So I started watching Kirk Morgan, and I soon saw what she meant. He seemed dull, dispirited, lethargic. Barry had to roar at him and prod him to get him to give his lines any zing.
It made one hell of a problem, and it seemed to be getting worse. The whole operation represented a very fat investment, and if we couldn’t make it work, there were going to be heads rolling in the dust.
Barry, Mark Weese and I had a nervous policy meeting about it.
“The guy is going dead on me, and it’s getting worse all the time,” Barry said.
“He eats and his color is good, and he hasn’t lost a pound,” Mark said, “but I get the kookie feeling he’s sort of fading away. You know what he does when he isn’t working, eating or sleeping? He sits and stares at the wall, hour after hour.”
After we argued it all out, we had a plan of action, but we weren’t happy with it. First, we’d move as fast as we could on the fourteen or so we had left at that time. We would get him checked over by a doctor. And Mark would do as much as he dared to change approved scripts to give Morgan less meat and fatten the lines and action for the other players.
We got him checked over, and it turned out he was in perfect health except for a very low metabolic rate. That figured, because he acted like a machine that was slowing down. So we started stuffing him with thyroid extract and dexedrine. It helped a little.
By the time we were left with only three to go, we knew the quality had sagged badly, but we hoped we could bull it through on the momentum of the first twenty weeks.
Mark Weese and I got ourselves loaded on the night before the last day, when we hoped to knock off the final three. I remember Mark peering drunkenly at me and waggling his finger and trying to be mysterious, but looking more like a gossipy matron on a resort hotel porch. “It’s a hex,” he said. “Deepest Africa. Witch doctor stuff. Revenge, Joey. For the dead girl. For Therese.”
I was in an air-conditioned room in a town where I could buy Coke, Kleenex and Time Magazine, and I wasn’t about to buy any hex theory.
But I remembered it the next day, and thought about it. We finished the series that day, without quite having to jab splinters under Morgan’s fingernails to keep him in motion. Let us just say his acting was what they call wooden.
So that night I pumped Jules Boudreau. I had not learned very much about that little round man. He did not have as much English as Rene. His approach to life was earnest and apologetic, without Rene’s automatic dignity. I had learned that his continuous smile was a reflex, a grimace without meaning. It was merely the way he had learned to hold his mouth.
I took him up to my room after dinner and we spent an hour going over all the details connected with closing up shop and disposing of rented and purchased equipment. As usual with such ventures, I expected to be the last man to get away, and I had no urge to prolong my stay.
When the work was over, I fixed Jules another drink and I said, “Morgan seems to be getting worse. He has to be dressed and undressed. They’ll have to lead him aboard that airplane. Tell me, Jules, you’ve lived here a long time, have you ever seen anybody get like that before?”
“Sometime,” he said, without disturbing his smile. “Not so many time.”
“What causes it?”
“Pipple say many t’ing.”
“The local people are talking about him?”
“Oh, yes! It is a sad scandal with this Therese, of course.”
“What do people say?”
He shrugged plump shoulders. “You know the mama, she have tribe connections way back, a rare strong pipple, knowing dark t’ings, they say. Also is true the child, she was cared for in the home by servant pipple loving her, so ver’ savage not so long time ago. She dead in her wedding t’ings, and it can be much hate. So they say is medicine made against him. In some places of the worl’ is called gris-gris. Some is voodoo. Some is hex. A dark pipple t’ing.”
“What do you think, Jules?”
With a sweep of his chubby hand he included all of Africa. “Some t’ings in this land, is better I t’ink we don’t look at so close. But all this is maybe done with pictures.”
“With pictures?”
He leaned forward, lowering his voice slightly. “A savage man, he does not want pictures taking of him, no? It is this reason: He t’ink a picture steal a piece of him, of his soul, take it away on paper, leaving him smaller.”
“I’ve heard of that, sure.”
Jules stood up. “This time somebody fix it so it truly happens to Morgan. All the time the cameras turning, sucking away his soul.” He walked over to the double stack of film cans, touched them with his fingertips and turned and aimed his small smile at me. “In here now, he is laughing, talking, fighting, making the love being brave and handsome, no? It is all in here, nearly all of him, so he can walk around, yes, but more like the king beetle when the spider she is nearly finish. How you say it? A husk.”
I could feel the small hairs stir at the nape of my neck. “But doesn’t a man have to believe that such a thing is happening to him for it really to happen?”
Jules came back and sat down. “So in what part of the mind is the believing ’eh? In the top where you know it for a certain t’ing, or buried down where it is lost in the darknes of the soul, eh?”
“I think it’s a lot of damn nonsense!” I said.
Jules stood up abruptly. “In the morning I will be here. Thank you.”
After Jules left, I learned I was a little too conscious of the twin stacks of film cans. I had been aware of them all along, as a sort of visual index of our production. I went over and stared at them. In one very logical sense of the word, Kirk Morgan was imprisoned in those fat aluminum discs. Each one was good for a hundred showings. But copies would be made from the mint masters as soon as the cutting was done. For several years Kirk Morgan would be released over and over again to go through his frozen motions and say his canned words, before being locked up again.
I sat there on my heels and told myself this was merely a symbolic point of view, a sappy and poetic point of view. Morgan’s soul was not sealed into those cans. Yet I had the fancy that if I held my ear close to them when the world was sufficiently still, I would hear the thin, insectile cries of anguish.
I shivered and took some mighty hacks at what was left of the opened bottle before I went to bed.
I was partially dressed the next morning before I happened to notice the tapes were gone. It startled me for a moment until I realized that Barry Driscoll had probably awakened with one of his fits of early energy and had begun to organize the trip home. He could have wangled a key from the management and had some of the crew carry the cans out without disturbing me.
When I went down to breakfast he was sitting alone, staring bleakly into what was probably his third cup of coffee. I knew it was unwise to attempt to join him, but I stopped by the table for a moment and said, “Was I snoring?”
He stared up at me. “Huh?”
“When you people came in early and carted off all our packaged genius, man.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Joe? You know I don’t like humor this time of day.”
“I never touch it myself. All the cans are gone.”
“What!”
“They were there when I went to bed. They’re gone now.”
He sprang to his feet, with a color like damp ashes. As we stared at each other, I felt the bottom falling out of my career.
It was Tuesday morning. We assembled the whole unit. Nobody knew one damn thing. Nobody on the hotel staff knew one damn thing. With the aid of Jules Boudreau, I alerted all the police power of the Crown Colony, right up to the Governor General. Barry approved posting a reward of 100,000 Belgian Congo francs for the return of our epic. To use an unfortunate tourist expression, this was $2,000 in “real money”. Barry canceled the flight reservations out. Everybody tried to be very helpful. Police swarmed all over the place.