Dead Stars (58 page)

Smile even tho it's breaking

———& that. is. it.

The child can take no more.

The nightmare moment the audience thought would never come

is here.

Aleisha stares into the wings stage right, from the ballroom audience a ¼viewable spasmy clump of people is discernible there. Melanie. Gwen. Phoebe. Jesselle. Stage manager. Others. And Telma: unblinking, unstomping, uncrying, raging no more. Recipient of Aleisha's beaten begging onstage eyes.

It happens so quickly, it's only seconds, she was about to rescue her daughter, Jesselle was going to go out there too, hell even Gwen was but Telma tamped the mom's arm & took the stage. The audience has not exhaled. They know this is no longer scripted. No one knows what's going to happen, not even Gwen, but more than a few think they do:
the big girl's going to help the little girl walk offstage

NO.

Telma kneels to enfold her. Aleisha trembles.

Loud silence, then Telma begins

:) tho your heart is aching        

Smile even tho it's breaking    

. . . . . . but won't go any further without her, her new BFF from Ontario CN. The silence grows louder. Telma gets
behind
her, still on her knees, arms enfolding/encircling her like a necklace, protecting, soothing, loving—& begins again—
warbling whispering entreating lullaby-beseeching
in Aleisha's ear—
MOTHERING—
Gwen out of her fog now and into a dream, all of it dreamy——————after a few false starts Telma gets her to talk—then talk-sing—then sing, her voice a thread of love entangled with Aleisha's
protecting loving
loving
LOVE

[they sing lyrics describing weather,

suggesting that as long as

there are skies above, one may persevere]
*

Masterfully, the accompaniment recedes (quickly, plaintively,
breakingly) the conductor must've made that decision) until there is only

a

single

violin.

 

 

{Telma&Aleisha (together)}

[they sing lyrics suggesting

to remain steadfast

thru difficulties, the gloom

may lift and the

sun come out again]
*

 

 

& then it's over.

 

Telma holds Aleisha

Aleisha holds back

burying her face in Telma/s blasted lambasted chest.

The mothers take the stage

 & then:

pandemonium.

CLEAN

[Bud]

Fall Guy

Dolly

fell again. This time she sprained an arm and got what the doctor called a scalp hematoma; she bled beneath the skin. She got lucky, though, yet again—nothing broken.
Nothing broken, nothing gained
, said Bud aloud, in front of the caregiver with the worst English.

Bud sat on the edge of the bed. Mom looked all played out.

“Do you know what this is?”

“This?”

“This
phase
.”

She sounded almost lighthearted. Jaunty.

“No. What is it?”

“This is
the deterioration-death
phase. It's old age.
That's
what it is:
the deterioration-death
phase. If there was a coffin, you'd just crawl right in.”

“I can have one here tomorrow.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

They watched TV together, then Bud flipped through channels while Dolly slept. Reality show after reality show; the world was overdosing on reality. Once faddish, the New (filmed) Reality was the norm. Bud's little theory was that the “blooper” was to blame. When he was a boy, he remembered John Wayne dropping by
The Tonight Show
with a blooper reel from his latest film—take after take of the Duke unable to make it through one scene or other without laughing. When he finally regained his composure, the virus had already passed to whoever was acting opposite him and the cycle began again. That sort of thing used to be a
goof
, a bonusburger you'd bring Johnny for kicks. It was fun, the folks at home liked the idea of being “in” on something plus it was sexy watching the squeaky gears of fame machinery at work. But when they started using blooper reels as “stingers” at the end of big feature comedies (a montage of mistakes, gaffes, and unprovoked hysteria over final credits), it was like climbing into a Philip K. Dick short story: the beginning of a fatal reality leak. If reality was the
PDF
, the blooper reel was the
end of PDF inviolability
, a gateway drug that hacked into reality to produce a highly addictive hybrid—reality programming—more potent than tired old reality itself. Cinematography died and gave birth to
the photography of everything.
Footage of the DP waking up in the morning, taking a shit and arguing with his wife before leaving for work (as DP on a feature film) was now as or more compelling than whatever fictional narrative he'd be hired to shoot. Formal storytelling no longer existed outside reality but had nestled
inside
; writers gave TED talks on creating narratives that could be altered by the shake of an iPad
.
The wiki page on bloopers said the English called it “corpsing”—trying to make the live actor playing the corpse onstage laugh. Well, someone had hacked into fiction and contaminated it with reality; now fiction was the fata morgana, the ghostly relic on the laptop screen; the untampered PDF was a fanatical construction, at last thankfully extinct.

