In This Skin (26 page)

    We are nothing. Less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been.

    Those grimly fatalistic words floated in heavy black print above a shot of the Luxor. The footage was old, faded. Poor tracking caused the picture to quiver, then lurch to the left before the tracking system automatically wrenched it back screen center. It took no specialized detective skills to date the video footage on what had been the elusive volume five. The Luxor had still been open for business. Bands still played there. In the parking lot were a dozen cars representing models from three decades ago. Parked at the rear doors a truck unloaded kegs of beer. This was the same entrance that Benedict had used, gaining access via the smashed door panel. Now a trucker rolled a keg through wide-open doors.

    A fresh-looking poster by the ticket office entrance advertised: HOT NEW TALENT NIGHT. THE STARS OF TOMORROW PERFORM TODAY. DOORS OPEN 7.00.

    This had been filmed on a gray winters day. Leafless trees rocked in the breeze. Even the dance hall itself seemed to tremble as air currents tugged the camera, shaking the lens. Only that statement superimposed on a cloud bearing sky remained as immovable as a monument to the dead. We are nothing. Less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been.

    Viewing the tape for the second time around that morning, Benedict found himself picturing the maker of this homemade documentary film. He knew that the footage was the work of Benjamin Isiah Lockram, the then-elderly owner of the Luxor. Clearly the place fascinated Lockram.

    Whether it had begun as a hobby Benedict couldn't tell, but the old man had set out to make a video about the building, the history of the site, and to talk about the acts that had played there in its eighty years of business. Everyone from vaudeville acts to minstrel bands, boxing matches, all-night jazz festivals with Harry Clark's Syncho Six, blues concerts through Buddy Holly, The Grateful Dead, The Four Tops, REM to Nirvana and beyond, while a whole phalanx of bands had come to strut their thing, then passed on, never to be heard of again, their singers destined to wait tables, their drummers fit tires, and legions of guitarists forced to reconcile themselves that they were never going to rival Jimi Hendrix. The Luxor was a conduit to fame for some, or the slimy slope to oblivion for others.

    Again, Benedict marveled at Lockram's burning passion to capture images of not only the fabric of the Egyptian-styled building with its gods and pharaohs, but the spirit of the place. That numinous effulgence that lit the hearts of so many who passed between the mock pillars to hear music and dance deep into the night- and briefly escape their day-to-day lives. Lockram had set out to capture the magic of the place. What he actually recorded was the nightmare that lay at the Luxor's dark heart.

    Benedict recalled seeing the earlier video recording in this sequence of seven volumes. The first volume contained a seemingly pedestrian film about the Luxor. It had ended with a shot of Lockram's wife dead in the apartment. He'd filmed her lying on the bed with her face shrunken and her eyes falling inside her head as body tissue shriveled. To film your dead wife is morbid enough, Benedict reflected, but Lockram had to have a valid reason. He appeared a perfectly rational man. Now this videotape-volume five-at last began to provide some answers. When the exterior shot of the Luxor faded along with the We are nothing line, it was succeeded by a simple shot of old Mr. Lockram. He was sitting in a swivel typist's chair in the center of the Luxor's dance floor in pretty much the same place the armchair sat now. A single baby spotlight illuminated him from the overhead gantry. A tight shaft of electric radiance that reminded Benedict of that ”beam me aboard, Scotty” column of shimmering particles that drew Kirk and crew back to the ship in the old Star Trek show. Even though the aged tape spangled of its own accord, Benedict could discern the twinkle of dust motes in the spotlight that duplicated the otherworldly special effect.

    Benjamin Lockram appeared calm onscreen, although now Benedict might substitute the description with ”resigned”or even ”fatalistic” Whether this presentation of Lockram's ”confession”using video footage revealed the old man's love of the theatrical or whether he genuinely believed it the most effective way of telling his story, Benedict didn't know.

    Whatever the man's intention, it was disturbing. It had the power to frighten.

    On the sofa Benedict held his breath as chills needled their way to his fingertips. The gray-haired man was about to speak. His voice came whispering from the TV. Somehow there was a sense it came in ghostly waves across a vast, dark gulf.

