The Lost Expert, page 30
THE LOST EXPERT sits slumped in his chair. A year has gone by, but the Lost Expert looks considerably older — bearded, with deep lines in his face. The phone in the exterior office rings. The Lost Expert ignores it. The radio is on, the volume low.
NEWSCASTER (V.O.)
It’s been almost a year since Harold Allan has taken power. So far, he’s kept all his campaign promises. We’re heading toward a more prosperous, safer country, people! The ghetto is sealed, and President Allan is moving to close the borders to all immigration. Making our country great again, people. Jobs for everyone. Prosperity for everyone. Allan’s Army has changed America for the good, ladies and gentlemen. Of course, the popular imagination continues to focus on the President and First Lady’s little boy, adopted at the very beginning of the Allan administration, and, by all accounts, now thriving under the …
The Lost Expert stares at nothing. Abruptly, the phone stops ringing.
ESTHER (O.S.)
(her voice coming from the outer office reception area)
The Lost Expert’s office, how may I help you?
The Lost Expert, startled by Esther’s voice, jerks up.
ESTHER (O.S) (CONT’D)
Okay, I understand. Let me get back to you once I speak with him.
The door to the interior office opens. ESTHER comes in.
ESTHER
(holding up a scrap of paper)
A girl is lost.
THE LOST EXPERT
(sighing)
Go home, Esther. Leave me alone.
ESTHER
(sharply)
Home? What home?
THE LOST EXPERT
(looking down at the dirty floor)
Esther. I’m sorry —
ESTHER
(holding back tears)
You have to try. We’re dying in there! The rabbi sent me. He says you can help.
THE LOST EXPERT
The rabbi!
ESTHER
She was playing in front of her house. With her dog. The next thing they knew —
THE LOST EXPERT
Esther!
ESTHER
(firmly)
It’s been more than a year. It’s time. People are dying. In the shtetl, things are bad. The rabbi is getting weaker. Please! We need you! He says you have to use it. Your gift. You have to just try and use it.
The Lost Expert shakes his head in despair.
ESTHER
Please. He’s sick. He’s dying.
THE LOST EXPERT
What can I do? I can’t do anything.
Esther looks at him desperately.
ESTHER
Please.
THE LOST EXPERT
(a single tear sliding down his cheek)
How old is she?
Section 26
THE LIMOUSINE PICKED CHRIS up in the early evening. His pants hung off him, even though he’d tethered them to his waist via an electric blue Thomson Holmes belt. The linen jacket he’d chosen at random felt like it was billowing off his frame as he walked hurriedly from the front door to the waiting town car. He gave his driver an appraising look meant as a warning. Seemingly unaffected, the driver clicked the door shut. Chris settled against the cool leather seat and closed his eyes. He’d been up all night, lying in bed, fingering the palm-sized switchblade that had once belonged to Thomson Holmes. In the hours around dawn, he’d drifted off picturing the assassin-turned-director Raoul Walsh and his mentor-turned-rival D.W. Griffith circling each other, going round and round.
The car climbed a ramp and began wending slowly along the congested freeway. The city up ahead, obscured by smog. On the sides, tan hills, swathed in lengthening shadow and dun vegetation.
To Krunk, it was the greatest film era — pre–Hays Code, maniacal, exuberant, and transgressive. A nation’s truth emerging. What art form would prevail in the wake of those horrific conflicts fought with a savagery never known or seen before? Film was the only possible answer, the only art not rendered obsolete by the new madness of modern warfare — muskets levelled on grassy fields suddenly filled with the cries of Charge! leading all too soon to tommy guns and lung-destroying gases settling eerily over acres of muddy trenches. Charge! Only film, equally frenetic and just as cruel, could matter now. Chris shook his head. Snap out of it. Krunkisms. Ideas his former friend had picked up from his endless hours re-watching the remains of the silent film era and dog-earing tomb-like books purporting to be the complete, the exhaustive, the thorough history of every epoch Hollywood had known or forgotten.
“Enough!”
Reed: “He speaks! Good god! The man speaketh!”
