Stalking the Nightmare Part 6

You're probably too young to remember, but the part of Adelaide in the original stage production of Guys and Dolls was played by Vivian Blaine, an accomplished actress who had the most amazing dumb-blonde voice ever bottled. Not even Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday could approach the level of stupidity aurally conveyed by Ms.

Blaine's rendition of the nitwit. Only once in the more-than-a-quarter-century since Guys and Dolls opened on Broadway, have I heard a voice, male or female, that rivaled for strident, full-out dumbness, the voice of Adelaide.

"May I help you?" she said.

"Uh, I'm Harlan Ellison," I replied. "I think this is my office."

Such instant attentiveness. Such perky willingness to serve, we don't do windows or floors. Could she get me coffee? Could she type some script? Could she file some reports? Could she read my Tarot?

I pointed out that I was just arriving and that it was my first day on the job and, since I had no idea what I was doing, nor even what the nature of the project was to be, I really needed only one bit of a.s.sistance: "Is that my office in there?"

She indicated that the connecting room was, in fact, the Holiest of Holies where, she was certain, I would create great moments in cinematic history. I thanked her, suggested she return to the contretemps of Nurse and Doctor and advanced post-nasal drip, and I'd call her when I needed her. In the background I heard mental riffs by Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks.

I went into my office.

They could have staged the World Cup soccer matches in there. One sofa, too short to sleep on; one wall of bookcases empty save for a well-thumbed copy of the 1948 WORLD ALMANAC; one framed painting depicting beanfield hands laboring under a blistering sun (I wondered if that was intended by the management as metaphor); one desk the size of the battles.h.i.+p Potemkin (and I wondered if that was intended by the management as metaphor); one typing table supporting an enormous IBM Selectric, already humming with life; one rollaround typing chair.

And on the desk, an even dozen #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, sharpened to such a piercing sharpness that they seemed to strobe off into invisibility at the points. Tony Curtis could have dueled with those pencils.

I didn't have the heart to tell anyone I type ma.n.u.script straight onto the machine. My handwriting is in the top I/10th of the top percentile of illegible scrawls.

I sat down and waited. For someone to come and tell me what they wanted me to write. To tell me at least the name of the picture. But an hour went by and nothing happened.

As I've pointed out earlier, left to my own devices, I get into trouble. Deep trouble.

So, bored out of my brain, I rose, went into the office where Barbie sat with furrowed brow pondering the mysteries of infections and abscesses of the submaxillary parotid gland, and I said, "I'm going to look around. Be back in a bit."

The smile fried my eyeb.a.l.l.s like a ping-pong ball in a cyclotron, and I stumbled into the hall.

I started checking out the other offices. And to my utter delight, there were at least half a dozen writers I knew, ensconced in Plaza Suites similar to mine. The wonderful thing about it was that most of them were loons like me. I'd name them, but since most of you can't even remember the names of authors of books. names of scenarists like Albert Aley and John D. F. Black and Mary C. McCall, Jr. won't mean s.h.i.+t to you. Suffice to say, we all foundourselves gathered in John's office, shucking and jiving till almost noon. At which point someone said, "Okay, let's break for lunch."

I thought that was a terrific idea, having put in an exhausting three hours working in the Disney vineyards.

So we went to the commissary and shoved in around the Writers' Table.

What I did not know was that the Writers' Table was right behind the Producers' Banquette. That was my first big mistake. As it turned out, it was also my last big mistake.

Oh, what fun, sitting there with intellectual companions, cutting up touches and laughing at the drolleries!

Born again: the Algonquin round table. Wit beyond compare. And, naturally, as the youngest member of the group, striving to make my mark as worthy of their camaraderie, their respect, I suggested a droll, witty lunchtime conceit...

Two things you must know. First, I do a terrific Mickey Mouse imitation. Absolutely phonographically perfect. If the publishers of this book had the money, they ought to bind in a record, one of those little plastic jobbies, so you could hear my spectacular Mickey imitation. When I tell this anecdote in person, it really enhances a lot. But just pretend you can hear it, okay?

The second thing you need to know is that the Producers, Banquette had filled up with Roy Disney and the other heads of the studio, behind me; a fact of which I was unaware; a fact no one bothered to impart.

