Look at me: (49 page)

“Sis,” Ricky called. He went to Charlotte and brought her to Thomas, who was adjusting the camera. I watched Thomas turn and see her, watched the crestfallen look he tried unsuccessfully to mask as he measured the distance between sister and brother. He nodded, smiling frozenly. He was at my side three seconds later (I counted). “We’ve got to lose the girl,” he said.

“I like her.”

“It’ll be easy,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “I’ll just say it has to be a guy. I’ll tell her you have to be carried.”

“You think that scrawny brother of hers can carry me?”

“I’ll tell her …”

“Thomas. She came all the way out here and found us.”

Thomas cocked his head and peered at me. “I came all the way out here from frigging New York,” he said through a tight smile. “I’m the one spending money to get this shot exactly right. And that girl is not going to be in it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Neither am I.”

He stared at me without comprehension.

“Use my niece,” I told him, “she’s better looking. God knows she’s younger. She can fall in love with the Good Samaritan at the end.” I longed to walk away, but the sight of genuine alarm catalyzing in Thomas’s face was too great a pleasure to forfeit.

“Hey,” he said. “I know we’re both tired.”

“I mean it. I quit,” I said, the very words unleashing a vertiginous sensation of freedom. “It’s your movie, great. Do it without me.” I knew I should walk away, but I couldn’t.

“Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte, Charlotte.” He’d reverted to my full name, which was something. “Charlotte, you’re everything,” he said, taking my hands in his (hot, moist), and gazing into my face. “You’re it. The sine qua non. Without you, the whole thing is nothing. All this”—he waved an arm at the sky, the corn, the audience—“is just empty. And if I haven’t been appreciative enough, if I haven’t made you feel how crucial you are to this project every minute that we’ve worked on it, I apologize. I honestly do. Maybe it’s just—maybe it’s some perverse side of human nature that we take for granted the things we value most.”

Where did he come up with this stuff? And yet even as I listened distrustfully, disbelievingly, I felt the words seeping into me like some witchy potion, flattening my rebellion into a thin wafer of complaint. I stood before him pouting. “I want Charlotte to play the Good Samaritan,” I said.

Thomas swallowed and looked away. I saw how hard it was for him to yield—even now, with the threat of my defection immediately before him. He was a tyrant: a tiptoey, apologetic tyrant. “We’ll keep talking about it,” he said. “And I promise”—he held up a hand—“the last word is yours.”

He smiled at me. I smiled at him. “You’ve already heard it,” I said.

Moose drove slowly, slowly. The rain had retracted, sucked back inside the clouds; tornado weather, he thought, then wondered if the tornado was real or metaphoric. This thought came to Moose innocently enough, a moment of literary-critical speculation, but in passing through his mind it raked against him in a way that felt damaging, a tiny tear in an astronaut’s suit. In Shakespeare’s plays, thunderstorms accompanied crescendos in human affairs, but those storms were metaphorical, of course. And here was the ominous sensation back again—oh, yes, closer than ever, a very large body passing so near to Moose that it lifted the hairs from his head. Was it the whale? Had the whale returned after a long metaphorical absence? Moose searched for his notebook, digging for it in the crack of the seat; not finding it, he finally wrote on the leg of his pants with a black Magic Marker,
Thought, sensation, whale, tornado
, realizing as he wrote that he was getting it backward; the tornado had come first, generating the original thought, which was—what? Oh, oh, he had to remember; Moose swerved in his lane as he rummaged metaphorically in his mind (which was crammed with metaphors), desperate for that thought—yes, there, he seized it like a rope, realizing only as he did so that it was a troubling rope, a troubling thought, a rope pulling him toward thoughts perhaps better left unthought, but it was too late. He was holding rope and thought. Thought: what proof did Moose have that his vision was not, itself, just a metaphor? His mind wheezed like a bellows as he attempted to grasp the implications of this query: that the revelation he’d devoted his life to understanding might not exist in itself, might be a metaphor for something within Moose—a mistake, a mutation, a disorder of the brain. That the vision was not the cause of his isolation, as he had always supposed, but merely an expression of it.

