Madonna and the Starship (9781616961220) (10 page)

Fade-out. Cut to title card, WHO CREATED GOD? Dissolve to NBC logo.

“There,” I said, nervously fingering Connie's borrowed motorcycle jacket. “It's finished. What do you think?”

“I think I'm going to throw up,” she said.

“This must be hard on you.” I brushed her shoulder. “It's hard on me, and I don't even
believe
in God.”

Connie squinted at a row of mounted
Catholic Anarchist
front pages, their headlines proclaiming LYNCHINGS ON THE RISE IN JIM CROW MISSISSIPPI and KKK RALLIES IN SAVANNAH and HUNGER IN AMERICA: A NATION'S SHAME. She approached the gallery and adjusted all three frames. For her sake, I hoped Joe McCarthy didn't know about Donna Dain's nickel newspaper, to which hundreds of Communists and fellow travelers doubtless subscribed. “I'll say one thing, Kurt. You have a talent for irreverence.”

“So do you.”

She winced and closed her eyes. “You should've told the lobsters to travel back two centuries and give their stupid award to David Hume instead.”

“I found our collaboration most stimulating.”

“Some of what we wrote is clever,” said Connie in a tone of qualified assent. “The rest is sophomoric scoffing.”

Even as she spoke, my imagination received an unwanted visitation from Pazuzu Jones, Demon of Regret.
Connie's dissatisfaction is well founded,
the intruder insisted.
Your script is insufficient—but sophomoric scoffing is the least of it: you must put these monstrous aliens out of business forever.

I heaved a sigh and said, “Part of me wants to start over. In fact, my friend, I believe that's precisely what we should do.”

“Start over?” said Connie.

“Yes.”

“From scratch?”

“My dear, we need a whole new script.”

“Are you crazy?” protested Connie. “It's four in the morning, and we haven't even cut the mimeo stencils!”

“Here's the problem,” I rasped. “Suppose we fool these maniacs on Sunday—what's to keep them from stumbling into some
other
Judeo-Christian program before they leave? That CBS thing, for instance,
Lamp Unto My Feet
? They'll go berserk all over again and call down their death-ray.” I shuffled toward the Silex and started brewing more coffee. “Or maybe next year they'll tune in an inspirational broadcast from elsewhere in the galaxy, and then,
zoom
, they're off to eradicate
those
viewers. The challenge, O Connie Osborne, is more formidable than we thought. We must show the lobsters that their
Weltanschauung
—is that the word you philosophers use?—their
Weltanschauung
is fatally flawed.”

“
Weltanschauung Schmeltanschauung!
What you're proposing would take a
week
to write, maybe longer!” Joining me by the Silex, Connie seized my arms and shook me vigorously, an encounter I found erotic, though her intention was to reacquaint me with reality. “I might be my brother's keeper, and my sister's, too, but that ideal doesn't extend to followers of
Lamp Unto My Feet
, much less to every damn believer in the galaxy! That way lies madness!”

She relaxed her grip and backed away. For several minutes no words passed between us. The sounds of percolation filled the basement. I poured two mugs of coffee, let mine cool, took a sip. Paradoxically the caffeine calmed me. Connie was right. To start over would be absurd. The hell with Pazuzu Jones.

“Weltanschauung Schmeltanschauung!”
I declared, then raised my mug and offered my collaborator a toast. “Confusion to the Qualimosans!”

“Confusion worse confounded!” she proclaimed, lifting her Maxwell House aloft.

We clacked our mugs together, then started hunting for the stencils.

Shortly after dawn we ascended the stairs of 378 Bleecker Street, bound for apartment 4R, Connie carrying a dozen mimeographed scripts while I lugged the steel mass of my Underwood. Lenny had transformed the living room into a movie theater, improvising a projector-stand from the coffee table and a screen from a bedsheet. Navigating by the glow of the tungsten-halogen bulb, I set my typewriter in the far corner.