Darlia leaned forward and put a tiny hand on Chris’s knee. He jerked ever so slightly at her gentle touch, slightly stunned to find that she and Reed were both in the limo with him. “Are you okay, Thomson?” Darlia, next to him, pondering him with a luminous, puzzled gaze, while Reed, across from him, looked on stonily.
On set, Chris had felt it. Signals and portents, sudden storms passing over eerie, inviting partings in the woods. Patterns to be divined: Little Scarface hates/needs Thomson Holmes. Chris hates/loves Krunk. Reed hates/needs the money men, and Darlia loves/hates Thomson Holmes. What did it matter? The old ways were gone. The dramatic gestures of heroes dipping their wings as they took their victory laps over Paris airfields were all too easily overwhelmed by Dolby Surround, Technicolor, and the 4d experience.
“Everything is replicable,” Chris blurted, channelling an inner Krunk-Reed he no longer seemed able to control. “The machine rolls on. Holmes disappears and is replaced by another, better Holmes. Miriam Cooper leaves the aloof genius Griffith, pulled to the brooding, needy Raoul Walsh. She’s looking to get back to something she’s lost, but once she gets there, she finds out the truth: there’s no home to go back to. ‘Just one more movie, my love,’ her new husband begs her. ‘Then we’ll settle down. Please my darling, my darling, darling girl. For me …’
“Everyone betrays everyone. Even if we don’t mean to. We can’t help ourselves. It’s like one of those slow-motion scenes in a disaster movie. The giant wave. We all know what’s coming, but we can’t stop it, can’t stop ourselves. It’s the world we live in. It’s the way we’re brought up. It’s what we know. What we learn, from very early on. To betray each other. To use each other.”
“Thomson! That’s terrible!” Darlia looked stricken. Reed tugged his ball cap lower. He made a sound, half moan, half sigh. Chris thought he was going to cry. Instead, he took a vial of pills out of his pocket, tilted three into his palm. He threw them into his mouth.
“Anyone else?” Reed rattled the pill bottle at them. “C’mon, people! It’s a party!”
THEY PAUSED GOING IN. Chris stood with his arm around Darlia’s slight shoulders as the paparazzi took pictures. He smiled faintly, holding his breath, steeling his muscles at the flashing cameras. Little Scarface. Tell them. Tell them!
Inside, the chic club was already crowded. Everyone looked up at them when they entered. Chris, waiting for his eyes to adjust, couldn’t make out anyone’s face. Who were these people? What did they have to do with the movie? He scanned again and thought he recognized the German’s scoffing profile backlit by the glittering raised bar. Anyone else? He looked in vain for Alison.
He’d texted her this morning, his words pathetic and unrequited:
Darlia returned with two glasses of champagne. She passed him one, then hooked her lithe arm through his and tugged him along. Chris let himself be led. Her glow made him disappear. Thomson Holmes, nothing more than a comma in the small talk. She introduced him to random shiny people, well dressed, tanned, healthy, physiognomies perfect to the point of freakish absence. Despite their armoured exteriors, they extended their hands demurely. You don’t fuck with celebrity. Producers, agents, fixers, distributors, mid-level executives, a cluster of famous hairdressers-to-the-stars, baring teeth as they leaned into one another and showed off their tight leather pants and shirtless vests revealing glimpses of smoothly shaved pecs. The wrap party was a reward for playing ball, putting in an all-nighter, doing the studio a solid, looking away from what shouldn’t be seen.
Darlia led him to a higher level behind a red velvet rope guarded by two weightlifters in tuxedoes. The rope, somehow, was enough to shield studio executives, money people, and B- and C-list actors whose faces Chris knew he was supposed to recognize. Darlia took him to a corner table. A woman stood up to meet them. She was instantly recognizable, with her quixotic smile and wraparound shades. Darlia pecked at the older woman’s high cheekbones. Making sure the cameras were ready, Darlia nudged Chris, shooting him a look sharp enough to cut glass. Chris leaned in to kiss the proffered cheek of the icon before him. A bona fide movie star. The cameras snapped the moment. Thomson Holmes with his long, lank arms around the shoulders of Darlia and a slightly wizened replica of Thelma — or had she been Louise?