“No!”
Moose shouted at his windshield. “No! I reject that vision, that antivision. I reject the accusation of solipsism because I know I’m right. I know I’m right. I know I’m right!” He was yelling, battling the beast, wrestling with an apparition from the icy sea that was also a minotaur, not to mention driving a 1978 station wagon through incipient rainfall. Really, it was a feat! But one he probably could not sustain much longer, especially if the lightning he saw gnawing the horizon was actually headed this way.

I sat on a folding chair in the cornfield, away from the reaching eyes of my audience, which now included some hundred Rockford teenagers and swarms of their parents, all drawn to this field as if by a heavenly sign, some gleaming emanation of Hollywood. I sat under a small tarp held aloft by Charlotte and Ricky, rain prattling at the plastic with an eerie restraint that was irreconcilable with the fat, lowering sky. I held the manuscript in my lap and read sporadically in the jaundiced light.

Pammy, who was acting as Allison’s assistant, held up last Halloween’s issue of
Seventeen
(they saved them all) so her sister could see it. “7 Easy Steps to a Wretched Bloody Mess,” I read amid a pinwheel of girl-faces so white and clean they resembled bars of soap. Many years ago, one of those faces had been mine. My nieces began Step One, which involved making wavy lines along my cheekbones with a set of soft purple crayons.

“I heard these guys from school?” Ricky told his sister, inclining his head at the mass of spectators. “They’re like, Charlotte Hauser’s in the movie? No way, how’d she get to be in it? They’re on me: Bro, how come your sister’s in this movie? I’m like, At ease, she has her ways. So now they’re in awe.”

Charlotte laughed. “That’ll be new,” she said.

I fought to keep my eyes open as Allison and Pammy rubbed the soft crayons over my face. It was a relief when Allison finally said, like every one of the hundreds of makeup artists before her, “Close your eyes.”

With my eyes shut, sounds seemed to magnify: rain tapping the corn, leaves sliding wetly, a distant grinding of thunder. “Donny, can you hold it higher?” I heard Thomas yelling to Speak No Evil as they tested the boom. “We’re getting static from the wind.” All of it broke, scattered the way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground, folding into the wet leaves, the sour, animal smell of the earth. My scalp tightened, prickling over my skull.

60

By the time we approached Chicago, we’d been driving more than twenty-four hours. My back hurt. My eyes stung. The car reeked with the smell of us
.

I felt bad in a way I associated with coming down from drugs. A glittering apparatus, dismantled piece by piece
.

Z stared into the darkness. I felt him looking for some reprieve, some escape. Of course there was nothing out there. Just plastic signs
.

Allison was dripping fake blood onto my face, testing her various brands: “Dr. Spooks’ Blood Bath,” another called “Ghoul Gush” and a batch she’d made herself from a recipe in
Seventeen
that reeked of peanut butter. “Which is best?” she asked the group. “Or should we do like a combo?”

They gathered in around me, Ricky and my nieces, brows pursed at the import of their task. “Char, what do you think?” Ricky asked, deferring to his sister.

The girl leaned in, crouching a little, her eyes moving over my face with the intensity of hands smoothing every last wrinkle from a bedsheet. I felt something flare up in her—surprise, I thought—and was certain she had recognized me. But she gave no sign.

“The peanut butter one,” she told the others. “Definitely. Because it’s all clotty.”

“I saw your picture,” Z said. His first remark in hours. “A long time ago
.”

“
Not that long,” I hedged. “I mean, I’m only twenty-eight
.”

“
You were selling something,” he said. “Makeup, I think
.”

“
That’s possible
.”

“
I remembered you. When I saw you again, I remembered you from before
.”