He stopped on a TNT doc about John Ford. There was a montage of men, galloping on horses. Suddenly the narrator was talking about horses that were specially trained to fall without injuring themselves. They called them—what else?—
falling horses
. He pictured Dolly on one, strapped to the saddle on the cover of an Hermès catalogue.

. . .

Bud knew Michael would be jetlagged and was surprised when he agreed to meet. He said he needed to force himself to stay up because they were throwing a long-planned dinner party tonight for a writer who just published an acclaimed translation of
Madame Bovary
. Michael suggested the Coffee Bean, on Larchmont.

As it turned out, all the fuss in New Zealand was nothing more than—surprise—the actor wanting more to do. So Michael wrote three new scenes and elongated five more, without leaving the actor's trailer. All the bullshit between star & director went
poof
.

“Wendy said the movie's called
Misericord 
. . .”

“That's just a working title. Did Ooh Baby close your deal?”

“Yeah. I've already commenced.”

“I
told
you. What did I tell you?”

“Yes, you did. And I really thank you.”

“It's from Biggie's story? What they want you to adapt?”

“
Kind
of. It's a
real
story that Biggie found on the Internet. He made a few . . .
changes
.”

“Have you seen the two of them together?”

“Yeah, at the cancer thing.”

“Right! There's something about them—the two of them, together—that's
terribly
moving. Biggie's sick, you know.”

“Something with his head?”

“They thought it was NPC, Niemann-Pick, but it isn't. They don't know
what
it is. If it was NPC, he'd be having seizures, & probably be fairly incapacitated by now. But he hasn't had any seizures.
Physically
he seems to be fine. It's a mystery.”

“Wow.”

“The doctors told him it's going to look, smell & feel very much like Alzheimer's. I mean, in the end. Whenever
that
is, also something no one seems to know.”

“Gee, you know I'd rather write a script about
that
.”

“Yours is not to reason why.”

“Michael . . . I know you just got back. I know you did a lot of writing over there, and that you're jetlagged. But I just wanted to tell you the story. Can I tell you this story they want me to adapt? It's a very weird story. I mean it's
compelling
, but . . . I guess I just need to talk it out. Maybe you'll have a take on it.”

“Sure.”

“Are you sure it's OK? I don't want to burden you. We can do it another time—”

“No! Now's perfect.”

“I'm really going to condense this, OK?”

“Condense away.”

“This is really kind of you, Michael. I really appreciate—”

“Bud! You're killin me!”

“OK. The whole thing's based on this newspaper article. Fifteen, maybe 20 years ago. Takes place in South Carolina, the Blue Ridge Mountains
.
These two 16 year-olds are hiking. Boyfriend-girlfriend. Pretty rough rapids there—remember
Deliverance
? They shot
Deliverance
around there too. And the rapids? Long story short: the girl slips and falls, they
both
fall trying to cross the river, he gets spit out, whatever, but she goes down. And what
happens
is, she—her
body—
gets stuck in this . . .
whirlpool
, feet first
.
”

“And the water
keeps
her like that, right? I've heard of stuff like this. It keeps her vertical.”

“Yeah, it's like a washing machine. She's 8 feet under, whatever, and they can
see the body
but they just can't get to it. And her father comes and camps by the river. They make a few attempts to get her out—the men from town, and these are experienced men—but they can't do it, some of them almost die trying. So they have to call it off. The father goes nuts.”

“Because he can't bury his little girl.”

“Right.”

“It's
Antigone
.”

“Exactly! And the river's protected, so they can't dam it up. But the dad goes to the senator who happens to be Strom Thurmond. Thurmond lost his daughter not too long before in a car accident, so he's got a sympathetic ear. And Thurmond says,
Do whatever it takes.
So they dam it up but the dam doesn't work either. And
more
of these guys come close to drowning. So finally, they just say,
The river will give her up.
No—they say, ‘the river always gives up its dead.'”

“Jesus.”

“Biggie made some notes about what he wants—”

“What are they?”

“—for the adaptation. First of all, he wants the whole thing to take place in one of these huge caves. So it's actually a river that runs
under ground
.”

“Interesting.”

“But this is the weirdest: instead of father & daughter, he wants it to be mother & son.”

“I can guess which side of the river Mom's on.”

