"You're an angel, Pinsleepe? Then show me. Fly. Or do a miracle. Angels can –"
She held up a hand for quiet, then lowered it to her distended belly. Beneath those small fingers it began to grow transparent. Healthy skin color faded in a moment to skin of glass. Inside, and easy to see, curled in on itself but showing enough face to make out, was a fetus with long brown hair: a tiny unborn Sasha Makrianes.
"Sasha and I are pregnant with each other, Weber. Whoever gives birth first, lives. Only the baby dies."
"Why? What does Sasha have to do with Phil? She doesn't even know where the baby came from! Is it his?"
"No. It came with her cancer. Both are wrong and unnatural things, but so was Phil's death. Both are a result of his suicide.
"I came to tell him that. To tell him the films and his whole life had gone too far. There is a human balance, and there are extremes. It's different for everyone, but then you reach your limit.
"If you go beyond that, the greed explodes like a bomb in all directions. Look what happened to those children in Florida. Then what happened to Matthew Portland. The same thing is happening to Sasha. It's all Phil's fault. If he'd stopped after the first warning, I think it would have been all right. But he didn't. He did those other things and then he killed himself. Maybe he thought that was the only way he could stop his greed. But I kept telling him he was responsible for what he did. Always. Now that he's dead, someone else has to be."
two
"So what do you want?"
"Nothing but thunder."
1
I remember exactly where I began writing "Mr. Fiddlehead." Only it had a different title then: "Pinsleepe."
That's right. That's something Weber will probably never know, and she'll certainly never tell him: The film was to be a slice of my childhood, like a slice of pizza when you're a kid and can't afford a whole pie. I had been using little bits all along in the Midnight films, but "Pinsleepe" was going to be the biggest. I got the idea when I was working on the video for Vitamin D.
One night at dinner with Victor Dixon, lead guitarist of the group, we ended up talking about our childhoods. Victor told me he knew a woman who'd spent her adult life illustrating her childhood because it had been so traumatic.
I asked if he thought much about his own. His answer put "Pinsleepe " in my hand.
"Yeah, kind of, man. I was one of those lonely little kids, you know? So I made up this secret friend, the Bimbergooner, who kept me company? Sort of a combination of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Tom Terrific, and Finky Linky. I've spent my whole damned life looking for someone like Bimbergooner to be my friend."
"It was a girl?"
"I don't know, I think so. Or at least she was a boy but had all the good qualities of a girl. Something like that."
I laughed too hard. He looked at me strangely. "I'm laughing because I had Pinsleepe," I said. "She sounds exactly like your Bimbergooner, only Pinsleepe was definitely a girl. Know why? Because my dream friend would have no hesitation about pulling her pants down and showing 'it' to me whenever I wanted. Naturally I was dying to know what 'it' looked like, but my sister would never show me. I made Pinsleepe a girl so she'd not only be my friend but would have the right plumbing to satisfy my curiosity."
Victor snorted. "Shit. I wish I'd thought of that! I don't think I even knew what my dick looked like then, much less what I would be putting it into some day."
He went on talking about his imaginary friend, but I was already spinning with a new idea and inspiration.
I'd make a film about Pinsleepe! But a Pinsleepe who comes back twenty years later to visit her old friend and creator.
What would we do if that happened? How would we handle the return of our childhood? Or a mysterious part that showed up in the flesh and wanted to stay awhile to see what things had changed in the old neighborhood?
I'd grown so weary of Bloodstone and his meager world that I knew I had to do something entirely different or go nuts. I'd done the small part in Weber's film, but I needed much more than that exotic hors d'oeuvre. Here, appearing full-blown out of the ether, was a gift from heaven!
The problem was, no one on earth wanted to do it, including my partner, Matthew. "I'll give you two words, Phil, and they say it alclass="underline" Woody Allen." He sat back, as proud as if he'd just proven Einstein wrong.
"What do you mean, Woody Allen? How is that supposed to finish this argument?"
"Every time Woody Allen makes a film that's not funny, it goes right in the toilet: financially, critically, everything. Why? Because people go to Woody Allen movies to see funny. The same way they go to your movies to see Bloodstone make them wee-wee their pants. Look what happened to Coca-Cola when they tried to change their formula.
"Classic Strayhom works, Phil. Don't start fucking around with a new formula."
"What would you do if I insisted on making this film?"
"Sell my collection of Fabulous Fifties furniture to get the dough, jerkoff. You know that. But it doesn't mean I won't put my Uzi in your eye when we go broke!
"I'm kidding. Do it. Who cares? What are you going to call it again, 'Pin Lips'? Jesus."
"PINSLEEPE. I'll make you an offer, Matthew. I'll write Midnight Four for you and we'll do that first. Then my film. Deal?"
"Yeah, a deal! I didn't think I was going to be able to persuade you to put on that makeup again for two years, old Puke Puss. Nice name, huh? That's what they called you in the last issue of Fangoria magazine."
I made notes on Pinsleepe and my shared secret world in between drafts of Midnight Kills. It took the longest time remembering exactly what she looked like. A really clear picture emerged only months later in Yugoslavia while we were negotiating shooting rights there for part of our next Bloodstone extravaganza.
I remember making a sketch of her on a paper napkin at an outdoor restaurant in Dubrovnik. We were eating cevapcici and drinking a good Yugoslavian pivo. When I was done, I slipped the napkin into my wallet and kept it until I died. I don't know why.
Bloodstone. Going back to him and the Midnight world began as an ordeal. Not that it was difficult writing a fourth film: I knew the geography of the place by heart, and where to go, once there.
What repelled me was the necessity of going there at all I resented most the fact I couldn't leave that part of my life behind like a hick town I'd grown up in but left after graduating from school there.
Halfway through an okay and thoroughly mediocre script, I threw the whole thing out and began again with a new goaclass="underline" If, as I hoped, Midnight Kills would be the last of "those" films for a very long time, why not work as hard as I could trying to create the best of the bunch? A honor film as hot and sinister as radioactivity, full of enough tricks and traps to keep people guessing and really scared till the end. That would be worth doing until I had the chance to get down to serious work on "Pinsleepe."
I went to Matthew's house at Malibu and watched the ocean for – days. Nothing doing. No inspiration in sea breezes.
After trudging back home discouraged, I found what I needed in a postcard from Weber. In Europe he had discovered the work of Elias Canetti and had been sending me cards with quotes from the writer, sometimes as many as – a week.
The outer bearing of people is so ambiguous that you only have to present yourself as you are to live fully unrecognized and concealed.
I read those words – times, then turned out the only light in the room and smiled like a happy hyena. Blood was rushing into my head, and it felt like I was glowing in the dark.