    "I am dead. Or should I say, by the time you-whoever you are-see this, I will be dead? And I will have followed my wife to whatever… or wherever…” Lockram cleared his throat. Benedict West's attention was drawn to the mans eyes-those eyes that were full of quiet wisdom but sadness, too. The eyes of a saint. After looking directly into the camera lens, Benedict felt as if he locked gazes with Lockram himself.

    The man resumed speaking in his slow, rhythmic way as he sat there in that beam of white light that formed a shining aura around his head. ”My life began leading up to this moment the second I walked through those dance floor doors when I was fifteen years old. I am now eighty-four. From that instant the Luxor had its grip on me. I knew then that this place was special. And it was more than knowing-it was feeling, too. The Luxor cast its spell. Soon I was working here. Within ten years I managed the Luxor. Ten years after that I'd bought the place. It became mine. I possessed it. Hmm… I possessed it? At least at the time, that's what I thought. As you saw on the earlier tape, I'd moved into the apartment upstairs and lived there with my wife for fifty years. And that's where Nathaniel was born. This is the fifth film I have made using video equipment I acquired recently. I'm no moviemaker; however, the camera and editing machinery are simple enough to operate. Oh? But why have I chosen to go to the trouble of producing this document as a TV program when I could have more easily kept a diary? Well… I believe the reasons will become transparent when you see the program I made. And, yes, there are rough edges. There will be shots that are blurred, sound that is muffled. I haven't mastered the camera operator's art of the dissolve or the tracking shot. My hands are rather shaky these days. But I have made this program to the best of my ability so you-whoever you are-will understand what has happened here in the Luxor. What you will witness are equal measures of the miraculous and the monstrous…”

    

    

    Floating free in the back of Benedict's mind were still recollections of the crook he'd watched die on the steps of the Luxor just days ago. And seeing that thing with the gross red mouth bending over the girl he now knew as Robyn Vincent, who lived with her boyfriend in the Luxor's apartment, the same one inhabited by Lockram years ago. Those recollections were there because with an uncanny symmetry the video he now watched matched some solutions to earlier puzzles.

    In that slow, rhythmic way, Benjamin Lockram's words came ghosting down the years through the mediumistic power of the TV.

    ”Many happy decades I enjoyed at the Luxor. I shook Buddy Holly by the hand at the bar over there in the corner. He was a tall man, softly spoken, and he had a smile that lit up a room. And Mr. Buddy Holly wanted to know why so many crows had settled on the roof. At the time I didn't know the significance of this, that it was an evil omen. He'd even picked up one of the long crow feathers and tucked it into the tuning peg of his guitar. A little while later I heard about his fateful flight into a snowstorm. The same night as the Holly concert there was a guy here celebrating that his girl had agreed to marry him. I remember that, too. He bought the champagne we used to stock then. Champagne. A sticky sweet liquor brewed from cherries, of all things. But sometimes it's as if there's a great spirit in the sky that weighs up how much happiness you have. And if you have too much it takes some back. The same happened with this kid. It seems the girl's sister was jealous for some reason and told the happy guy that the only reason his girl had agreed to marry him was because she was pregnant by someone else. The guy went out into the lot where he'd parked his truck and blew off his head with a hunting rifle, right there and then, at the same time that Buddy Holly was blasting out
'Peggy Sue' onstage. While I was out there with the police and the ambulance guys I watched how the crows all took off in one great big black cloud that swirled around and around the top of the Luxor. And the noise they made, calling out? Inside my head I can hear it now. An awful, awful sound.

    ”Of course, I couldn't blame myself for the guy's death. It was suicide. Life went on. The fifties exploded into the sixties… and if you were there, you know what I mean… suddenly clothes were every color of the rainbow; the music got more colorful too. Only they called it psychedelic. By then I was into my sixtieth year and my wife was fifty. That's when life changed. And strange things began to happen in the Luxor. On recollection, maybe they'd always been happening. But the first thing that made me sit up and take notice…”

    On screen the twitchy image of Lockram sat up straight. The power of the memory had brought a shiver to those old bones.