Eliot had gotten his second wind. Seated on the couch between Wulawand and Volavont, he gave the current Lugosi potboiler his undivided attention, as did Lenny, sprawled across the armchair. Marvin, by contrast, lay asleep on the rug, snoring profusely. The salad bowl contained a few inert brown Quickie-Bang kernels. Popcorn nodes littered the cushions like huge dandruff flakes.

“What's this one called?” asked Connie, speaking above the grinding of the projector and the sharp burble of the dialogue spilling from the auxiliary speaker.

“
The Invisible Ray
,” said Lenny. “Shhh. It's almost over.”

“Mr. Lugosi is playing Dr. Benet, a deluded astrochemist who believes that too much knowledge can be as dangerous as too little,” said Volavont. “Earlier this evening Dr. Benet and his colleague Dr. Rukh traveled to Africa in search of a meteor that, according to the best astronomical evidence, crashed in the jungle eons ago, bringing with it a new element of unknown powers.”

Eliot gestured toward Connie's armful of teleplays. “Looks like you got the job done.”

“We're professionals,” she said, setting the scripts on the dining table.

“Might I glance at your collaboration?” asked Wulawand. “I read English without difficulty.”

“It wouldn't interest you,” I said. “An educational program about Canadian paper mills. Dry as dust.”

“Dr. Rukh eventually found the extraterrestrial rock,” said Volavont, “then learned to harness Radium X for benevolent purposes, giving sight to his blind mother.”

“This was a
scientific
cure, of course,” said Wulawand, “unlike those miracles the actors were rhapsodizing about in that
Bread Alone
rehearsal.”

“Exposure to Radium X caused a wondrous change in Dr. Rukh, giving him an incandescent body and an enlightened mind,” said Volavont, gesturing toward the screen: a midshot of Boris Karloff clenching his glowing fists before his equally luminous face. “He proceeded to hunt down and exterminate his incurious colleagues, including Dr. Benet.”

Wulawand reached into the salad bowl, scooped up the unpopped kernels, and jammed them in her mouth. “Later today, Mr. Eliot Thornhill will give us what he calls ‘the ultimate Manhattan tourist experience,'” the lobster reported. “Did you know that a great work of art sprawls beneath this city, an immense three-dimensional installation that the spectator can enter and explore?”

“I figure that our visit to the IRT will take all morning,” said Eliot.

Mentally I applauded my imaginative thespian roommate. Evidently he'd bought us the time we needed for our Chock Full O' Nuts script conference. “Ah, yes, the IRT,” I said in a bemused tone. “The New York subway system is the most impressive sculpture on the planet.” And unlike many of the pieces one finds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I thought, it's entirely secular (with the exception of some Saint Luke's Hospital placards the lobsters would never notice). “I'd love to come with you, but Miss Osborne and I must spend the afternoon writing a script about Norwegian fisheries.”

“Quiet!” Lenny demanded. “I want to hear the end of the movie!”

All eyes turned to the screen. To prevent Dr. Rukh from committing another murder, Mother Rukh employed her cane to swat a leather hypodermic case from his grasp, thus shattering his vials of the antidote for Radium X poisoning.

“My son, you have broken the first law of science,” said Mother Rukh, a character evidently as sympathetic as our Demivirgin Mary.

“A pox on you, Mother Rukh!” shouted Volavont.

“Yes, you're right,” rasped Karloff, exuding smoke and exhibiting other symptoms of internal combustion. “It's better this way. Good-bye, Mother.”

The radiant Dr. Rukh charged up the stairway to a balcony door and hurled himself through the glass. Transmuting into a ball of fire, he plummeted to the street below.

“The first law of science,” said Connie. “I wonder what she meant by that.”

“Never conduct serious research in the Carpathians?” Lenny suggested.

“Refrain from killing sprees?” offered Eliot.

“Refrain from
unnecessary
killing sprees,” Volavont corrected him.

“First do no harm?” I proposed.

“Unless the future of reason is at stake,” said Wulawand.