RACHEL APPEARED, SAID SOMETHING to Darlia, who handed Chris off to her with a grateful smile that looked like a wince. Rachel led them to a nook in the back where they sat in relative darkness only very occasionally penetrated by someone asking to take their picture or just simply taking their picture. But that segment of the party was mostly over now. It was getting toward midnight, and things were loud, louder — supplicating laughter suffusing the DJ’s soundtrack with wishful mania. Reed had made a brief speech, perhaps the only genuine aspect of the wrap party turned carefully staged spectacle. While Reed talked, Chris searched the fringes of the gathering for Frankie and his gang, but they were nowhere to be seen. “In this film,” Reed had said, “Thomson Holmes utterly transforms himself. You will not believe your eyes. He turns himself into the most soulful, tormented, fascinating character I have ever had the privilege of bringing into the world.” The applause had been perfunctory, many in the audience busy frantically broadcasting bastardized variations of Reed’s comments over their complex array of electronic networks. Reed ended by urging the gathered crowd to get excited about the picture, because it was the real thing. “The real thing,” Reed had repeated gravely before tottering off to the bar where he took the stool next to the German, both facing short glasses glinting with brown liquor, their backs to the crowd.
Rachel talked, pointing out people she knew and people she knew of. Chris nodded along, but he was tired and thought that he’d stayed long enough. He glanced around, nervously tugging at his jacket lapels.
Rachel raced into an update. She hadn’t gotten any of the parts yet. Several auditions were coming up next month. Her agent had engaged a private acting coach. There was so much competition! But she was staying positive. “The only thing” — here Rachel lowered her voice. Chris saw that her hand, perfectly manicured and topped with glazed nails, was now over his. “Money is a bit — I wouldn’t normally ask. God this is awkward. Do you think that —”
There was a sudden surge of excitement, phones in the direction of the door. “It’s Clooney,” he heard someone say.
Then came a disembodied reply: “Ah, shit, George the Bore!”
“Is he?” Chris wondered. “Is he boring?”
“Excuse me,” Reed said, his heavy hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Can I borrow him? I promise, I’ll bring him right back.”
At first, Chris thought they were heading toward an introduction — George the Bore — but instead Reed led him hurriedly through the swinging doors next to the bar, through the kitchen, down a greasy hallway, and out a side door into an alley.
The alley, lit only by the deflected streetlights of Sunset Boulevard, was intimately familiar to waiter Chris. Another alley reeking of cigarette butts and the not-so-faint odour of urine. Reed pulled out a fat cigar and his silver lighter. His hand shook, and the flame danced around the end of the stogie, haphazardly singeing the leafy skin and illuminating bits and pieces of Reed’s Caligari-like expression — darkness shadowing a scowl trying to be a grin.
“Here. Let me.” Chris took the lighter and carefully raised the flame. Reed drew in. The cigar glowed red. Reed’s lunatic scowl steadied. Chris thought of a car’s red brake lights disappearing into the night. The tender scenes he’d watched with the director. Boy Lost Expert and his harried mother. Long takes of clouds slowly turning from silver to grey and back again. The car far below, alone on an empty road bordered by blurred forest. Faded banquette seats at a diner. It’s just you and me now, kid. Close-up of a holy mess of pancakes overloaded with sundae sauce and whipped cream. We’ll be okay. Won’t we?
“Goddamn parties.” Reed’s voice cracked, and he coughed a bit as he exhaled sweet, rotten smoke. “But you’re doing good, Holmes. Real good.”
Was he?
Reed took off his Penguins cap. He ran his hands over his greasy scalp. Then he put the dirty cap back on. Chris wasn’t crazy about this weakened, anxious version of Reed. It was like Krunk in his rare moments of doubt, those end-of-month times when they were both totally broke and his friend was on the verge of being summoned to the unemployment office to discuss his job search and his chronically unsubstantiated claim that chronic back pain prevented him from most forms of labour. “Ah, what’s the point,” his friend would say, looking down at what was left of his black work boots, the steel toes scuffed and exposed. “Why even bother?”
“Oh, yeah, here,” Reed said, suddenly animated, his voice weirdly controlled — another first, he was neither stage-whispering nor bellowing. Reed produced a half-size bottle from somewhere inside his frayed sports jacket. “We’ll have a toast.” He handed the clear glass bottle to Chris for inspection. It had no label obscuring its yellow brine, just a protruding cork sealed with blood-red wax.
