The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (18 page)

It wasn't long after I arrived that I got hooked on the smoke and ended up selling my movie for a ridiculously low price in order to get high one night. An elegantly thin cricket gave me ten crystal chips for it, and I spent the next three days dozing and smoking at Spid's. When my credit ran out, and a few hours passed, I came to and began to panic. That was how I became Stootladdle's flunky.

“How do you feel about living?” he asked me when the Beetle Squad brought me to his office. I had been caught on the street trying to score a turd without the proper papers. Even in my orange haze, I was surprised they hadn't plugged me.

“Tomorrow is another day,” I said to him.

“I'm going to slap you around and you're going to like it,” he said. Then he did, all those arms working me over at once. The blows were like a stinging swarm of locust and the nano-technology, true to its guarantee, registered every one. When I was thoroughly dazed, he gave a little jump in the air and kicked me right in the nuts, or where they would have been if the suit makers had bothered to render them. I fell forward and he caught me with his mandibles by the neck.

“I've got a spot for you in my private collection right between Omar Sharif and Annette Funicello,” he said.

I promised I'd do anything he wanted if he let me live. He loosened his grip and I stood, rubbing my throat. He laughed loud and long, the sound of teeth scraping concrete, and he put two of his arms around me.

“Now, Joseph,” he said, “I have a little job for you to do.”

“Anything,” I said.

Stootladdle waved away the Beetle Squad, and I was left alone with him in his office. He sat down at his desk and triple motioned for me to take the chair across from him.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

I looked into his eyes and saw myself nodding ad infinitum.

“Yes,” he said. “Very well. Have you ever heard of a film called
The Rain Does Things Like That
?”

“Will it go badly for me if I haven't?” I asked.

He laughed. “It will go badly for you no matter what,” he said.

“No,” I admitted.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “I saw this movie once, years and years ago, very early on in our trade relationship with your planet.”

“How is it?” I asked.

“It's the butterfly's dust,” he said.

“If it's that good, how come I never heard of it?” I asked.

“The actors were unknown, but I tell you there is a young woman in it named Gloriette Moss, who is nothing less than startling. It's a love story. Poignant,” said Stootladdle, scratching his hairy stomach.

“I'll have to catch it some time,” I said.

“No, Joseph,” he said, “you're going to catch it now. The only copy of the film on the planet resides out in the luminous veldt with the widow of Ambassador Lancaster. His widow, who still lives out there on the estate, is none other than Gloriette Moss. I've tried to buy the movie from her for my collection, but she refuses to sell. It was her husband's favorite film because she starred in it. Sentimental value, as you earthlings say. I want that movie.”

“Why don't you just send out the Beetle Squad and take it?” I asked.

“Too delicate a situation,” he said. “She has ties to Earth's military. How would it look if we started roughing up an ex-ambassador's wife? It could interrupt our thriving trade.”

“If you send me back to Earth, I'll tell them to make her give you the film,” I said.

“Ready for another beating, I see,” he said. “No, I want you to go out there and get it for me. I don't care how you get it short of stealing it, but I want it. You can not harm her. She must willingly give it to you and then you will give it to me and I will let you live.”

“How am I going to do that?” I asked.

“Your charm, Joseph. Remember how you were in
The Third Man
, bumbling yet sincere, but altogether charming?” he said.

I nodded.

“Succeed or suffer a slow, painful death.”

“I think I hear zither music,” I said.

Stootladdle put his slackey (like an ancient rickshaw conveyance) and driver, an ill-tempered termite, at my disposal for the trip out of town. Once beyond the dim glow of the streetlights of Exo-town, things got really dark. Our only guide was the ragged moon all jumbled and bashed. The driver kept complaining about the pests, miniscule mammals with gossamer wings, bats the size of Earth mosquitos, that traveled in clouds and stung viciously. He at least had a few extra appendages at his disposal with which to keep them away. I was frightened of him, frightened of the dark and my grim future, but the thing that scared me more than anything was the thought of going without the smoke for more than a day. The mayor had assured me that Gloriette Moss was a smoke fiend herself and had her own setup, keeping a huge supply on hand of whatever that stuff is that one burns to make it. I prayed he wasn't playing with me on this score. He said that the reason she never went back to Earth was because she was hooked.