At the top of my voice I suggested, "Hey, listen, what a kick! Why don't we do a p.o.r.n Disney flick?"

Everyone smiled.

"It'll be terrific," I said. Loudly. "I mean, everyone knows, for instance, that Tinker Bell does it... what they don't know is how she Does It." They all looked at me expectantly." She flies up the head of the p.e.n.i.s and flaps her wings like crazy, " I said, proud as h.e.l.l of myself at this bit of fantasy. Everyone chuckled.

I went on, oblivious to the sudden hush all around me in the commissary. "I'll be Mickey, and I'll be the director; John, you do a good Donald, so you can be the male p.o.r.n lead, sort of a duck-style Harry Reems; Mary, you can be Minnie, the female lead; and Albert, you can be Goofy... and Goofy, of course, is the producer."

Their smiles were frozen; the way the smiles of bit players get frozen when they see the monster creeping up behind the hero in a horror flick.

"Hey, gang!" I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. "Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let's get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie's legs!

I wanna see closeups of quivering l.a.b.i.a!"

A silence as deep as that at the bottom of the Cayman Trench.

I went on, oblivious, carried along by my enthusiasm. In Donald's quack, I said, "G.o.ddam sonofab.i.t.c.h! Pluto, get outta there, you're steaming up the lens!"

As Goofy, in the dumbest voice possible, I said, "Yuck, yuck, yuck... hey, fellahs, I'm a highly-paid, extremely-inept producer person... c'n I play, too?"

As Mickey: "f.u.c.k off, Goofy, f.u.c.k off! Get those Seven Dwarfs in here... I don't care if they don't wanna gang-bang a mouse, tell 'em they're under contract... and fer chrissakes, Minnie, will you take off those d.a.m.ned shoes?!"

The meal came. Everyone addressed their plates like inmates of the Gulag Archipelago. When lunch was over, everyone vanished very quickly. I was confused, but felt good. What a nice little shtick I'd invented. Wished they'd joined in. Oh well.

Went back to my office. Noticed first that my name had been whited-out in the parking slot. Upstairs, the secretary and her paperback were gone. On my desk: twelve sharpened #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and a pink slip.

I had been fired after working for the Disney empire for a total of four hours, including lunch.

The lessons here cannot be avoided.

Big business is humorless.

And...

At Disney, n.o.body f.u.c.ks with The Mouse.

Visionary

(Written with Joe L. Hensley) Under the pastel and quiet skies their minds conversed.

"There is the need," they thought, and: "They are maturing," and: "Soon we will be in the togetherness."

And they turned and watched the quiet skies and the reaching roof and spires in antic.i.p.ation.

I had this dream. I'd been having it for years before I knew it for something more than vague remembering. A child's dream, but it did not fade and change. It was a solemn dream, disquieting. And, after awhile, it became more real than the other things that I found in books and lived with.

There wasn't a great deal to it. Just an enormous building, the background around it pastel misty. The building was like a great cathedral, and yet my feeling when I saw it was not religious, though it was akin to it. Always I seemed to be hanging far above it, struggling, but never reaching it. And I would awaken...

I knew, somehow, that everything would be right for me if I could find it. And I knew that I would, some day.

But then, there was the dreaming: The architecture was odd and alien. It seemed to be many organ pipes, thrust down into a soil that was pinkish and fine. The pipes were set flush against one another, so that a great wall of rounded shapes rose up and fit the sky. The roof of the building was of a design I could not identify. Neither Gothic nor Baroque; neither Art Nouveau nor Victorian; certainly it was not Contemporary, yet in a configuration that struck a chord at the rim of familiarity.

There were openings here and there and the openings were dissimilar. Circular and squared apertures; originality of design, in such depth that none of them could be called doors or windows with certainty. They were merely openings: for what purposes I did not know. I looked for one that would fit me.

And there was a scintillance, a s.h.i.+mmering quality to the scene, as if I were viewing it through a membrane, or from a great distance, distorted by heat ghosts.

That was my dream.

Over and over and over again. Waking was a sense of loss, sleeping was life.