“Smuggled it out,” Reed said. “Tequila. Aged forty years. The best in the world. You can only buy it locally, and even then it’s like Fort Knox. They only sell to gangsters and presidentes — like there’s a difference.” Reed giggled at his joke.
“Huh,” Chris said. “I’ve never had really good tequila.”
“Ha! Funny! I’m not kidding around! This’ll make that swill you and Jackson brew at that place in Cabo taste like bilgewater.”
“Ha, yeah,” Chris clucked. From another voluminous fold, Reed produced two shot glasses. “But maybe we could take a rain check? I’m kinda — exhausted.” Chris said the last part hopefully.
Reed was ripping at the wax. “It’s just one shot.”
The cork fell away. Reed kicked at it with his battered sneaker. Chris lost sight of it in the detritus of the cracked pavement.
“Here, hold these —”
Reluctantly, Chris palmed the two shot glasses. Hand shaking so violently he had to use one fat paw to steady the other, Reed poured, spilling liberally. The liquid felt thick on Chris’s fingers, treacly, cold and warm at the same time. Chris tasted sour moving up his stomach to his throat.
“Reed,” he tried again. “I’m really tired. Could we maybe —”
“Shit, Holmes. It’s just one drink. You gotta try this stuff. We’re celebrating!”
His pleading eyes, dull and rheumy in the gloom.
“You know, Holmes. What we had. What we did. That was special. You know that, right? I mean, you were it. The real thing. The best I’ve ever seen.”
Reed was sloshing his drink around, half of it already spilled.
“To us!” Reed bellowed loudly. “The real thing! To fucking us! You and fucking me!”
Chris closed his eyes and drank.
“Ah!” Reed smacked his lips. “Good stuff, huh?” He nodded to himself and threw his shot glass against the alley’s bricks. “Good stuff!”
“Jesus, Reed!”
Chris leaned against the brick wall. The liquid had gone down with a burn, but he hadn’t really tasted it. He was just so tired. The darkness pressed in. The smells of the alley thick and tangible. Reed puffed pensively on his cigar. Chris, watching him, sensed more than he felt an onrushing dizziness — the wavering red tip of Reed’s cigar starting to circle, to appear in many points of an orbit, as if he was back at the planetarium, a high school sophomore tripping on acid, Dark Side of the Moon pumping through the speakers, Krunk giggling. Chris narrowed his eyes, trying to regain focus. He swallowed, urgently repressing the need to throw up.
“… maybe it was worth it,” Reed was saying. “Maybe it was all for a reason.”
“What?” Chris managed. “What was worth it?”
Reed drew on his cigar again, exhaling with a grimace. “All the fucking carnage. All the dead. The ovens. The goddamn ovens. My mother. She never got over it, really. I owe them, Holmes. You know what I mean? I owe them!”
Reed threw his arm around Chris’s shoulders. How? Chris wanted to ask. How could it have been worth it? Reed drew him down and continued in a sombre voice.
“You don’t deserve all this video shit. Or maybe you do. Fuck. I don’t know! All I know is you aren’t like that anymore. You’re someone else now. People need to know that. They need to know that the person in this movie is different. You know what I’m saying, Holmes? I’m done, Holmes. I’m done. It’s my last one. It’s my last movie.”
Reed released him.
Chris staggered forward. His legs buckled. Reed grabbed him and held him up, his cigar tip a neon spasm in the dark night.
“I love you, man,” Reed whispered.
Nauseated, Chris pushed off the director’s barrel chest. With no other intention than to get away, he staggered down the alley toward the street.
Script 24
EXT. EMPTY URBAN PARK, BEAUTIFUL SUNNY DAY
An eight-year-old GIRL slowly sways on a rusted swing set. Her shoulder-length straight blond hair flounces gently in the breeze. The girl is dressed in the style of the day, with a blue dress, dark stockings covered by a double-breasted frock coat. The cloudless azure sky sparkles under a cheery sun. A jay lands in an adjacent tree. The girl swings, and though her expression is neutral, there is the sense of loss about her, as if she doesn’t know exactly where she is or where she will go next.