After a jostling, potholed, nightmare of a journey, we came in sight of the luminous veldt—an immense pasture of long windblown grass that glowed against the dark with the resilient yellow-green of cat's eyes. The light from it eased my fear and its slow ocean movement was very relaxing. In the face of its beauty, I almost forgot my predicament. The driver turned onto a path that cut through the grass, and we traveled for another mile or so with me in a kind of stupor.

“Out, earthworm,” he said, and I came suddenly to my senses.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is it,” he said. “Get out.”

“Where is the Lancaster estate?” I asked.

“Look,” he said, and pointed out with three of his arms that we were at a crossroad of paths. The grass was high over our heads.

“Take that path. Up there a way, you'll see an Earth house. I can't take you any farther. If the lady sees me, she'll know you have come because of Stootladdle.”

“Thanks,” I said as I got down from the slackey.

“May maggots infest your nostrils,” he said. Then he turned the hitch around and was gone.

There I was, Cotten, three light-years from Earth, on a bug planet of perpetual night. The stars were brilliant above me, but I did not look up for fear of the loneliness and recrimination I might feel at seeing the sun, a blinking dot in the distance. I thought of my parents, thinking of me, wondering what had become of me, and I saw my old man, shaking his head and saying, “That jerk-off took my movie.”

The Lancaster house was a creaky old retro affair from the part of Earth's history when they used wood to build dwellings. I'd seen pictures of these things before. The style, as I had read in one of my many film books, was Victorian. These baroque shelters with lace-like woodwork and myriad rooms were always popping up in the flicks from the thirties and forties. Pointed rocket-ship-looking turrets on either side of a big three-story box with a railed platform that went all the way around it. As I made my way toward the steps that led to a door, I quickly, out of desperation, mind-wrote the script for the next scene.

I knocked once, twice, three times, and waited, hoping the lady of the house was home. There was no way I would ever make it to Exo-town on my own. Eventually the door pulled back and a young woman appeared behind an inner screen door.

“Can I help you?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“I'm lost,” I said. “I wandered away from town, hoping to see the luminous veldt, and although I've found it, I don't think I can return. Something has been chasing me through the tall grass. I'm scared and tired.” Having said this, I had a feeling my words had come out too stiffly to be believed.

She opened the screen door and looked at me. “Joseph Cotten?” she said.

I nodded and looked as forlornly as possible.

“You poor man,” she said, and motioned for me to enter.

As I crossed the threshold, it became clear to me that old Joe was on the job. If it had been only me, she most likely would have locked the door and called the Beetle Squad, but since it was Cotten, the consummate professional of ingratiating
Third Man
haplessness, she immediately felt my pain.

Inside the bowels of the old Victorian, standing on an elaborately designed rug, amidst the spiraled wooden furniture, in the face of an ancient stand-up clock, I took in the beauty of Gloriette Moss. Stootladdle knew his film, because here was obvious star quality in the supernova range—an exotic hybrid of the young Audrey Hepburn and the older Hayley Mills. She was this and more than this, with a midlength blonde wave, a face so fresh and innocent, a smile that was straight grace until the corners curled into mischief. She wore a simple, cobalt-blue dress and no shoes. She was Jean Seberg with hair, Grace Kelly minus the affectation.

“I rarely have visitors now that my husband has passed away,” she said, her hands clasped behind her back.

“Sorry to trouble you,” I said. “I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here into the wilderness on my own.”

“It's no trouble, really,” she said. “I rather enjoy the idea of company.”

“Well, just let me get my bearings and I'll be off,” I said, and though I spoke this plainly, I could feel Cotten creating a look of half-hidden dejection.

