The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (15 page)

He hovers at the edge of the screen, reminding you that you are, after all, in Lapland, and in some sense always will be. When he smiles, his hair gleams. The smile of Alan Ladd is both tough and wounded, an effect akin to that of headlights reflected on a dark, rain-wet street in downtown Lapland, his turf, his home territory. A sick, shameful nostalgia leaks from every frame, and it is abetted, magnified, amplified by the swooning strings on the sound track. The sound track clings to you like grease. You carry it with you out of the theater, and it swells between the parked cars baking in the sunlight, indistinguishable from the sounds in your head.

His name is........................,
says Alan Ladd, whose name is Ed Adams, o
r
Johnny Morrison.
That man’s name is.....................He is known as Sli
m
Dundee and Johnny O’Clock, also....................and.....................His name
s
surround him like a cloud of flies. At the center of his names, he..................
.
and...................
A speaking shadow rises from between the parked cars
,
and you wish for it to follow you home
.

..........................,
Alan says in musical italics, coming along steadily behind. Sirens flare. A man with a gun flees into a dark, sunlit alley. The hot white stripes of headlights reflected on rainy asphalt shine and shine and shine on the street. Beneath a car further down the block, an oily shadow moves, and the name of that shadow is.....................

Forget him,
Alan says.
Forget IT.
Underneath his warm deep grainy voice, that of a tender and exhausted god, a hundred stringed instruments swoop and twirl, following its music.
Do it for my sake. If not for......sake, for mine. I know......can hear me, kid. Kiddo. Little guy.

I always liked....., did you know that?

And at night, when.......lie in the bottom bunk with your face to the onyx window, only........awake in all the house, a streak of blond hair shines in the corner of the window frame, the music stirs like the sound of death and heartbreak, and when his wounded face slips into view, he says,
A lot of this is gonna disappear forever. If you remember anything, remember that it’s.........fault..........mber that. Little guy. If you can’t remember that, remember me.

THE PETRUSHKA RESTAURANT WAS a large dim cellar, with theirs the only table occupied. Ballets Russes murals writhed dimly on the walls: exotic ghosts.

As the waiter unloaded the chilled glasses of vodka, Don Kavanagh observed, “I don’t think Russian restaurants are very popular these days.”

“That’s why we came,” Hugh Carpenter said. “Bound to get a table.”

“Don’t blame me,” said the waiter. “I’m a Londoner, born and bred.”

“Maybe there’s a good sketch there,” suggested Martha Vine, who was the ugly sister of the team. “You know, restaurants run by the wrong sort of people. Such as an Eskimo Curry House. . . . Or, wait a minute, how about a slaughterhouse for vegetables. Wait, I’ve got it, protests at
vegetable vivisection
!”

Hugh dismissed the notion, and the waiter, with the same toss of his head. The whole sparkle of their TV show relied on cultivating a blind spot for the
obvious
.

“Not quite mad enough, darling.” He cocked his head. “What’s that?”

Don listened.

“A car backfiring.”

“That many times?”

More like gunfire,” said Alison Samuels, shaking her impeccably corn-rowed red hair. She was beauty to Martha’s beast.

“So it’s somebody gunning their engine.” Hugh grinned triumphantly. “Okay, where were we?”

Soon after, sounds of crashing and breakages, a woman’s scream, and incoherent shouting came from the upstairs vestibule of the Petrushka . . .

“This isn’t one of your practical jokes, is it, Hugh?” asked Martha anxiously. “Tape recorder upstairs? Is it?”

“No, it damn well. . . .”

At that moment, two brawny men wearing lumber jackets crowded down the stairs, thrusting the waiter, who was bleeding from the mouth, and the manager and his beige-blonde receptionist ahead of them. A third man stayed up top. All three were armed with machine guns.

“Stay where you are!” The armed man’s accent was southern Irish. “You three, get to a table and sit down!”

The manager, cashier, and waiter did so, quickly.

The momentary silence that followed was broken by the approaching wail of a police siren.

“I take it,” said Hugh loudly, “that we are all hostages in yet another bungled terrorist escapade?”

“Be quiet!”

Out of the corner of his mouth, Don murmured, “
Hush.
You’re most likely to get murdered in the first few minutes. Then rapport starts building up. Just . . . meditate. Do nothing.”

