He got up and paced the small area, walking back and forth behind my chair, appearing and reappearing in the mirror over the couch.
“I’ve got special things to say, McGee. I have special visions to reveal to the world. I can compose scenes within scenes, dialogue behind dialogue. When realities are composed in a certain way, a scene becomes referrent to a Jungian symbolism, and millions of people will be moved and disturbed in a way they cannot understand.”
He came around in front of me to stand looking down at me. “There is such a thing as an artistic imperative. Genius demands the communicative medium. It’s my mission to change the world in a way you can’t even comprehend, McGee. And I will sacrifice anything at all to that mission. Right in the midst of the bad dialogue in this turkey script I am working with, I can project an instant of magic so precious I will lie, cheat, steal, kill, torture, in order to have the chance to do it. I am beyond any law, any concept of morality, McGee, because I have this gift which has to come out. I have to use everything and everyone around me, for my own ends. A little bureaucratic turd like Forgan can’t comprehend the necessity of the mission. The mission is bigger than all of us. So I do what I have to do. When the money gets thin, I have to make more somehow, to keep this project alive. Do you understand that?”
“Not exactly. Maybe I do.”
“I can always tell when the chance is there,” he said, his voice animated, his expression full of excitement. “I get a big rush, a really stupendous flowing feeling, and I can see all the symbols and relationships as if a fog lifted. I can then move the camera just so much, change the lighting a little bit more, get the people in a different postural relationship to each other. And it doesn’t matter what they say. The symbols are speaking and the words mean nothing. This is my chance to do it perfectly and change the world!”
“Now I understand,” I said.
He reached and clapped me on the shoulder. “Good! Good! Right from the start I had the feeling you could catch on, Travis. You have sensitivity. Your inputs are open. Desmin thinks you’re some kind of fake. It got me worried, and I called Lee Dean and she vouched for you. Are you sore at me for checking you out?”
“Not at all, Peter. Not at all.”
The windows had darkened. He turned on two lamps and stretched out on the couch again. There was the sound of a key in the door and Josephine Laurant came in, wearing a white safari suit, with a leopard band holding her hair back and a white silk scarf knotted at her throat.
She nodded at me and said to Kesner, “It’s raining again, hon.”
“Jesus jumping H. Christ!” he yelled. “What are they trying to do to me?”
She knelt on the couch beside him and patted his cheek. “It’s all going to be all right.”
He pushed her arm away roughly, got up, and walked out without a word. She looked at me and managed a weak smile. “Peter gets very tense when he’s working. There’s been a lot of rain.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“It will really help us if Take Five will give us some advance publicity.”
“When is it going to be released?”
“That isn’t firm yet. There’s an awful lot of editing and dubbing to do yet. Peter always does the film editing personally. It’s an art, you know.”
“I guess you both have a lot of reasons for wanting it to succeed.”
She tilted her head. Her eyes looked old. “Exactly what do you mean by that, Mr. McGee?”
“I guess I meant that you’ve both invested money in it. And you’ve been sidelined for quite a long time. And Peter bombed out on his last two tries. I mean it must be very important to both-”
“I don’t need that. I don’t need any part of it. I didn’t ask you in here. Get the hell out! Move!” She had snatched up a heavy glass ashtray. I moved. I walked through light rain to the cook tent. Desmin Grizzel sat at a corner table for four with Jean Norman. He and I stared at each other until he beckoned me over. I sat across from Jean, with Dirty Bob on my right. He had been in the rain. The corona of gray-black beard was matted. He smelled like an old wet dog. Jean was in dirty white pants and a yellow top. She was hunched low over her plate, eating her stew with her hands. Her mouth was smeared, and gravy ran up her wrists.
“Hearty eater, ain’t she?”
“Did Forgan get to talk to her?”
He took his unlit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and stared at me. “What would you know about that?”
“Only what Peter told me. Joya phoned the FBI about you people here making porno tapes before she took off for good.”
“Peter told you that?”
“I was there in Josie’s dressing room with him when he was talking to Forgan.”
“Oh. Nobody here knows anything about any tapes. Jeanie here didn’t know a thing, did you?” She ignored him. He pinched the flesh of her upper arm. She winced and looked at him. “You didn’t know a thing, did you?”
Her expression was one of intense alarm. “No, Dez. Nothing at all. Nothing.”
“Keep eating, princess.”
She dipped down again, chin inches from her the pile of stew.
Grizzel smiled at me. He popped a kitchen match with a thumbnail and lit his sodden third of a cigar. There was a curious flavor of latent energy about him. I felt as if I were sitting next to one of the big jungle cats, and neither it nor I had any good idea of what it might do next.
I said, “Peter was giving me some of his ideas about his work.”
“So?”
“I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of what he was telling me.”
“Why should you?”
“Frankly, it sounded spacey. It sounded un-wrapped.”
He studied the end of his cigar. “I think you should keep your mouth shut.”
“I just meant that if there isn’t going to be any motion picture, I’m wasting my time here.”
“Peter Kesner turned me into somebody, pal. From dirt nothing to somebody. I’ve got a beach house, pal. I’ve got great machines, and a Mercedes convertible, a batch of bonds, and a lawyer working on getting me a pardon on a felony I did once. I owe him.”
“You can see the reason for my concern.”
“It isn’t scheduled to rain tomorrow. We’ll get going early, with the flying, and we’ll wrap up the last location shots, and we’ll go back home, and he’ll put it all together. It’ll be great. So don’t sweat it, Ace.
He stood up, slowly, heavily, inspected the red end of his cigar again, took another drag on it, then leaned and hissed it into the little pile of stew remaining on Jeanie’s plate and walked out.
She sat there staring at the upright butt in glum confusion and then stared at me. “Am I gonna be with you?” she asked. “I thought I was gonna be with Dez.”
The little dark-haired stunt woman came striding in, directly to the table, directly to Jeanie, ignoring me. She was wearing boots, jeans, a red shirt, a suede vest. She clucked in dismay, scooped up the dirty plate, and went off to scrape it into the garbage can over near the coffee machine. She came back with a damp towel and sat beside Jeanie. Jeanie tilted her face up, eyes closed, as Linda mopped her clean. Jeanie’s face was immature, with a spray of freckles across the unemphatic nose, dark soot of lashes lying against the cheek. Linda swabbed the girl’s hands and wrists clean, gave her a little pat on the shoulder, a little kiss on the forehead, and took the towel back to the counter. She came back and sat where Desmin had been, braced her chin on broad brown little fists, and looked at me with flinty eyes.
“You want pieces of this turkey for some kind of television?”
“Just to show how things like this are done.” Her laugh was abrupt and humorless. “Things like this are not done like this, fellow. I have busted fifteen bones in this line of work, which comes out to one a year since my first stunt where I fell off a cliff onto the roof of a stagecoach. I know good from bad. These people here are nuts. Peter, Josie, Mercer, Tyler, all of them. The money is almost gone and they keep making up new story lines. Peter calls it free association. How did you get mixed up in this?”