After Lenny finished rewinding
The Invisible Ray
, Eliot began arguing that the Qualimosans' trench coats and slouch hats would not make them sufficiently inconspicuous during the subway tour, and I had to agree. The solution, we soon decided, lay in the talents of our across-the-hall neighbor, an artist named Chet Sargent. Although Eliot had lost his job as a palace guard when
The King and I
ended its run in September, he still boasted one of the healthiest bank balances on Bleecker Street, and he was happy to fund the salvation of two million Christians.

Grateful for the commission, his first in six weeks, Chet took two 24” x 32” slabs of plywood, adorned each with an elegant codfish, then added an advertisement for a nonexistent restaurant: EXPERIENCE FINE DINING AT CAPTAIN CABOT'S SEAFOOD TAVERN—MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS. A second pair of plywood sheets received an image of a cabin cruiser and a caption touting an alleged service for sportsmen: LONG ISLAND CHARTER BOATS, INC.—CATCH YOUR DINNER IN THE SOUND—RESULTS GUARANTEED. Leather shoulder-straps provided the
coups de grâce
, turning the paintings into sandwich boards.

While Eliot supervised construction of the Qualimosans' disguises, Connie got on the phone to NBC. First she spoke to someone in the art department, directing him to prepare two new title cards, one reading THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP, the other asking WHO CREATED GOD? Next she talked to an assistant props manager. Owing to the last-minute addition of a mêlée, she explained, the dining table and the benches on the Lazarus set must be replaced with breakaway furniture.

“You're right, Randy,” she said. “Brawls don't normally figure in
Not By Bread Alone
, but it all makes sense in context.”

She cradled the handset, and I straightaway called Saul Silver. Wulawand and Volavont, I explained, were indeed extraterrestrials. Their spaceship was orbiting the Earth, their shuttle lay camouflaged in Rockefeller Center, and my colleague Connie Osborne and I had less than twenty-four hours to produce a teleplay congruent with the invaders' logical-positivist worldview, lest a mass murder occur. We'd arranged to sequester Wulawand and Volavont for the next five hours or so, but would Saul be willing to have them over as dinner guests? Indeed, might he detain them till morning, subsequently tuning in
Not By Bread Alone
and keeping me apprised, via telephone, of their reaction while Connie directed the broadcast?

“You're asking the editor of
Andromeda
,” said Saul, “a man who prides himself on his scientific curiosity, if he might conceivably value tête-à-têtes with two intelligent beings from outer space?”

“Silly question.”

“What do they eat?”

“Apparently they're omnivores. You got any macaroni and cheese? It needn't be kosher.”

“Ha, ha, ha. Yes, I've got macaroni and cheese. How's your edge-of-the-universe novelette coming along?”

“Slowly. I've been preoccupied.”

At 11:30 A.M. Connie, Eliot, the lobsters, and I entered West 4th Street Station, my valise bulging with the cloaked Zorningorg Prize, the trinocular goggles, and all twelve copies of the teleplay. Still fetchingly attired in Lenny's motorcycle jacket, Connie approached the newsstand and purchased that morning's
Herald Tribune
.

She immediately wished she hadn't. DYLAN THOMAS DEAD AT THIRTY-EIGHT proclaimed the headline in the lower left corner. PNEUMONIA CLAIMS WELSH BARD IN SAINT VINCENT'S HOSPITAL ran the subhead.

“I hope he raged,” said Connie, scanning the article.

“I'm sure he did,” I said.

“God rest his soul.”

Wulawand and Volavont followed us as we descended to the platform for the uptown A, B, and C trains, both aliens eager to begin the first phase of their cultural adventure, a protracted northward journey to the 207th Street Station near the Harlem River. Doubtless owing to the sandwich boards affixed to their chests and spines like a conquistador's armor, the invertebrates attracted little notice. I told Eliot to meet us on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History at four o'clock, a plan that would presumably allow Connie and me to hand the crustaceans off to Saul and still keep our evening appointment at the White Horse Tavern.