There's Something I Want You to Do (21 page)

—

When he bothered to turn to his right, he noted that a silhouette had materialized next to him, the famous outline of the old filmmaker encased in layers of fat. The director’s sadness and loneliness drifted up from his bulk like a corpulent mist in the still air. In his right hand he held a ghost cigar that produced ghost smoke. He wore a spotless dinner jacket, although he gave the impression of having been in the park for years, sitting there exposed to the elements. “I was wondering who it would be this time,” Dr. Jones said. “But somehow I never expected to see you of all people here. Didn’t they let you in? To heaven, or whatever they’re calling it now…?”

“Good evening,” the director said, bending slightly toward Dr. Jones out of a habitually polite formality. His voice had the familiar sonorous rumble, mixed with audible memories of his Cockney upbringing. His face had an odd phosphores
cence. “No, they didn’t let me in. Not as yet. The rules are quite complex, you see. One must wait. There are pages of rules written with blood mixed in ink, thick volumes of these rules stretching from the floor to the ceiling, which is way up
there,
so high that no applicant has actually seen it. You can’t imagine a room without a visible ceiling, and yet it must exist. Spiritual exercises are required, of a sort not dreamed of by the Jesuits of my youth. Those Jesuits would whip a boy’s upraised hands, palms out, to intensify the pain. They enjoyed cruelty, some of those Jesuits,” the old man said, with a trace of envy mixed with bitterness. “They were very clever in those days: they liked the boys to cower. They
quite
enjoyed it. It is a form of control, you understand, to cause someone to cower in fear. Fear supplied the voltage of their faith, and fear became their métier. So I was trained by masters. But as it turns out, one has to overcome…c
ertain tendencies. As at one time I was a director, now I am directed. Tell me, have you ever thought about suspense?”

“Your specialty,” the doctor said.

“Yes, once.” The director nodded sadly, out of a bottomless melancholy. “All that caring about what happens next.” He waited. “Now nothing happens next.” He took a puff from his cigar, and the exhaled smoke formed itself into the shape of a cat, which sauntered away in the night air.

“Why do they have you sitting out here, night after night? For months? Years?”

“Penitence,” the director said. “I sit in the rain and snow observing the river. But that is not our subject. We were talking about suspense.” The director looked over at Dr. Jones. “You could lose some weight,” he said with a ghostly smile. “For the lifeboat movie I invented a nonexistent weight-reduction drug, Reduco, that you might want to try. But, yes, we were talking about suspense. For example, that homeless man over there—”

“Wait a minute,” the doctor said. “How can I try Reduco if it doesn’t exist?”

“The same way that you watch a movie about people who never walked the Earth. You swallow a pill containing dreams. Please don’t interrupt. Anyway, that man who looks like a bum is actually in flight from people who are pursuing him for reasons that I shall disclose once I think of them. He is in disguise. He merely looks like a bum. Underneath the shabby clothes and three-day growth of beard is Cary Grant. Perhaps Cary Grant has possession of some secrets related to international negotiations, but I believe it is more likely—yes, indeed I can now see it—that through a case of mistaken identity our friend here was targeted as a
terrorist
guilty of terrible, malicious sabotage that resulted in the darkening of an electrical grid covering much of the north-central United States. An accused saboteur, his face in all the newspapers. Did you know how easy it is to disable a nuclear reactor? No? A few broken valves, a bit of sand…And so here he is, our bum, hiding out, disguised, on the banks of the Mississippi River, accompanied by his grocery cart and bag of aluminum cans. But over there, just upstream, a mile away from where we sit, the true terrorist, whom we shall call the Arab, approaches, gripping his knife, intent on murder.” The old man paused, savoring the doctor’s interest. “The Arab approaches our scene with his knife blade out. The sharpened knife blade reflects the streetlight; it
shines.
And now misty rain begins to fall. The Arab has already killed others, in one instance just this morning at the Minneapolis Farmers Market in broad daylight, so that the victim’s blood splashed all over the cauliflower and the yellow squash. Blood splattered everywhere on the produce, quite a mess to clean up. There will be a chase across the river, through the hydroelectric plant right down there, ending in the caves far underneath us, below, the caves of the Mississippi, the
endless
caves, where the Girl is tied up. I haven’t mentioned the Girl, but she’s down there now. Imagine her: a blond beauty knotted up with hemp. Imagine the rope
tight
around her wrists and her ankles. We already know about her, don’t we? Beneath our feet resides an underground labyrinth, and there she is, our blonde. Her cries are piteous. We desire her, like oysters. An
endless
labyrinth. Cary Grant finds her, but the Arab approaches them both, with his knife. The movie will go on for days.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Well, what
does
sound like me?”

The doctor thought for a moment. “ ‘Mother…’ ” he recited. “ ‘Mother…what is the phrase?…Mother isn’t quite herself today.’ ” The director nodded. After a moment, Dr. Jones thought of another line. “ ‘And you know what else, Doctor? I don’t think Mozart is going to help at all.’ ” This time the old man’s face took on a downcast expression. The line seemed to cause him pain. “ ‘That plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops,’ ” the doctor recited more happily, getting into the spirit of things.

