The Fortress of Solitude (49 page)

I dared ask, “You like it?”

“Are you kidding? It’s pure dynamite. I’m just thinking, okay? I’ve got to think. This is Friday, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Okay, practically speaking, that means I’m not going to find anybody until Monday.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Where are you going from here?”

I suspected
ForbiddenCon
wasn’t a reply Jared would easily make sense of. It wasn’t that easy for me to make sense of myself. “Back to my hotel.”

“Don’t shit me.”

“I’m not.”

“Because a part of me, wow, a part of me doesn’t want to let you out of my office until I know what we’re doing with this, until I get
something
from you that I can take into a meeting and a promise you’ll give me a couple of days from the weekend. Forty-eight hours at least. Do you want a tissue, mister?”

“Sure.” I’d tear-streaked my face, evoking Johnny Bragg’s dilemma. I wonder how many of Jared’s pitches wept in this office. Maybe all of us, by the end.

Jared plopped his tissue box on my love seat, then leaned over his desk, onto the intercom.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Mike, I just heard something
great
. This is what I’m always telling you—you never know how it’s going to happen. Some boat-guy’s friend just walks into my office and it’s this writer Dylan and Dylan has something really great, really
really
great.”

“That’s incredible,” said Mike.

“No, it’s
really
incredible.”

“Wow.”

“Mike, I need Dylan’s agent
right now
.”

“Sure.”

Jared turned from the desk. “I know this is moving fast but I just want to say, Dylan, you and I are going to be putting our kids through college on this.”

“Okay.” I blew my nose.

“If I can’t make this movie I’m going to kill myself.”

“I guess that means you have to make the movie.”

“That’s exactly what it means. Holy shit.” He was amazed at himself, understandably. Large events were occurring, and he was at their center. “I need something on paper.”

“I don’t have much written down,” I bluffed.

“I need to be able to explain. I have to make other people get it. I need something on paper, like what you said. What you said was so amazing. It has to be like that.”

“It wouldn’t take long.”

“You’re saying there’s
nothing
?”

“Not yet.”

“This is bad, Dylan. I really, really need this so I can make someone else see.”

The intercom clicked. “Jared?”

“What?”

“I don’t have an agent for Dylan.”

“I thought I told you always to get contact information. You remember me telling you that?”

“It’s my fault,” I stage-whispered, wanting to protect Mike.

Jared released the intercom. “I’m not into games,” he said.

“Neither am I. Just let me call my agent first, okay?” I had no agent, nor the remotest notion where I’d begin looking for one. “He doesn’t actually know a lot about this whole thing.”

“If you think I’m letting you walk out of my office with this movie in your head you’re
crazy
. I need something from you, Dylan. Don’t screw me, man. This is my movie. I
feel
this one.”

“It’s great,” I said, holding up my hands, hoping to slow the madness. “We’re both excited. Just tell me what should happen next.”

“Call your agent from here.”

“What?”

He held up both hands. “Sit at my desk. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll go out in the hall.” He paced madly. “Just sit and call him from here.”

“I—”

“I’m giving you my office, man. Go. Sit.”

There was no refusing. I took his chair. He shut himself out in Mike’s antechamber, first pointing at me from behind the half-closed door. “Tell him I’m holding you hostage until I have something I can take into a meeting.”

“Okay.”

When he’d sealed the door I dialed my home number. It rang through to the machine, of course. Abby was at school. I hung up without leaving a message, then retrieved my address book and rang Randolph Treadwell at the
Weekly
. I got him.

“Help,” I said.

“You had the meeting?”

“I’m
in
the meeting. He left the room so I could call my agent, only I don’t have an agent. I’m at his desk.”

“Interesting.” Randolph’s voice was neutral.

“Is Jared always so, uh, volatile?”

“I don’t really know him that well. Why?”

“He’s seems to think we’re about to have a baby together. A solid-gold baby.”