“Zen and the art of being a hostage, eh?” Hugh whispered. He sat still as a Buddhist monk.

A police loudspeaker spoke, close by. . . .

“Don’t come any nearer!” cried the upstairs man. “We have hostages in here! We’ll kill them!”

Lumber jacket number two ran to the kitchen door and kicked it open. . . .

Hugh’s tongue moved inside her mouth. His finger traced the curve of her hip.

He pulled away instantly. He was naked. So was Alison. They were on the bed in his Chelsea flat. Outside was bright with June sunlight.

Alison gazed at Hugh, wide-eyed.

“But,” she managed to say.

“But we’re in the Petrushka, Alison. . . . I mean, correct me if I’m crazy, but I wasn’t aware that I’m subject to bouts of amnesia! I mean . . . how the hell did we get here? I mean, you
can
tell me, can’t you?”

“Hugh. I . . . I can’t tell you anything. We’re in the restaurant. Those IRA men are . . . at least . . . I suppose that’s what they were. But we aren’t. We’re here.”

Hugh sat up. Dumbly he stared at a newspaper lying on the yellow shag-piled carpet.

The headline was: Petrushka Siege Ends Peacefully.

He read the story, hardly understanding it. But he understood the accompanying photograph of himself with his arm wrapped round Alison’s shoulders, both of them grinning and waving.

“Just look at the date! June, the
ninth
. This is next week’s newspaper.”

“So we’re in the middle of next week.” Alison began to laugh hysterically, then with deliberate irony she slapped her own cheek. “I must remember this trick next time I visit the dentist’s. . . . Why can’t either of us remember a bloody thing?”

“I wish I could remember us making love.”

Alison started to dress.

“I always wanted us to get into bed,” Hugh went on. “It was one of my big ambitions. I suppose it still is! We must have been celebrating our freedom. Our release. . . .

“Gas,”
he decided suddenly. “That’s it. They must have used some new kind of psychochemical to knock everybody unconscious or confuse us. This is a side effect.”

He studied the newspaper more carefully.

“Doesn’t say a thing about gas. It says the police talked the gunmen out. I suppose you can muzzle the press a little . . . no, this was all too public. The story has to be true as written.”

His telephone rang.

Hugh hurried naked into the next room to take the call.

Alison was sitting at the dressing table, concentrating on braiding her hair, when he returned. He noticed how she was trembling. His own body felt hollow and his skin was covered with goose bumps, though the air was warm.

“That was Don. He . . . he reacted very rationally, for a clown. He’s in the same fix we are. After Don hung up, I tried to phone Martha. But I can’t get through. All the lines are jammed. I tried to phone the police. I even tried to call . . . I tried to call the goddamn talking clock. Can’t get it either. Everybody is phoning to find out what the bloody time is! It isn’t just us, Alison. It’s got nothing specifically to do with the Petrushka. It’s everybody.”

“Where’s your radio? Switch it on.”

“Kitchen.”

Hugh fled, still naked, and she followed his bouncing rump.

A punk rock band was singing:

. . . they’ll bomb yer boobs!

they’ll bomb yer brains!

they’ll bomb yer bums!

The song faded.

The deejay said, “You’ve just heard the latest track from The Weasels. Hot stuff, eh? Like,
radio-
active . . . and that’s what a radio’s supposed to be: active. So I’m carrying straight on, even if you’re all as confused as I am. That’s right, loyal listeners, none of us here in the studio has any idea how we got here today. Or how it
got
to be today. But if you’re all feeling the way I’m feeling, I’ve got this word of advice for you: stay cool, and carry on doing what you’re doing. Keep on trucking that truck. Keep the traffic moving. Cook the lunch, Ma Jones, and don’t set fire to the pan— the kids’ll be soon home. And now to help you all, here comes a track from an old group, Traffic. It’s called ‘In a Chinese Noodle Factory.’. . .”

Hugh turned across the dial. One station had simply gone off the air; on others only music was being broadcast.

“Try short-wave,” urged Alison. “Abroad.”

When he picked up a gabbled French-language broadcast from Cairo, he realized that whatever had happened, had maybe happened worldwide.

Before the end of June, and during July and August, the effect repeated itself a dozen times. None of the subsequent “breaks” lasted as long as the first one had. Some swallowed up two or three days, and others only a few hours. But there was no sign that they were winding down.

