Mendoza in Hollywood (24 page)

Prosper was killed, the Mountain Girl was killed, Belshazzar and the Princess Beloved killed themselves, and there was a close-up of the Mountain Girl lying killed, which irised out to show that the forlorn little doves had pulled the rose-chariot up to her lifeless body. Juan Bautista burst into tears, but Catherine de’ Medici was pleased with
herself and so was Cyrus, who guffawed crudely right in the camera’s face, as meanwhile everybody piled out of the train and into another car, which raced on to save—gee, who else was left alive?

Not Jesus. A confusing mass with a lot of smoke resolved itself into Golgotha, with the three crosses dimly visible on a dark skyline. So the car raced on, but the Boy was already mounting the scaffold, they were binding his hands, they were binding his legs, they were putting the black hood on him, and men with razors were standing by to cut the cord that would drop the trap.
Would rescuers get there in time
?

Surprise! They did. Dazed Boy being embraced by passionately twitching Little Mother. General expressions of joy and satisfaction. “Here comes the summation,” Einar told us.

WHEN CANNON AND PRISON BARS WROUGHT IN THE FIRES OF INTOLERANCE
, read the titles, over scenes of battlefield and prison. A lot of angels appeared, dangling in a rather crowded sky, and all the fighting stopped.

AND PERFECT LOVE SHALL BRING PEACE FOREVERMORE
. More people staring up in confusion at the angels.

INSTEAD OF PRISON WALLS, BLOOM FLOWERY FIELDS
. A Scene showing convicts in their striped uniforms walking through the walls like ghosts and disappearing. Then an exterior shot of a prison doing a vanishing act too, leaving the Hollywood Hills in the distance. Now we saw little children disporting themselves at a church picnic. One bold toddler grabbed a tiny playmate and gave her a big kiss.

“If he tried that in the twenty-first century, he’d be arrested and put in therapy the rest of his life,” said Porfirio gloomily. I was waiting for a final title card that would finish Griffith’s sentence, but instead we saw a lot of people yelling glory hallelujah at the angels and then one last shot of Lillian Gish and her Cradle, endlessly, endlessly rocking.

White light, flickering on a blank screen.

Einar moaned, stretching sensually.

“So, what happened to the Baby?” Porfirio asked.

“What happened to the goddamn Rhapsode?” I asked.

Before either of our questions could be answered, Imarte leaped to her feet, scattering popcorn in all directions.

“I must go there,” she announced. “Now.”

“Where?” Oscar stared at her in bewilderment. We were bewildered too; there hadn’t been a peep out of her in the last few minutes, but now she turned on him with a snarl.

“I must go to Babylon!”

“Imarte, what’d you put in that rahat locum?” said Porfirio, but she pushed her chaplet of roses back from where it had slipped over one eye and fixed him with one of the scariest expressions I’d ever seen.

“I
will
go to Babylon, fairest of cities, beloved of Ishtar,” she said. “I will not lose it again!”

“Cool,” said Einar, scrambling unsteadily to his feet. “Let’s go now. Come on, you guys, it’s just over on Sunset. God knows there’s no traffic. We can get there in no time.”

I remember that Porfirio did some protesting, and so did Oscar, but one way or another we found ourselves galloping through the night. That is, Einar and Imarte galloped; the rest of us rode in the wagon, driven by Porfirio at a rattling clip as he tried to catch up with those two. I clutched at my chaplet of roses and wondered what I was doing as we thundered along through the damp night air under a very amused moon.

It was a wide sloping piece of ground where we stopped, an old floodplain with a view of the distant lights of Los Angeles and the more distant sea, pale and obscure under the moon. Was that Catalina Island out there?

Einar and Imarte had dismounted. She was standing motionless; he was striding with arms outstretched through the sagebrush and chamise.

“Right here,” he was saying. “This will be the lot adjacent to the Fine Arts studio complex. Can you see it? And where I’m standing, babe, we’re on that Grand Staircase! Look up there behind us in the
moonlight, there are the elephants! There are the winged bulls bright as day. They’re here, and more real than this empty place or the asphalt that covers it later. Silver nitrate’s made Babylon eternal for all time, and the prophets can’t do a thing about it. This is Ishtar’s city of love and tolerance. Can you smell the incense? Can you hear the music?”