“Nonsense,” she said. “You've come all this way to see the veldt. You can't go back to town by yourself, you're lucky you made it here alive. There are things in the grass, you know. Things that would just as soon eat you.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I had come all the way from Earth to scout locations for a film about the bug planet. I'm thinking of reviving the art of cinema back on the home world, and I thought what better place to make a movie than the only place in the universe where movies are still appreciated for their art and not how much freasence they will bring.”

“That's wonderful,” she said, her face brightening more than ever. “Stay here with me for a while and I will show you the veldt. This house has so many empty rooms.”

“Are you sure I won't be putting you out?” I asked.

“Please,” she said. “I'll have my man show you upstairs and get you situated.”

I began to speak, but she said, “I'll hear nothing to the contrary,” and that ancient, elegant phrase, issuing from that smooth face made me weak.

“Vespatian,” she called out, and a moment later a pale green grasshopper as tall as me, dressed in a black short-coat and trousers, appeared at the entrance to a hallway leading left.

“We have a visitor,” she said. “Mr. Cotten will be staying for a time. See him to the large room on the third floor, the one with the view of the veldt.”

“As you wish, madame,” said the bug with the obsequious air of a David Niven. “This way, sir.”

As I was delivered to the door of an upstairs room, Vespatian informed me that dinner would be at eight. I thanked him and he gave a pained sigh before deftly spinning and walking away.

The minute I was in my room, I became the Cotten of
Shadow of a Doubt
. I laid down on the bed, a view of the glowing waves of grass out beyond the floor-to-ceiling window making it feel as though I were on a ship sailing a sea of light, and began to scheme.

At dinner, we ate charbroiled centipede steaks and sipped at fermented roach mucous from fine crystal Earth goblets. I'd always thought if I had the money, I'd bring pizza to the bug planet, but that is something else again.

“Now, Joseph,” said Gloriette. “I know you from your films, but I bet you have never heard of me before.”

“But I have,” I said, taking a chance of revealing too much. “I've never seen it, but anyone interested in film knows of
The Rain Does Things Like That
. After meeting you, I can now see why it is such a cult classic.”

She laughed like a girl and then as suddenly a look of sorrow came over her. “My husband, the great Burt Lancaster, loved that movie,” she said. “That is all that is important to me about it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was sorry to hear about the ambassador when I arrived from Earth.”

“He was a great man,” she said, and the nano-technology produced delicate tears true to her obvious feelings.

We ate then in silence. I dared not speak and interrupt the memories clearly she was reliving. She sat motionless for some time, a piece of centipede on her fork, staring down at the table.

When I finished, I quietly got up and left the dining room. I went to bed and tried to sleep, but now that my situation was fixed and the nervous tension generated from an uncertain fate had worn off, my desire for the smoke began to scratch at my brain. I was so strung out I thought I smelled it wafting about my room. It became impossible to lay still any longer, and I got up and paced. There came a death scream of some prey from out on the veldt, punctuating the ambient drone of crickets. I let myself out of the room and quietly snuck downstairs.

I crept through the darkened house from room to room, wondering at all of the twentieth-century gewgaws that lined the shelves. The ambassador, it was evident, was a real fan of ancient Earth. Then, I truly did smell the smoke, and at the same time saw a light coming from a room at the end of a long hallway on the first floor. As I approached, I heard soft music—Ella Fitzgerald, I believe. At the entrance, I looked in and saw Gloriette sitting on a couch. Before her on a low table were a huge bottle of the concoction we had at dinner, a full glass, and a smoke pot, smoldering away, the orange mist hovering about the room. The long tube from the pot draped down and then up beneath her dress, between her open legs.

At that moment, she turned and saw me. Her half-opened eyes registered no alarm or embarrassment. She smiled, now much older than before, a smile devoid of mirth.

“Smoke?” she asked.

“If I may,” I said twitching inside my exo-suit.