“That’s the way these things go,” said Randolph, unimpressed. “It’s sort of like a faucet. If it’s on, it gushes. Now you have to keep it open.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“You want to come by the office after this? How long are you in town?”

“I have to go see my dad, in Anaheim.”

“What’s he doing in Anaheim?”

Jared barreled through the door. “I gotta go.” I hung up the phone.

“What’s the ending?” said Jared.

“Sorry?”

“I was trying to do it for Mike, the whole thing, the black guys, the jail, Elvis. And I forgot if you told me the ending.”

“I . . . think we didn’t get to the ending,” I said carefully.

“And?”

“Well, Johnny Bragg was in and out of prison a couple more times, I think. He made music whenever he could. No big hits, though.”

“The Prisonaires?”

“They died, I think.”

“Could we have, like, a big
comeback
?”

I shrugged a
why not?
I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce the words, though. Was there any aspect of Johnny Bragg’s story I hadn’t dishonored by my pitch? What further harm would a little comeback bring? Or a big one?

“What about Elvis? Elvis is really important to this whole thing. That was a really great part, when Elvis visits and you were crying, remember?”

Maybe Elvis could return and bust the warden in the jaw, then personally break Bragg out of prison. Or the two of them, Bragg and Presley, could be shackled together at the ankles and sent to break up rocks. The singing would be amazing, anyway.

“Well, the story doesn’t really have a big ending,” I said. “It just sort of goes on and on. I’m sure we can figure out a good place to end it, though. Maybe Johnny Bragg walking through the gates, a free man. The last time.”

“It has to be good.”

“It can be good.”

“Do they catch the guys who really did it?”

“Did what?”

“You know, killed all those women.”

“There aren’t any dead women. There wasn’t a big legal showdown or anything. Eventually he was just old and they stopped picking on him, I guess.”

“How old?”

I’d wondered when this might come up. “He might even still be alive,” I said. At the time of Colin Escott’s liner note, nine years ago, Johnny Bragg was still alive and giving interviews. His anecdotes were the source for half my pitch. For years I’d been planning a visit to Memphis to try and interview him myself. That visit waited, with so many other speculative projects, for an entity like Dreamworks to bankroll. Anyway, that was my excuse.

“
Alive?
”

“It’s possible.”

“
Possible?
”

Yes! Alive! Possible! I wanted to scream. “He’d be in his seventies.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll find out.”

“This is a serious problem, Dylan.” Jared raked his hand through his hair and frowned, under stress I couldn’t possibly understand. “Can I have my desk back, please?”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked as we swapped places.

Scowling, he settled back, crossed his legs, and with two fingers kneaded the bridge of his nose and then the periphery of his jaw. He appeared to be recovering from a sort of bender,
coming down
as after an orgasm or a hit of crack. I wondered how often he indulged.

“You just came in here and pitched me someone’s life story, a living person,” he said, not angrily, but with deep regret. “Well, we’d have to option life rights. That can get
really
sticky.”

“He’d want it told,” I suggested.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I don’t know about the ending, though, Dylan. I’m not happy about that ending.”

He spoke as though
The Prisonaires
was already filmed and edited and he’d just screened it and been disappointed. Now we were left with the sorry task of mopping up, cutting our losses. “It’s so vague, he gets out, he goes back, the band never reunites. And I kept expecting something to happen with that woman, the one in the audience, you know? The crying one.”

Inescapably, absurdly, I fell to the same tone. “I guess we could end it sooner. After the first parole.”

“Oh, I doubt that would work.”

“Okay,” I said, helpless.

“Listen, I don’t want to—I don’t want to tell anyone about this thing until we pull it together. It should be
perfect
. A slam dunk. You and I should both think really hard about the third-act problems and do
nothing
until we’ve cracked them. If I bring this upstairs I want it to be airtight, you know?”

“That makes sense.”

“Did you talk to your agent?”

“He, uh, feels the same way, actually.”

“Of course he does. He knows how these things work.”

“So—” I was baffled. “What happens next?”