There was a sorrow and a strangeness in me then; and I grew older resonating to some soundless song no one else could hear. I was always alone... walled in, yet much freer than those who ran and played around me--my brothers and sisters. And because I was different, it was not an easy life.

My father and mother were second generation Italian Americans and my father was historically impressed by an early American patriot named Whitelaw Martin. He was like that. My name bothered me until junior college. They constantly abbreviated it to "Whitey," and my hair was pitch black--that and a perfect body were the last vestiges of my Italian heritage. But there were a lot of other things that bothered me also. When you are a child you must run with the pack. I couldn't do it. At first my brothers fought my fights for me, stood up for me, but later I lost even my brothers. And I was strange, I knew that. It took strong stimulus to get through to me. Kid's games never did it. I found something that did and I buried myself in the daytime too.

Books.

At first there were fairy tales. I could lose myself in those fabled lands and the cathedral would become unnecessary for awhile. When I was ten I read through the Brittanica and I spouted facts until I was beaten to my knees. Then I learned that it is unwise to be wise. At fourteen I'd read almost everything that was worthwhile and lots that was not. I'd read Shakespeare and I could quote whole acts; I'd read the mad, brilliant ones like Fort and Nostradamus, I'd read Hemingway and Plato and The Compleat Angler.

And I grew away from those around me, without boyhood or regret for it. One day, when I was nineteen, and in college, I looked around and saw that I was tolerated, but not loved. And the conscripters were breathing at my heels for I'd lost interest in school and my stats were marginal.

I enlisted in the Force.

It was still the Air Force, but it sounded ridiculous to call a service that spent most of its budget in the vacuum of deep s.p.a.ce the" Air" Force. So the jingoists, and then the newsfax shortened it to Force.

I became a Forceman. That may sound dramatic, but it wasn't. At least, not at first.

I was trained, and a.s.signed as a hot-stuff drainage expert to a coolant team, based with a limpet missile unit outside La Paz. Based there, but we did a lot of traveling.

It was during the travels--Borneo, Lebanon, Malta, the Arctic, Chad, Kingsland--that the dream ceased to trouble me. I looked for the building in every land and could not find it. But as the dream faded, so did the obsession retreat.

Oh, there were remembrances. On clear nights, when the stars were so painfully sharp they hurt my eyes, and I was pulling guard mount under them, then I'd remember the dream. But it was as if I'd put it aside, this dream that was almost a knowledge, and it was waiting for me, but willing to wait. As if it were saying: My time will come.

And yet I was not completely patient in my waiting. I collected buildings, in much the same way that many people collect books or stamps. I had pictures of every famous structure in the world, thousands of pictures. My favorite was a framed photo of a tiny s.h.i.+ntoist shrine, that had a vague, grudging resemblance to my dream building.

But they were all wrong--Taj Mahal to ruined Angkor Wat--none of them even reasonably resembled mine. So the fixation remained and I continued to look. The thirst could not be slaked, no matter how much I drank. They were using radex fusion propellants then, and every once in a while we, or the Cubans, or the Sheikdoms would send out a one man job that would attempt to crack the barrier beyond the Edge. But none came back. None of ours for sure and the others never claimed any success; I suppose for fear they'd have to substantiate the claim.

The fights went on in the U. N. : bickering about territories that neither of us could really use; limited wars; police actions; border incidents; each nation striving to establish superiority over the other.

All this, even in an era of limited exploration of the Solar System. We should have known better.

And then along came something out of a magician's hat and what was to be... was set in motion. But I didn't know that--not yet.

They'd been giving Force-wide tests. They were odd tests, unlike any I'd ever taken. The questions were odd and peculiarly-phrased and yet, sometimes, lucid and almost exciting to me in their familiarity--as if someone should have asked them of me long ago, so that I would know and they would know. There were questions about foods and smells and what you would do in a given situation. There were many of those. But every once in awhile there was something else, like: "What do you think it would be like to die?" or "Have you ever felt apart from all places and things?" or "What is the loveliest thing that you can remember?"

And there were physicals, too. Good competent physicals, not hurried and superficial, as were the annual checkups.

The dreams came back then--nearer and closer. I was sorry when the tests were completed: the dream became sporadic again-once more it receded.

