Wyatt said, "Before my father died a couple of years ago, he was so mean and impossible to be around that he made everyone's life miserable, especially Mother's. Whenever I'd call and ask how she was, she'd say, 'Weary, dear, I'm pretty weary,' because she was giving him every last bit of love she had left, like blood. Whatever she'd kept stored up for maybe her grandchildren, or us, whoever, she was giving him. It was like a transfusion: If love could keep someone alive, he could have all of hers. I've never stopped thinking about that.
"But the sad thing was, it didn't do anything for my father. He only got sicker and more demanding.
"You did what you could, Sasha. It's egotistical to think we can always save the person we love. Even if you were the perfect mate, after what happened to Phil you end up with all kinds of unlocatable guilt. My mother did, and she behaved like a saint with her man.
"Push it away; you made Phil happy. By being with him, you increased the odds in his favor and built something winning and good."
"But what if I drove him crazy?" She looked from Wyatt to me.
"Making Midnight drove him crazy, Sasha. Let's finish this damned film and get on with the rest of our lives."
As the blue airport shuttle waited in Sasha's driveway, I put my arm around Wyatt and walked with him to the van. "You'll call Blow Dry and explain what we want?"
"The only reason you're going to New York is so you don't have to ask him. Yes, I'll call. What else?"
"You have an idea of how this has to go. What I really want from you, Wyatt, is humor. The whole thing is so much fucking dreck and blood now, we're drowning in it. I want the first scene to lift us completely off the earth and put us somewhere else."
"Where, Disneyland?"
"No, not that far, but somewhere we can . . . rest from Bloodstone awhile. Somewhere we can get a little fresh air."
He nodded and we shook hands.
Sasha was at the door to the van, standing over my suitcase. "I still wish you weren't going."
I stepped up and hugged her. "I won't be gone long, and when I'm back it'll be for a while."
"That's then; this is now. Oh, Weber, I hate missing everyone. It takes up so much energy and makes you so sad. . . . Go ahead. Wyatt and I are going to Larchmont for lunch. Have a good trip and come back soon. Sooner than you said!"
Driving away, I turned around and saw the two of them standing on the sidewalk, arms at their sides, neither of them moving an inch. Both had cancer. At least one of them would be dead soon.
The trip east was uneventful. I made notes for an hour and then fell fast asleep for the rest of the flight. There are so few times or places where you're forced to turn your energy down and simply sit still for a few hours. That's why I enjoy flying, where you can only think or read or sleep. Watching a film or eating a meal on a plane is torture and not even to be discussed.
Since Phil's death I'd been on the run, so thinking long and hard about any one thing was impossible. Boarding the plane, I vowed in the next hours to try and put some of the events together in understandable order. But being away from the Strayhorn hurricane for the first time, my body shut right down and said, "Later. Now take a nap."
I awoke over upstate New York, feeling both refreshed and guilty. I'd be flying back to California in a few days, but in the meantime it felt good to be on my way home.
There were so many things that had to be done. Close up my apartment, talk to the actors, see if I could reach my old cameraman and then convince him that making a couple of scenes for a horror film would be an interesting challenge. . . .
One of the most important qualities a person needs in order to direct for a living is to be a great coaxer: money from producers, performances from actors, special angles from cameramen. . . . When I was directing movies I'd usually be exhausted by the time we began filming because of the days already spent coaxing and wheedling, stroking and reassuring so many people that what they wanted I wanted, and vice versa.
The same was true for stage directing, but in New York I was working with intense, eager people who weren't in unions or up for Oscars or scared they'd lose their shirts if we produced a bomb.
But I'd be flat-out lying if I didn't say I was also intrigued and excited about what we were doing.
The night before, Wyatt and I sat up and talked about it.
"What are we supposed to do, Weber? Fix the film so it's moral or immoral?"
"I don't know. You were there when I asked Pinsleepe the same question."
"Then what are we going to do?"
"All I know now is Blow Dry will play Bloodstone and we're going to use – from our group. Maybe we'll just put everyone together and let them talk."
His look said that wasn't the answer he wanted to hear. "Weber, I've seen all of your films many times and I think they're superb, but this isn't the same thing."
"Hold on a minute. Do you think this is real; that once we film whatever is necessary, and do it right, it will save Sasha?"
"Yes, I think it's real! But most of the craziness has been happening to you. Don't you think it's real?"
"Anything's real, Wyatt, so long as it's happening to you at the moment. Dreaming Cullen's dreams was real once, the tattoo flying off my back was real. Videotapes from the dead that are there now but weren't a minute ago are real." I stood up and threw my hands in the air. "But then tell me what the fuck is 'real'? Weren't we brought up recognizing boundaries . . . definitions of what was reality and what wasn't? We were, goddammit! That's where we got our sanity!
"So what do we do when everything goes beyond those bounds, like right now? Does it mean the old rules were bullshit and we have to make up new ones, new definitions for reality?
"And if that's so, if all boundary lines are down and we've got to start redefining everything, what's 'good' and what's 'evil' now?
"I'll give you a stupid example. When I was in Munich a couple of years ago, a baron I met invited me to an auction of some of the possessions of Princess Elisabeth of Austria. You know, Sissy? It was a ritzy affair, invitation only, and the crowd was mostly royalty with lots of money.
"One of the things for sale was Sissy's bathrobe. Just that: a white bathrobe with plain red stitching up the side. Know how much it went for? Two thousand dollars. If it had been a painting, something unusual and valuable, I'd've understood, but it was a white bathrobe that sold for two thousand bucks! What was it, Finky, a bathrobe some fool paid too much for or a valuable piece of memorabilia?"
"Obviously it sold for that much because of who wore it."
"That doesn't answer the question! We're not talking context here. We're talking bathrobes! What was sold for two thousand dollars? Do you get my point?"
I was so loud he put a finger to his lips. "Shush! No, I don't."
"A robe looks like this; you use it to dry off; it costs about this much. Okay, that looks like one! But the guy just paid two bills for it and then put it in a safe or in a frame. So what is it?
"Midnight Kills is a film about evil. But that was evil by the old rules and definitions. The old bathrobe. That was before little pregnant angels, home movies of my mother dying. . . .
"Pinsleepe isn't going to tell us what to do. We have to figure that out ourselves. I think that's the point. But first we have to figure out what –
"You know what I think, Finky? We've looked at that film and the other – now, and none of them are very good. Parts are, but even the first one is overrated. It's not nice to say, but I think Phil did something new with Midnight but then just coasted through the other -, particularly this one.