“Stop,” the old man commanded. “Cinema is not the writer’s medium but the director’s. All the same, none of those lines is my favorite.” He sat waiting for the doctor to ask him the inevitable question, and when the doctor did so, the director answered, “ ‘Do you know the world’s a foul sty?’ ” After a pause, he said, “
That
was my favorite line.
I
wrote it. It’s not Thornton Wilder’s line; it’s mine. Joe Cotten read it very well. Even the moronic masses got the point that time around.”

“That’s not a very nice line,” the doctor said.

The old man shrugged in response. “Fuck nice. Do you know,” he said, “that even now as we speak, your friend Benny Takemitsu is being mugged elsewhere, nearby, down by the Federal Reserve Building? The perpetrator of this crime is a young idealistic gay man who needs the money for painkilling drugs. He has assaulted this Takemitsu with a baseball bat. In the montage, the baseball bat hits the back of the knee, and we cut to Takemitsu’s face, astonished with pain. Then in a medium shot, Takemitsu falls. Then we see in an insert the assailant’s hand reaching for the victim’s wallet. Your friend will be all right, however.”

“How do you know?”

“The dead know everything,” the director said. “But such knowledge does us no good: we cannot move from our fixed positions. Approaching death and then following it, the camera cannot move. The camera must…never move. For example, you were about to ask me if I would like to walk with you back to your car, for your trip homeward. I cannot. I must stay here on this bench of desolation until my penitence and contrition are complete. I must apologize to the Girl, the one at whom I threw all those birds. I made her a star. There are others to whom I must apologize once they reach this realm. According to the rules written in blood and ink, the rules that reach to the ceiling, I must feel the apologies inwardly.
That
is the hard part, the inward contrition. With respect to inward contrition, the Jesuits are no help.”

“Why here? Why in Minneapolis?”

“The Girl was born here,” the old man said, “and one’s spirit always naturally returns to the place where one was born. For years I sat by the Thames in London. Now I’m here. I’m not always alone. Benny Herrmann sometimes comes down here to keep me company. We are reconciled, he and I. He wrote music for me. Did you know that he once lived in Minneapolis at the Nicollet Hotel, a few blocks away from here? He composed his opera,
Wuthering Heights,
a pastiche of Delius, in this city. I never liked it. Don’t tell him. However, most nights I have no company. So I make pictures in my head, as I used to do. And, now, you must leave me, Doctor. You cannot stay.”

“Mr. Hitchcock,” he asked, “will my patient die? The little one?”

“No, not this time,” the director informed him. “There will be a miraculous recovery. In fact, it has already occurred. Her heart has somehow repaired itself, no one knows how, though perhaps your initial diagnosis of damage to the valves was mistaken. Why should anyone question such a recovery, such a miracle? No one ever does. They will not. Music up. We dissolve to happy, smiling faces. Joy abounds. The end, and the final credits,” he said sourly. “Not like many of my pictures, but there you are. So for once, my dear doctor, you will have
a happy ending
. The scene in the hospital will be directed not by me but by Frank Capra. This case will bring you great renown. You will be cheered. A box-office smash hit, one might say if one were inclined to use such phrases. Henceforth you will be known as a healer with uncanny resources, like a shaman. Well, I must bid you a good night.”

At that moment, the director himself dissolved, leaving behind the odor of cigar smoke and burnt coal. What was brimstone, actually? Just another name for sulfur, with a smell to wake you up, to make your eyes open in astonishment.

—

Dr. Jones rose from the bench and jammed his hat down on his head, lowering himself against the wind as he made his way to his car. Driving home, he saw the souls of the dead wandering about the city. They seemed not to see each other. No one smiled. The dead seemed puzzled by their condition, distracted, preoccupied. They appeared to be dressed in nondescript clothes from Goodwill, although some were naked. Among them ran a few children. None of the women were pretty, or the men handsome. They were beyond all that. Some sat on park benches or stood in bus shelters next to actual living people. The dead were identifiable not because they were semitransp
arent but because they walked several inches above the ground, and they did not reflect light but radiated it, like fireflies.

If I am going mad, Dr. Jones thought, remembering Herzog, it’s all right with me.

Once in the house, he touched the play button on the kitchen’s message machine. A nurse from the hospital had called to say that Dr. Jones should phone the unit as soon as possible. Something strange and quite wonderful had happened. He trudged up the stairs feeling as if he had shed some weight.

On an impulse, instinctively negotiating his way through the nearly perfect dark, he knocked softly on his son’s door before entering. Wearing his boxer shorts, Raphael lay sprawled not under the covers but on top of them, his seventeen-year-old body giving off a sweetly rank boy’s smell, leathery and acidic like that of a horse’s stable. The clock radio blinked on the bedside table, illuminating the poster over the bed of a superhero cheesecake girl who was apparently from another planet. She aimed a weapon-thing at the viewer. Her confrontat
ional breasts pushed aggressively at her vinyl uniform. She had powerful thighs and the scowling face of an angel. Raphael’s tae kwon do awards and cups gleamed and glowed from two shelves across from the window. Dr. Jones gazed at his boy for a minute in the near dark. He could not look at his son in daylight without Raphael saying,
“What?”
So he watched him now. Minutes passed.