martin shrugged. He guessed it was better that children didn’t talk to strange sweating screenwriters with melting juice bars. He dropped the bar into the gutter, and across the street an elderly woman in a cotton hat stared at him as if she had discovered at last the man responsible for polluting the whole of the Southern California environment.
Martin went into the house and climbed the stairs. It smelled of disinfectant and Parmesan cheese, but at least it was cool.
Morris had depressed him this morning. He didn’t mind so much that Morris disliked the idea of a Boofuls musical; he was professional enough to accept that some people were going to regurgitate their breakfast at nothing more than the mention of motion pictures that other people swooned over. But he was deeply upset that June Lassiter could have called up Morris behind his back and complained about him. It made him feel like a clumsy amateur, an outsider; as if he hadn’t yet been accepted by Hollywood Proper.
He had almost reached the top landing when he heard Emilio laughing. Too bad, he thought philosophically – the juice bar wouldn’t have survived the climb from the street in any case. But as he turned the corner of the stairs he saw that his own apartment door was ajar and that the upper landing was illuminated by a triangular section of sunlight.
He approached the apartment door as quietly as he could. He heard Emilio giggling again.
‘You can’t throw it! You can’t throw it!’ And then more laughter. Then, ‘You can’t throw it, it won’t come through.’
Martin eased open the door and tiptoed as quickly as he could along the hallway toward the sitting room. Emilio was scuffling around, his sneakers squeaking on the wood-block floor, and he was giggling so much that Martin was worried for a moment that he was choking.
Martin tried to see through the crack in the doorjamb. He glimpsed Emilio’s faded red sneakers, flashing for a moment, and then Emilio’s black tousled hair. But the door wasn’t open wide enough for him to be able to see the mirror on the end wall; and if he had opened it any farther, he suspected that he would scare away
who
ever or
what
ever Emilio was playing with.
Emilio laughed. ‘Stop throwing it!’
But then Martin heard another voice – a voice that didn’t sound like Emilio’s at all. A young, clear voice, echoing slightly as if he were talking in a tunnel or a high-ceilinged bathroom. ‘
Get another ball! Get another ball!
’ And then a strange ringing giggle.
Martin felt as if somebody had lifted up his shirt collar at the back and gradually emptied a jug of ice water down his back.
What had he said to Morris?
If I don’t know Boofuls’ voice when I hear it, then nobody does
.
Emilio said, ‘What? What? Another ball?’
‘
We have to have two! If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you!
’
A moment’s hesitation. Then Emilio saying, ‘Okay, then, wait up’, and dodging toward the door on those squeaking sneakers.
At once, Martin swung the door open wide. It banged and shuddered against the wall. He lifted Emilio bodily out of his way and jumped right into the middle of the room.
He thought he saw a blur that could have been an arm or could have been a leg. But then again, it could have been nothing at all.
The mirror was empty, except for himself and the room and the late morning sunlight; and just behind him, a bewildered-looking Emilio.
Martin swung around. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded, his voice cracking.
Emilio shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The boy, the real boy. Where is he?’
‘He’s –’
‘Listen, Emilio, I was standing right behind the door. I
heard
him. I heard him with my own ears.’
Two clear tears unexpectedly dropped onto Emilio’s cheeks, and rolled down on either side of his mouth, and fell on the floor.
‘He said I mustn’t tell anybody. He said they punish him if anybody finds out.’
Martin got down on one knee and hugged Emilio close. ‘You listen to me, old buddy, I’m not going to hurt him. I’m his friend, the same way that you are.’
‘He says he’s frightened.’
‘Well, what does he have to be frightened about? He doesn’t have to be frightened of me. I can help him. At least, I
think
I can help him.’
Emilio shook his head. ‘He says he’s frightened.’
‘All right,’ said Martin, and stood up. He looked toward the mirror and wondered if the real boy was listening to them. ‘But if that boy really is who I think he is – and if he’s gotten himself trapped inside that mirror or something – for whatever reason – and he’s frightened – well, I’m sure that I can find some way to help him – because I know more about him than he knows about himself.’
Emilio glanced quickly at the mirror, almost furtively, and then asked, ‘Can I go now?’
