I had once heard her on a radio show describe herself as a snake charmer.
All that film whistling through her hands, sliding through her fingers, undulant and swift.
All that time passing, but to pass and repass again.
It was no different, she said, than life itself.
The future rushed at you. You had a single instant, as it flashed by, to change it into an amiable, recognizable, and decent past. Instant by instant, tomorrow blinked in your grasp. If you did not seize without holding, shape without breaking, that continuity of moments, you left nothing behind. Your object, her object, all of our objects, was to mold and print ourselves on those single bits of future that, in the touching, aged into swiftly vanishing yesterdays.
So it was with film.
With the one difference: you could live it again, as often as need be. Run the future by, make it now, make it yesterday, then start over with tomorrow.
What a great profession, to be in charge of three concourses of time: the vast invisible tomorrows; the narrowed focus of now; the great tombyard of seconds, minutes, hours, years, millennia that burgeoned as a seedbed to keep the other two.
And if you didn’t like any of the three rushing time rivers?
Grab your scissors. Snip. There! Feeling better?
And now here she was, her hands folded in her lap one moment and the next lifting a small 8-millimeter camera to pan over the faces at the table, face by face, her hands calmly efficient, until the camera stopped and fixed on me.
I gazed back at it and remembered a day in 1934 when I had seen her outside the studio shooting film of all the fools, the geeks, the autograph nuts, myself among them.
I wanted to call out, Do you remember? But how could she?
I ducked my head. Her camera whirred.
It was at that exact moment that Roy Holdstrom arrived.
He stood in the commissary doorway, searching. Finding me, he did not wave but jerked his head furiously. Then he turned and stalked out. I jumped to my feet and ran off before Fritz Wong could trap me.
I saw Roy vanishing into the Men’s outside, and found him standing at the white porcelain shrine worshiping Respighi’s Fountains of Rome. I stood beside him, noncreative, the old pipes frozen for the winter.
“Look. I found this on Stage 13 just now.”
Roy shoved a typewritten page onto the tile shelf before me.
The Beast Born at Last!
The Brown Derby Tonight!
Vine Street. Ten o’clock.
Be there! or you lose everything!
“You don’t believe this!” I gasped.
“As much as you believed your note and went to the damn graveyard.” Roy stared at the wall in front of him. “That’s the same paper and typeface as your note? Will I go to the Brown Derby tonight? Hell, why not? Bodies on walls, missing ladders, raked-over prints in grass, papier-mâché corpses, plus Manny Leiber screaming. I got to thinking, five minutes ago, if Manny and the others were upset by the scarecrow dummy, what if it suddenly disappeared, then what?”
“You didn’t?” I said.
“No?” said Roy.
Roy pocketed the note. Then he took a small box from a corner table and handed it to me. “Someone’s using us. I decided to do a little using myself. Take it. Go in the booth. Open it up.”
I did just that.
I shut the door.
“Don’t just stand there,” called Roy. “Open it!”
“I am, I am.”
I opened the box and stared in.
“My God!” I cried.
“What do you see?” said Roy.
“Arbuthnot!”
“Fits in the box real nice and neat, huh?” said Roy.
“What made you do it?”
“Cats are curious. I’m a cat,” said Roy, hustling along.
We were headed back toward the commissary.
Roy had the box tucked under his arm, and a vast grin of triumph on his face.
“Look,” he said. “Someone sends you a note. You go to a graveyard, find a body, but don’t report it, spoiling whatever game is up. Phone calls are made, the studio sends for the body, and goes into a panic when they actually have a viewing. How else can I act except out of wild curiosity. What kind of game is this? I ask. I can only find out by countermoving the chesspiece, yes? We saw and heard how Manny and his pals reacted an hour ago. How would they react, I wondered, let’s study it, if, after finding a body, they lost it again, and went crazy wondering who had it? Me!”
We stopped outside the commissary door.
“You’re not going in there with that!” I exclaimed.
“Safest place in the world. Nobody would suspect a box I carry right into the middle of the studio. But be careful, mate, we’re being watched, right now.”
“Where?!” I cried, and turned swiftly.
“If I knew that, it would all be over. C’mon.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Strange,” said Roy, “why do I feel I could eat a horse?”
On our way back into the commissary I saw that Manny’s table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place.
“Damn fool,” I whispered.
Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled.
“Sure am,” he said gladly. “Move.”
I moved to my place.
Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect.
Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult.
“Pay attention!” Fritz snapped his fingers. “The introductions continue!” He pointed along the table. “Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenin’s very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenin’s body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!”
“Lenin’s makeup man?” I said.
“Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.
He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
“Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!”
“Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!”
An empty place.
“For who?” I asked.
Someone