“The question is what
you
do next. This is all in
your
hands.”

“Uh, okay.”

“I’m not easily discouraged, you know. I believe in you, mister.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing wrong with taking some time, by the way. This isn’t going anywhere. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.”

“Okay.”

“So, do you have a driver? Because I need to have you out of my office now.”

“I can call—”

“Yes, but use Mike’s phone.”

In the middle chamber I handed Nicholas Brawley’s card to Mike and asked him to call.

“Jared was really knocked out,” Mike whispered, eyes wide at what I’d accomplished inside.

“I think he’ll recover,” I said.

I waited with my overnight bag in the shady lot for a long fifteen minutes before Nicholas Brawley’s cab pulled up again at the gate. The man with the Oscar never came back. Brawley’s radio was still tuned to MEGA 100, and the station was broadcasting my old nemesis of a theme song, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Of course, the thirty-five-year-old rock critic knew what the thirteen-year-old scrap of prey on the sidewalks outside Intermediate School 293 never did: Wild Cherry was a bunch of
white guys
. The tune which had been enlisted as an indictment of my teenage existence was in fact a Midwestern rock band’s rueful self-parody. I’d wondered many times since then whether knowing would have helped. Probably not. Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had been taken from me, stripped off like clothes I’d only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

chapter  
3

A
braham and Francesca stood together in the lobby of the Anaheim Marriott, still as sculpture. All around them the lobby boiled with arrivals, misshapen travelers clad in black and purple, peering nervously side to side as though concerned with the impression they made as they wheeled suitcases in agitated confusion to the check-in desk. Others lurched or darted through the vast open space of the lobby, gathering briefly in groups of four or five to hug and talk, to crinkle brochures with circled program items, or present one another with buttons or ribbons to affix to suspenders or knapsack straps. Some wolfed sandwiches, licking gummy fingers unselfconsciously. Many wore plastic-frame eyeglasses or floppy hats or molded jewelry, others T-shirts with proud enigmas emblazoned:
MORE THAN HUMAN
,
DONATE YOUR BODY TO SCIENCE FICTION
,
I USED TO BE A MILLIONAIRE THEN MY MOTHER THREW OUT MY COMIC BOOK COLLECTION
. Photocopied signs, taped inelegantly to corridors and glass doors, offered suite numbers for hotel parties, advertised special events, and directed attendees to the registration table or the art show or the first aid station. Certain laminated name badges were labeled
PRO
or
VOLUNTEER
. Voices rose and were lost in a babble of others—monotonous harangues, kooky laughter, anxious questions, hysterical reunions. ForbiddenCon 7 was under way in all its glory. I only had to figure out what it was, or else not bother. I didn’t sense it needed me to know.

Francesca saw me first. “There you are!” she cried out. Abraham nodded and they surged toward me as I came through the revolving door. I hurried forward, trying to save them the trouble. “You’re late!” said Francesca. “We’re practically going to miss Abe’s
panel
.”

I’d promised to meet them in the lobby at three—it was almost four. Nicholas Brawley had laughed and shaken his head when I gave him the destination. “You should have rented a car,” he said, and by the time we’d crossed the ocean of suburb between Hollywood and Anaheim I saw his point. The fare was $114.00. Now, however, stepping into the lobby of the convention hotel, I considered the even greater conceptual distance I’d covered, moving from Jared Orthman’s office to ForbiddenCon. Brawley’s fare was a bargain.

“Dylan,” said my father. We embraced, and I felt him sigh against my body. Then I turned and dipped to Francesca, just in time to be enveloped in her swarming attack, not soon enough to plan where on my exposed surface the lipstick would be delivered. It landed north-northwest of my mouth, a misaligned mustache in beet purple. I swabbed it with my thumb and said, “Sorry I’m late.”

Francesca’s badge was unadorned, while Abraham’s bore a special purple ribbon, reading
GUEST OF HONOR
.

“They need Abraham in the greenroom,” she said gravely.

“Lead the way,” I said.