This is where he needed Michael's input so Bud kept quiet. Michael began to subtly rock in his chair, eyes slowly opening & shutting, lost in thought. After a few minutes of that, he got up from the table, ordered another latte and a chocolate croissant, and sat back down with the same intensely focused demeanor—as if having placed himself in a twilight state where creative solutions might be accessed. He was definitely engaged in some sort of
process
, and Bud only hoped it was one that might benefit him.

They didn't give him 2 million a script for nothing.

Bud saw that the latte was ready, and fetched it. He set it down in front of his old friend, waited a few respectful moments then said, “So what do you think? I mean how the fuck do you make a movie out of
that?
Because from everything I know, everything I've
heard
and
seen
, Brando Brainard & Ooh Baby Baby aren't really in the business of making dark little
indies
.”

“
No they are not.
You've got that right. You know, I talked to Brando—I think it may have been the day after you went over to the house and met Biggie. Brando said he came home from work and asked Biggie how your meeting went.
Biggie didn't remember you being there.
Brando said that his brother doesn't even really remember anymore the story of the girl in the river, either
—
he just remembers the broad strokes. Brando thinks Biggie's fixated on the story in that autistic way. I
do
think that most of the time,
details
elude him. I mean, unless Biggie brings up the page on his screen, he only remembers the broad strokes: mother, son, river.”

“What does it all mean, Michael?”

Bud felt like he was on the pier, talking to a psychic.

“What it
means
is, you've got to make it work. Make it work for
you
. Because if it doesn't work for
you,
it sure as hell ain't gunna work for
Brando
. Now, that doesn't mean you don't take Brando's
input
, because you should. As much as possible. Because that's what will allow you to form an idea of what he wants. He won't tell you
directly
—producers never do. It's something he won't be able to
articulate.
Plus, I think he may be a little leery of encroaching on his brother, not that Biggie would even be
aware,
but I have a feeling Brando's a little superstitious. Biggie's the golden calf, the so-called idiot savant (unfortunately beginning to skew more toward
idiot
) and Brando's probably a bit reluctant to fuck with that. On some deep, brotherly level. But as long as the story is approached with
respect
, especially
at the beginning of the process—
which is clearly what you're already doing—as long as Brando can
see
that the material was approached with
respect
, you'll be fine. Make
mother, son, river
your mantra, then you're free. Sky's the limit.”

He was flummoxed. There was some awkwardness there as well, because Bud felt like he was walking that fine, perilous line between asking for guidance and outright begging for help.

“Free . . . free to do
what
, exactly?”

Maybe it's for the best that he's jetlagged. He probably wouldn't have met with me if he wasn't. Maybe he'll come up with some kind of fix, out of sheer exhaustion.

Michael smiled to himself before taking a ragged bite from his croissant. Bud was starving. He hadn't eaten much in the last few days; he was saving food as a reward for when he found a solution to his approach to the script. He resisted the impulse to reach over & tear off a hunk of Michael's bread.

“A comedy,” said Michael.

“A comedy?”

“Comedies are in Brando's wheelhouse. [
OMG. They're still using the word!
A nice omen
] They're pretty much the only thing Brando responds to.”

“You're saying I should write a comedy?”

“Yup.”

“But how do I walk away from this? And how do I get him to agree to let me substitute something
else
?”

“No, no, no. You write a
comedy
from the
river
story.”

“The drowned girl—I mean, the drowned
mom
?”

“You got it. Are you following me?”

Bud was trying; he had to.

“A comedy?”

“Why not?” said Michael. He looked like one of those wild, exultant
tzaddiks
from rabbinical lore.
“Why not?”

He fixed Bud with a secret fraternity smile, happy that he saw, or pretended to, the light.

“Jesus, Michael, it's brilliant
.
But
how
? How do I make a comedy out of something like that?”

Michael said, “Who was it that said ‘comedy is tragedy, plus time'?”

Bud looked it up on his iPhone while Michael excused himself to the restroom. Well, it was either Woody Allen or Carol Burnett, which probably meant neither. Other quotes were “If it bends, it's comedy. If it breaks, it isn't” and “Life is a tragedy in close-up, a comedy in long-shot.” Bud racked his brain. He knew Michael was
right
, but realized their conversation would need to have a sequel, at another time; he didn't want to overstay his query. Michael returned to the table.

“OK, fucking
brilliant
. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to apply it—I need to
reframe
—but this whole
world
just opened up. Do you think we can have just one more talk about this? I mean, once I figure it out? Just to run past you?”