Six weeks later I was cut new orders. They flew me out. A special VTOL. I was. the lone pa.s.senger.

I counted.

I had to show my orders exactly fourteen times from the minute I reached Bong Field until I was billeted there.

I never saw so many guys with guns--off safety--even in a battle area. And they didn't just check my orders--they read them. Then they checked my face against my I. D. card and made me rattle off my service number. Then they fluoro-ed my retinas and took my fingerprints and checked them against copies from my "master file."

They'd taken a group of old hangars and put high fences around them. Real high and charged. Then they'd put a guard along every fifteen or twenty yards offence. There was another fence inside the outer one and more guards. I guess they wanted to keep what they had inside. A close-mouthed captain took me to a barracks and there were other men billeted there. But that night the dream wasn't there. I couldn't sleep.

In the morning they started more tests on me and about thirty others who appeared to have been s.h.i.+pped in from almost everywhere. At first, physicals. The tests were similar to what had been run before. After awhile they became more complicated. Doctors beat on me, and pinched me, and took my blood, and flashed lights at me, and depressed my tongue, and sc.r.a.ped bits of skin off me. Then they whirled me in a thing like a "whip" at the carnival and shot me up in an ejection seat. And I endured it all with the same vague excitement I'd felt during the other tests. But no one came to tell us what we were there for.

They had the bunch of us in two old barracks. But by ones and twos and threes they eliminated until there were only six of us left. And whenever the taciturn captain came in I knew it was not for me--just knew it.

I got to know the other five pretty well. They were all different from me in many ways. In one way we were the same. The first of them was a large-boned, wry black man embarra.s.singly named Was.h.i.+ngton Jones. Then there was Samuels and Kahn, who was very tiny, and the two women, Pearson and Ludwig. They were all different from me--except for their eyes.

When it got down to six, a colonel came into the barracks one day and pinned bars on our lapels and shook our hands.

I suppose we all knew, in a way, what was going on. We figured they'd found something and, from the tests, that we were their guinea pigs.

The dream was very close now. It was as though I was reliving a bit of my childhood. I saw myself up there again--my face, the same child's face I'd always had, with the wide eyes and the freckles and the black, black hair and the slash of a mouth, wide and frowning. But the body was different. It was bigger than life, man-plus. Hard and ripplingly-muscled, tall and golden, like a G.o.d out of a Greek myth. I was that G.o.d.

I recognized the egocentricity of it, naturally, but my cathedral waited beneath me. And I awoke.

The barracks was quiet around me. All but our six bunks were empty now. Faint dawn light filtered down the walls. I lay awake for a while, remembering; then I scratched a cigarette alight.

Another spot of red bloomed from a nearby bunk and Wash Jones's voice said softly: "You awake, Fazio?"

I grunted.

"I been working it over in my mind," he said. "Why we're here--why I'm here. I'm afraid. All my life I've been waiting for something to happen to me. Now that it is, I'm afraid of it but I want it."

"Do you ever dream?" I asked.

His voice was almost lost: "I dream, but I can't share it." When his voice came again it was hesitant: "Did you ever read Charles Fort, Fazio?"

"A long time ago."

"Remember what he said about time?" His voice strengthened. "That there are ages in which certainoccurrences are predestined to happen. Not by divine ordinance, but just because it's their time to happen. The time of the wheel and the steam engine and the automobile. And if someone comes up with one too early, there's a singular, almost mystical, disregard of the invention. As though the world were snubbing it till it was ready for it."

I felt the excitement grow a little again and what he said was right and it fit inside me, fit in with my dream.

And I lay there and thought about it; and for a long time we, were silent.

I was almost back to sleep when I heard him muttering to himself. "What time is it now, Was.h.i.+ngton Jones?

What time is it now?"

I checked Charles Fort out of the base library next day and read him through again. I had nothing but spare time. We waited, and no one told us a d.a.m.n thing. Once Jones saw me with the book and we grinned at each other self-consciously. But the book did not engender in me the kind of excitement that I'd hoped for. Fort was quite brilliant and quite paranoid.

Yet the dream persisted and Jones's concept was some part of it and something to mull over in my spare time.