I very nearly could. I found I was still clutching the cocktail shaker and took a fortifying gulp. Imarte stretched out her arms to the moon and gave a plaintive cry. She began to dance, there in the moonlight, over the stones and red sand, through the yucca and the cactus and other herbs that never lifted bud or branch in Belshazzar’s city so long fallen. It was no stiff absurd dance either, no attempt to choreograph a flat wall painting; it was lithe and savage, a little unsteady, something you’d really dance at a bacchanal.

“Is she nuts?” asked Juan Bautista, who cowered shivering beside me. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s just had enough gin, that’s all,” Porfirio told him.

“You think that’s all it is?” I had another belt from the cocktail shaker. “She’s crazy with pain. She’s so much older than the rest of us, and she was really there, wasn’t she, when Cyrus came crashing down on Babylon. What if you’d loved a place like that, and seen it go down in flames? What if you’d buried it in your heart for centuries, all that lost glory safely forgotten, and then one night, when you least expected it, something brought it to life for you again? How do you think you’d feel? How
will
you feel, kid, a hundred centuries from now, when you’re as old as she is?”

“I won’t be like that,” said Juan Bautista. “That’s not supposed to happen to us. We don’t go crazy, we can’t, we’re perfect! Aren’t we?”

“Shut up, Mendoza,” said Porfirio quietly, and Oscar fumbled the cocktail shaker from my icy grasp.

“Of course we are, son, we’re positively the last word in cybertechnology,” he assured Juan Bautista.

I staggered to my feet and flung my chaplet of roses out into the middle of what would be Sunset Boulevard one day, when all this sweet wild land would be buried under an urban nightmare. And
what would
I
be feeling, when I was as old as Imarte? What would have become of the places
I’d
loved? What if there were no more oak trees or redwoods, what if California itself slipped under the Pacific, drowned and broken up, as lost as Atlantis?

And I was going to lose it all, when that steel cancer of a future city was built. It wouldn’t even take a global calamity: just millions of mortals moving west. I would lose my wilderness just as I’d lost Nicholas, and how would I live then?

I drew in my breath to howl at the moon, but Einar came bounding up to the wagon. He held up his pistol by its barrel, pretending it was a microphone again. “Let’s hear what our studio audience has to say! Sir, can you tell the wonderful people out there in the dark what personal revelations
you
had tonight?” He thrust it under Oscar’s nose.

“Oh, this is silly,” Oscar said. “But—very well.” He took the gun and held it up. “If you really want to know, why, I think there’s a brilliant message in that film, and Griffith really was a genius born too soon. He’s telling us loud and clear just what’s going to bring on that earthly paradise he envisions at the end, and you know what it is?

“Technology. Yes, sir, ladies and gentlemen, consider for a moment. What turns the tide of battle (albeit temporarily) against the Persians? None other than the superior technology of the Babylonians, as exemplified by their marvelous machine of war. And consider! Don’t the other tragedies occur because prospective rescuers are delayed in their efforts by inferior means of transportation? Reflect upon the fact that, of all the stories presented, the one story that ends happily does so solely because of modern and efficient means of locomotion. Yes! The automobile brings the Boy’s pardon! Now, just what would have happened if that Mountain Girl or the French fellow had had Fords with which to speed to the rescue of
their
loved ones?”

“What would have happened if Christ’s apostles had had grenades and rocket launchers?” I said, dropping into the bed of the wagon.

“Precisely! That is, er, anyhow, it seems mighty clear to me that what the great David Wark Griffith was foreseeing was nothing less
than us. For are we not the veritable saviors of Earth, the ultimate marriage of man’s mechanical genius with his biological possibilities? Why should any cyborg feel shame? Is it not an honor to be descended from the noble Model T no less than from Adam? I don’t know about you folks, but I’m proud,
proud
of my mingled heritage.” Oscar flung his chaplet out into what would one day be the roof of the Kinema-color lab. He handed the gun back to Einar, who was applauding.

“Bravo, Mr. O! And what about you, sir, do you have an epiphany you’d like to share with the folks listening at home?” He thrust the gun at Porfirio.