    ”The first thing that made me take notice was men and women began to be drawn to the Luxor. They'd come at odd times of the day and night and want to take a look inside. They were scared and excited all at the same time. The strangest thing is they all had some excuse why they wanted to see the dance floor… maybe to relive a little of their youth… or out of architectural interest… some claimed they were Buddy Holly fans and wanted to see where the guy had played. But the Luxor was one of the smaller venues… we weren't The Winter Gardens or the Hollywood Bowl. We were a little dance hall in an old industrial zone. We had plaster moldings of Egyptian pharaohs, fake gods and phony tomb paintings. Why the Luxor? And the audience changed. For example, we'd have a pop band with nothing but teen appeal, yet we'd find a middle-aged woman or two in the audience, or an elderly man. Were they eccentrics? I don't know… or at least didn't know. All I knew then was that they joined the audience but sat there not paying any attention to the band, looking around as if they expected to find someone or something there that… that… I don't know… would transform their lives.

    ”About this time my wife fell pregnant. Is there anything so strange in that, you might ask? Not strange. No. A miracle for us. We'd tried for children, but we weren't blessed. Only one day my wife says to me, 'Ben, I've been to the doctor and I'm pregnant! Remember, I was sixty and Mary was fifty. Pregnancy at that age isn't impossible but it is rare. I wasn't the world's most demanding husband back then. Even so, Mary moved into the spare room. She didn't say as much but I knew she couldn't bear for me to touch her in a way that would… you know, lead to something sexual. It was as if she became so nervous of the idea of making love that she wanted to keep me at arm's length. I understood-or thought I did-she didn't want to put the unborn baby at risk at her age. This was the one last chance in her life to have a child. Even though it seemed to me she rejected me, that she couldn't bear to share a bed with me, I figure I did the right thing by being supportive and aiming to be as understanding as possible.

    ”Anyway, at that time we had a break-in. An intruder got into the Luxor in the early hours. I was alone in the place with Mary. When I looked down from the apartment window and saw the broken glass by the door, I figured that some punk had grabbed liquor from the bar and taken off. So rather than call out the police I took a flashlight and my old twelve gauge to check out the damage myself. I planned to nail a board to the broken glazing, then report the crime in the morning. You see, Mary was in a jumpy state about her pregnancy. I didn't want to alarm her.

    ”The moment I stepped out onto the dance floor I saw the intruder. It wasn't some scuzzy bum looking for whisky. It was a woman of around thirty-five. She wore a flared skirt and schoolmarmish blouse. She had respectability stamped right through the center of her. You couldn't have found someone who looked less like a thief if you'd tried. I could see there was no point in waving the gun and yelling the cops were on their way. Instead I switched on the house lights. My appearing like that in my robe and slippers with a shotgun under my arm didn't even surprise her. Instead she looked at me with this expression of wonder on her face. She filled the room with her happiness, her eyes shone, she kind of puffed herself up with excitement, holding her hands up like this…”

    Benedict saw the man onscreen raise his hands at either side of him until they were as high as his shoulders. 7 figured she'd seen the gun and was surrendering, hands held high. I told her, 'Don't worry, ma'am.
I'm not going to shoot.' But she never even noticed the gun, I'd swear to
that, because she was so thrilled at being in the Luxor- my Luxor, my little
old dance hall in the middle of nowhere. Then I asked her 'Ma'am, why are you
here? You know it's late and this is private property?

    ”Then she turns to me and says, 'Do you
know what happened to me last week?”

    ” 'Wo, ma'am, I don't-'

    ”I went to see a specialist at the hospital and he told me I have cancer of the liver. I won't be alive six months from now.
'I'm sorry to hear that.' I told her, and offered to drive her home.

    ”She didn't seem sorry. She looked happy as a sand boy. Straight out, she told me, 'Last night I was doing the dishes and crying so hard I had to wipe my eyes with a towel but then all of a sudden I said to myself,
'Grace, the time's come to go home.' But I am home, I thought. 'No,' said this voice in my head.
'Return to your real home.' I didn't even have to ask myself where that was. I knew I had to drive to the Luxor, where I used to come dancing when I was seventeen. This is home.
'Your home is here in the Luxor? I'm sorry, but this is just a dance hall-'