She went away smiling. I asked him why he'd come. The plane was still climbing, and before he answered we broke through the clouds into the pure blue of thousands of feet high.
"We were lovers once."
"You and Phil?"
He looked at me and touched my hand a moment. "He wasn't gay, Weber. Only wanted to know what it was like. Remember when I went out there to do Midnight Too with him? We were together a couple of days. Nothing special, just warm for me and new for him. He didn't like it very much, but I wasn't surprised."
Although I knew he was gay because we'd discussed it, Wyatt appeared straight. There'd been a bad scene in our group once when a woman fell in love with him and he didn't reciprocate. He told me sickness had replaced gender anyway in his life, that when you get cancer and they're sticking things in you or cutting them out, it's hard feeling sexy.
"Are you shocked, Weber?"
"Sure. It's interesting, too. You think you know your friends but you don't."
"Maybe I shouldn't have told you, especially now."
"No, I'm glad you did, Wyatt. One of the reasons I'm going to California is to find out why Phil shot himself. Until yesterday, I didn't think that was him either. Would you mind telling me about what happened between you two?"
"He thought I was funny, and I thought he was a genius. A mutual admiration society. We talked on the set; then we went out for something to eat after. You know the end. The strange thing was, I didn't come on to him at all. I told him I was gay and no big deal. He kept asking questions about it, so I answered them. I don't believe that deep in his heart, every hetero man is secretly gay and only waiting for the right moment to jump out and admit it to the world. Some are and some aren't. Phil wasn't gay, only curious. Curious about everything. That's why he was such an interesting man."
"If he wasn't gay, why were you together two days? Wouldn't one night have been enough?"
"Not for Phil. He wanted to know as much as he could."
To be as successful with children as Wyatt had been, you had to have the wonder and openness of a child. When I told him the story of the day before, including the experience with the magical videotapes that played back my history and fast-forwarded to Sasha's future, he only shook his head and grunted. He asked if Phil had sent anything else. I took "Mr. Fiddlehead" out of my bag and handed it to him.
"What's this?"
"A short story. Sasha said it was going to be his next project."
"I can read it?"
"Are there more things you're not telling me?"
He looked at the story in his hand. "Let me read this first." He took the famous Finky glasses out of his pocket and put them on. The tough-looking pig on the motorcycle with the wheels holding the glass? Those.
While he read, I looked out the window and thought about Phil, then about my mother. Wyatt chuckled a couple of times. Once he looked up and said, "Phil must have written this. I can hear him telling it. You're obviously Mr. Fiddlehead."
"Why? My red hair and green eyes?"
"Partly. Let me finish."
Phil dead. Phil sleeping with Wyatt. Phil writing "Mr. Fiddlehead." The plane bumped up and down and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light came on.
"I don't understand the end."
"What's not to understand?"
"What does it mean?" He started reading from the manuscript. "'Thin artistic fingers. Freckles. Fiddy and I were in a dazzle and knew it. He turned out the light again. Blood was rushing into my head, and I hoped I wasn't glowing in the dark. I started to hate him. I felt like blaming him for something that hadn't happened yet.'"
I took that manuscript from Wyatt and looked at it. The new sentences he'd read were on the page: words that hadn't been there when I'd originally read the story a few hours before.
"The story I read ended with the word 'freckles.' These last lines are new since then."
"Did Phil ever tell you about Pinsleepe?"
"Wyatt, did you hear what I said? This story's grown since this morning!"
"I heard. Do you know about Pinsleepe?"
I shook my head. The world was too much with me, and how.
A week before he died, Phil came to New York. Usually when he came it was an Indianapolis 500 of speeding around to all his favorite places and people. He didn't like the city but he loved what was in it, so his trips were manic, albeit infrequent. He liked his friends to get together: to have big rowdy dinners in restaurants where sensational or peculiar people told long stories that held the table in thrall.
The last time was different. He contacted only two people, Danny James and Wyatt Leonard. The rest of his friends and fans – the rare book dealers, a dinosaur specialist at Columbia, the vegetable chef at Benihana, me – knew nothing of this visit.
From what Wyatt and Danny pieced together, he stayed at the Pierre Hotel and spent most of his time traveling in and out of town, destination unknown. Both were surprised when he called and said he was there, shocked when they saw him. Danny thought he looked very ill, Wyatt that he was deranged.
"You know that crazy look people get when they're caught in a flash photograph? That was Phil's expression the whole time we were together. He was very relaxed and soft-spoken, but his eyes had the hysterical look of someone who's just seen death. Or a glimpse of ourselves in some hideous future situation. We walked around, went out to dinner, and talked for hours, but the look stayed. It scared me."
"Did you ask him what was wrong?"
"Finky Linky wants a drinky. Does Weber want a drinky too? Yes, I asked what was wrong. We were sitting in the Four Seasons eating lobster. He asked if I ever read W. H. Auden. Yes, I read Auden. Then did I know the line, 'We are lived by powers we pretend to understand'? He was taking these incredibly long, slow-motion bites, all very elegant and calm, but his eyes were those of a man about to be shot. W. H. Auden. I said, 'That doesn't answer my question, Phil. What's the matter with you?'"
Pinsleepe was the matter.
There's an old Jewish legend that says before it's born, a child knows all the secrets of the universe. But as it's being born, an angel touches it on the mouth to make it forget. According to Wyatt Leonard, Phil believed before he died he had rediscovered those secrets, but not from within – from the Angel Pinsleepe.
"Once he started describing her and what had happened, I couldn't stop him. It was like he'd been waiting for someone to talk to about her.
"I know about 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' That's where Pinsleepe first showed up. Phil told me he'd had the idea for the story a long time ago and once in a while thought about writing it as a script. When he was in Yugoslavia filming, he began it because he was bored down there. He wrote two pages, but then there was a problem with the Yugoslav authorities or something, so he put the script down and forgot about it.
"Cut to California, a few months later. He's going through the papers he worked on in Yugoslavia and comes across five pages of a short story entitled 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' He remembered writing two pages of a film script with the same name. He reads these five pages and gets scared. It's the same plot he had in mind for his movie, only this is a short story, and what's there is more than what he'd written.
"He tells me all this between leisurely bites of lobster and glances from these high octane speed-freak eyes.
"Finding the short story was bad enough, but then he had his first vision. You know what it was? Flea getting killed. He saw her running out into the road and not being hit by a car but shot by some loony, joyriding in the canyon. In this vision, he knew what day it would happen, what time, even the make of the car and the face of the crazy. He also knew this was no bullshit and he'd better heed the warning. So the time it was to happen, he locked Flea in, went out of the house, and waited in the driveway. Along comes the white Toyota with the Woody Woodpecker decal on the side. The driver slowed in front of Phil's house and looked at him. Phil said the guy had such a strange expression it looked like he knew he'd somehow been cheated out of his dog to kill."