“What home?” I said. “We have no homes, none of us.”

“Shut up.” Porfirio put his hand on my shoulder. “You want to know what I think, pal? I think it’s time to rein in this party. Maybe you should go catch Salome of the Seven Veils and get her back on her horse.”

“No, man, she’s okay,” Einar’s eyes were glowing. “Don’t you see? She knows how to deal with this time thing. She understands. That’s why she’s dancing. She can
see
Babylon. It exists for her outside of time, it’s neither past nor future but right now. Always.

“Haven’t you guys figured it out yet? Don’t you know what it really means to be immortals? We transcend time, it has no meaning for us, it ceases to exist, because it’s all simultaneous. We’re here
now
, and we’re on Griffith’s set
now
, and we’re in 2355
now
!
We’re the ones controlling reality, from in here
.” He struck his fist against his indestructible skull.

“We are time machines! The truth’s been right in front of our noses since cinema was invented. Hell, since photography was invented. Hell, since
writing
was invented. Make an image of something, and it escapes the flow of time. That’s why it’s forbidden! Dickens had a grasp on it with his ghosts, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley almost got it, and Einstein came so close to the truth. The dead heroes are brought in to Odin, and they rise again, they feast all night and fight all day again, and their deaths mean nothing, because they’ve escaped time. That’s the whole point of the metaphor with Dr.
Zeus, you guys! He’s the liberator.
Zeus defeats Chronos
. Everything’s happening at once! We can perceive time in a way mortals can’t, we can make it irrelevant. Don’t you see?

“All you have to do is understand, and you’re free! You’re out of here!” With an ear-piercing whoop he snatched off his chaplet of roses and whirled it up, up, black against the moon for a second before it bounced down and rolled away in the direction of L. Frank Baum’s house.

I did understand: Einar was mad as a hatter. There were rumors that some of the really Old Ones weren’t too stable. I knew Imarte was several millennia old, and she’d lost a screw tonight. How old was Einar? That mention of Odin was probably a clue. He wasn’t so crazy, he couldn’t do his job; just crazy enough to be happy on this black plain, under this cold moon. Wasn’t he the lucky guy?

Shuddering, I pulled my shawl around myself. I needed Theobromos. I’d have some as soon as I got back to the inn. No, I couldn’t; I’d been drinking gin. Where had I heard that Theobromos and gin didn’t combine well?

It’s hell to be a cyborg and have immediate access to any stray memory that one rashly summons up. There I was at a New Year’s ball, at a table with three other immortals. There was the little neophyte Latif, there was my damned demon godfather Joseph, and there was poor Lewis, who was feeling ill after overindulging. Precocious Latif had explained about the toxic effect of Theobromos combined with martinis.

Lewis. Somewhere my friend Lewis was weeping for me.

Juan Bautista’s teeth were chattering in his head, and Imarte’s dance had become so frenzied, she was a blur in the moonlight. Einar was dancing too, kicking up his boots and waving his long arms as he chanted a song, something in third-century Norwegian about hauling on the oars and steering for the land where palm trees grow.

Porfirio pitched his chaplet over the side of the wagon and drew his six-shooter.

“Our revels now are ended,” he announced, and fired three shots
into the air. Instantly we were all sober, converting the alcohol in our bloodstreams into water and sugar, as we were programmed to do when confronted by hazard.

“What on Earth—?” said Imarte. “How embarrassing.” She got up from where she’d been rolling in the dust, near what would one day be the statue of Ishtar, and hastily brushed herself off. “Was I indulging in grief accommodation again?”

Einar was crawling out from under the wagon, where he’d vanished when the shots went off. He got to his feet and looked around sheepishly.

“Cold out here, isn’t it?” was all he said.

“Well—we were only having a bit of fun, weren’t we?” said Oscar.

“Speak for yourself,” I said. Juan Bautista had his eyes closed; he was huddled up with his cheek pressed into Erich von Stroheim’s feathers.

“Let’s go, guys,” Porfirio ordered. He took the reins and swung us back around for La Nopalera. Einar and Imarte climbed into their saddles and followed, all along the empty road, and the lights of Los Angeles grew fainter behind us, until they vanished like a dream.