He was trying to tell me something. I listened very carefully. Scraped each word for the meaning underneath
.

It was starting to rain
.

“
I thought you could help me,” he said
.

“
I will,” I said. And felt a tiny click of excitement. “I want to
.”

Z shook his head. “You can’t. You have no idea what you’re doing
.”

I was offended
.

“
You don’t know,” he said, with a kind of amazement. “None of you. It happens without planning, like the rain. Like the fire no one lights
.”

“
What are you talking about?” I asked.
“What
happens?” “The conspiracy
.”

The word hung there. Coiled, sibilant. I felt another click. Hadn’t I known? Felt its presence around us from the beginning? A gold, shimmering net
.

“
Tell me about the conspiracy,” I said
.

Z turned to look at me. In his eyes I saw something alive for the very first time. Pain
.

“It’s a dream,” he said
.

My face dripping with gore, I borrowed little Charlotte’s umbrella and crept among the cornstalks toward the blue Grand Am I’d seen wobbling up the road a half hour before. Halliday was there, leaning against the hood in faded jeans and a black T-shirt. He was taking in the scene with a look of some amusement.

He flinched at the sight of me: a broken, bloody figure emerging from the stalks. “Christ,” he said.

“Relax,” I said. “It’s mostly peanut butter.”

He ran a finger over my cheek and sniffed it. “I’m on my way to the airport,” he said. “Thought I’d stop by and see what you were up to.”

“How did you know we … ?” But I let it go. He was a detective.

I moved nearer to Halliday, holding the umbrella over both of us, snuffing subtly for booze. But the peanut butter smell was too strong.

“I’ve stabilized,” he said. “If that’s what you’re trying to figure out.”

I smiled. “I’m amazed you’re still here.”

“Had a setback or two,” he said. “As you saw. Some work to finish up.”

I glanced at him, curious. He seemed uncertain whether to continue. Finally he said, “He flew the coop, our missing friend. Again.”

“Your friend,” I corrected him.

“My friend,” he said, and laughed.

“Good riddance.”

There was a long silence. Halliday and I watched the commotion, swaths of movie light bleaching the cornstalks to white.

“Looks like you won’t need that detective job after all,” he said.

“Apparently not,” I said. “This face of mine is full of surprises.” After a moment I asked, “Was I in the running for it?”

“You were my top candidate.”

By now a few spectators had caught sight of me—a person in movie makeup—and begun moving eagerly in my direction. More cars teetered up the road from the interstate.

“I better get out of here,” Halliday said, “before your fans box me in.”

He slid into the driver’s seat. I stood by his open window, holding the umbrella, my other hand gripping his car. I couldn’t seem to move it.

Halliday lifted my hand in his own and kissed it. Twice. “You were an angel that night,” he said, with difficulty. “I’m grateful.”

“The pleasure was mine,” I assured him.

Now it was raining, oh, yes, now it was finally coming down. Moose bypassed Rockford, heading farther west, rain punching his window, rendering useless his less-than-perfect windshield wipers. But the imperative of continued driving overshadowed all of that—the urgent need to return to the site of his first transformation, which alone had the power to dispel the terrible thought of some minutes back. The overpasses all looked alike, but Moose never had trouble finding the one in question—there it was; he recognized it even through this crush of rain, and felt a pull deep within him, a rising up. There were tears in his eyes as he eased the station wagon onto the narrow alley beside the interstate—dangerous, he knew, in a storm, so he left his headlights on, cautious Moose, then lumbered from his car and began climbing the steep embankment, rain hugging him, blinding him, mud pasty under his shoes. Moose slipped, he skidded—slopped, flopped, fell once and landed on his rear, but slowly, slowly he fought his way to the top of the hill. Rain heaved from the sky, soaking his head, the fabric of his shirt and pants, lightning scudding across the sky like skipped stones—this was no metaphor, Moose thought, with satisfaction, this was a bona fide summer storm!