Nor was there any conceivable explanation.

Nor could people get used to having their lives repeatedly broken at random.

For this was not simply like fainting or falling asleep. When awareness resumed—and who could promise that it would, next time?—all the world’s activities were found to have flowed on as usual. Airplanes had jetted to and fro between London and New York. Contracts had been signed, and babies born. Newspapers had been printed—and the newsdealers’ cry of “Read all about it!” was now an imperative, for how else could anyone find out in detail what had happened? A woman would find herself locked in a jail cell, but the police would have to consult their records before they could break the news to her that she had murdered, say, her husband—which raised strange new questions about guilt and innocence. . . .

Distressing it was, indeed, to find oneself suddenly at the controls of a jumbo jet heading in to land at an unexpected airport, or lying in a hospital bed after a mysterious operation, or running down a street . . . for what reason?

“What if we find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear war, with all the sirens wailing?” asked Alison. “I can’t stand it. It’s driving me mad.” She poured herself another glass of gin.

“It’s driving everybody mad,” said Don. They were in Hugh’s flat. “It’s like that old Chinese torture.”

“Which, the water dripping down on your skull till it wears a hole in it?”

“No, I mean the Death of a Thousand Cuts. I always wondered if the poor victims died from loss of blood. But it must have been from the accumulated shock. One painful shock after another. One, you could survive. A dozen, you could survive. But a thousand? Never! That’s what’ll destroy the human race. This is the Life of a Thousand Cuts.”

“Good heavens,” said Hugh, “you’ve got it.” He rubbed his hands briskly. “
Cuts!
That’s brilliant.”

“It means we’re like robots,” Don went on, ignoring him. “We don’t
need
consciousness. We don’t need to be aware. A bird isn’t aware. But that doesn’t stop it from courting and raising young and migrating. Actually, it helps. No swallow with self-awareness would bother flying all the way to the tip of South Africa and back every year.”

“Do you mean we’ve evolved too much self-awareness, and it’s a dead end?” asked Alison.

“And now we’re going to become robots again, and the world will run a lot more smoothly. But we won’t know it. Any more than a sparrow or a mouse knows. They just
are
. Martha, you mentioned nuclear war. But have you realized how smoothly the Arms Limitation Talks are going all of a sudden?”

“That’s because both sides are more scared of an accident than they’ve ever been.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve been checking back. All the significant advances have occurred during breaks.” Don chuckled softly. “Breakthroughs, during breaks! And remember, too, that the Petrushka siege ended peacefully—during a break.”

“During a cut,” Hugh corrected him.

“The Petrushka thing could so easily have ended in a bloody shoot-out, with the restaurant being stormed. But it didn’t happen that way. . . .”

Don was driving his red Metro along the elevated section of the motorway into Central London, in fast heavy traffic. Some distance behind, a Volkswagen failed to overtake a large tractor-trailer. The tractor-trailer rammed it, skidding and jackknifing. As following traffic slammed into the wreckage, a ball of flame rose up.

“Bloody hell!” Don glanced at the calendar watch he had thought to equip himself with in the aftermath of the first break, before stocks ran out. “Two days, this time.”

Alison was sitting next to him. Hugh was in the back seat. No sign of Martha. He hoped she was still alive.

“For Christ’s sake, get us
off
here!” begged Alison. “It’s a death trap.”

“More like a bloody buffalo stampede! Why don’t the idiots slow down?”

Somehow, Don reached the next exit ramp safely. The ramp was crowded with vehicles descending. Horns blared. Fenders and bumpers scraped and banged.

“Mustn’t forget what we were talking about,” Hugh reminded him, over his shoulder. “The life of a Thousand Cuts.”

“There’ll be a thousand cuts in the paintwork of this baby. . . .”

“Stop at the nearest pub, Don. We have to talk before we lose the continuity.”

“About cuts,” said Hugh, cradling a double Scotch.

The bar of the Duke of Kent was packed, but remarkably hushed as people waited for the filler music on the landlord’s radio to stop, and the first hastily assembled news to take its place. Many people were not drinking at all, but merely waiting.

“You mentioned the Death of a Thousand Cuts, and of course, those were cuts in the flesh with a knife. But what do
we
mean by cuts?”