Martin grinned and shrugged. ‘Sure you can go. This isn’t the third degree.’
Emilio didn’t know what he meant but he went, anyway. He was passing the kitchen door, however, when he said, ‘Are you going to have him through for dinner?’
‘
Through?
’
‘Well, you know, like through the mirror.’
Martin came along the hallway and gave Emilio a pretend Rocky punch. ‘You’re way ahead of yourself, Emilio.’
‘But he likes lasagne.’
‘He told you that?’
‘He likes Swedish meatballs and he likes lasagne and he likes pecan pie.’
‘So your grandmother’s lasagne won’t go to waste?’
‘No, sir.’
Martin watched Emilio climb back down the stairs. It was extraordinary how easily children accept the strange and the supernatural, he thought. But maybe this mirror wasn’t as strange and as supernatural as it appeared to be. He had read in
Popular Radio
that mirrors could sometimes pick up radio signals from powerful transmitters, because of their silver backing, and that their glass could vibrate sufficiently to make people hear disembodied voices. Late one night in 1961, in Pasadena, the wife of a grocery-store manager was lying in bed waiting for her husband to come home when her dressing-table mirror began to pick up a live Frank Sinatra interview from Palm Springs. Her husband, coming home late, heard a man’s voice in his wife’s bedroom, and shot to kill. He wounded his wife and then turned the gun on himself.
He returned to the sitting room and leaned against the mirror with his arms upraised and listened and waited for a long time. No boy. Nothing.
‘Walter!’ he shouted. ‘Boofuls! Come here, Boofuls, let me take a look at you! I’m your biggest fan, Boofuls! Why’n’t you step out and give me that sailor’s hornpipe, hunh? Come on, Boofuls, I’ve devoted three years of my life to writing and rewriting about you. Three years – and three complete transfusions of blood and sweat. The least you can give me is a couple of minutes of hornpipe.’
He waited five minutes, ten. Nothing happened. No Boofuls appeared. After a while, Martin turned away from the mirror and looked across at his typewriter. He had some work to do on a
Knight Rider
teleplay. He might just as well sit down and get to it. Trying to get in touch with boys who lived in mirrors wasn’t going to pay the rent.
He switched on his tape player and inserted the sound track of
Suwannee Song
. Immediately the flutes thrilled and the drums rattled, and the sitting room was filled with the opening march, when Boofuls was strutting like a drum major in front of a regiment of two hundred black minstrels, as they paraded along the levee.
Surrr … wannee Song! Suwannee Song!
You can blow your flute and you can bang your drum and you can march along!
Martin sat down at his desk, zipped a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and started work on the latest adventures of Michael Knight. He wondered mischievously if Kit the talking car could turn out to be gay: if he could come out of the garage, so to speak.
Surrr … wannee Song! Suwannee Song!
It’s the song, it’s the song, it’s the song of the South!
He didn’t know what it was that caught his eye; what it was that stopped him typing ‘
What is it, David? Bad guys?
’ and turn around in his chair and stare intently at the mirror. But the blue and white ball came rolling out from under the table, halfway across the room, to settle there, rocking slightly from side to side before it came completely to rest.
He turned to look at the real room. The ball wasn’t there. He switched off his typewriter and walked up to the mirror and stared at the blue and white ball for two or three thoughtful minutes. Then he went back to his desk and opened up the bottom drawer and took out a tennis ball that he had used for practice last summer.
‘
We have to have two!
’ the boy had called out. ‘
If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you
.’
Martin hesitated for a while, tossing the old gray tennis ball up and down in his hand. Then, without warning, he threw it at the mirror, quite hard, half expecting to break it, half
hoping
to break it.
There was a sharp smacking sound, and the ball ricocheted off the glass and rolled across the floor. It came to rest only five or six inches away from the toe of his Nike sneakers.
But it wasn’t a dingy gray tennis ball. It was a bright new blue and white bouncing ball. And when he turned in shock and looked toward the mirror, he saw his own tennis ball there, in exactly the corresponding place, five or six inches away from his toe.
He picked up the blue and white ball. It was quite hard and smelled strongly of rubber and paint. His mirror image picked up the tennis ball and sniffed that, too.