“No,” I said, watching Fred.
“This Virginia Gibson person really does look a lot like Alis,” Heada said. “Do you want to try Seven Brides for Seven Brothers again, just to make sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Good,” she said, standing up briskly. “Now, the main thing now that you’re clean is to keep busy so you won’t think about the craving, and anyway, you need to catch up on Mayer’s list before he gets back, and I was thinking maybe I could help you. I’ve been watching a lot of movies, and I could tell you which ones have AS’s in them and where it is. The Color Purple has a roadhouse scene where—”
“Heada,” I said.
“And after you finish the list, maybe you and I could get Mayer to assign us a real remake. I mean, now that we’re both clean. You said one time I’d make a great location assistant, and I’ve been watching a lot of movies. We’d make a great team. You could do the CGs—”
“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “There was an ILMGM exec who used to come to the parties who was always using time travel as a line. I need you to find out his name.”
“Time travel?” Heada said blankly.
“He said they were this close to discovering time travel,” I said. “He kept talking about parallel timefeeds.”
“You said it wasn’t her in Funny Face,” she said slowly.
“He kept talking about doing a remake of Time After Time.”
She said, still blankly, “You think Alis went back in time?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and the last word was a shout. “Maybe she found a pair of ruby slippers, maybe she walked up onto the screen like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Holmes, Jr. I don’t know!”
Heada was looking at me, her eyes full of tears. “But you’re going to keep looking for her, aren’t you? Even though it’s impossible,” she said bitterly. “Just like John Wayne in The Searchers.”
“And he found Natalie Wood, didn’t he?” I said. “Didn’t he?” but she was already gone.
MONTAGE: No sound. HERO, seated at comp, chin on hand, saying, “Next, please,” as routine on screen changes. Hula, Latin number, clambake, Hollywood’s idea of ballet, hobo number, water ballet, doll dance.
I didn’t have all the alcohol out of my system yet. Half an hour after Heada left, my headache came back with a vengeance. I called up Two Sailors and a Girl (or was it Two Girls and a Sailor?) and slept for two days straight.
When I got up, I pissed several gallons and then checked to see if Heada had accessed me. She hadn’t. I tried to access her, and then Vincent, and started through the movies again.
Alis was in I Love Melvin, playing, natch, a chorus girl trying to break into the movies, and in Let’s Dance and Two Weeks with Love. I found her in two Vera-Ellen movies, which I watched twice, convinced that I was somehow missing an important clue, and in Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, taking Virginia Gibson’s place again in a side-by-side tap routine with Gene Nelson and Virginia Mayo.
I accessed Vincent and asked him about parallel timefeeds. “Is this for Rising Sun?” he asked suspiciously.
“The Time Machine,” I said. “Paul Newman and Julia Roberts. What is a parallel timefeed?” and got an earful of probability and causality and side-by-side universes.
“Every event has a dozen, a hundred, a thousand possible outcomes,” he said. “The theory is there’s a universe in which every single outcome actually exists.”
A universe in which Alis gets to dance in the movies, I thought. A universe in which Fred Astaire’s still alive and the CG revolution never happened.
I had been looking exclusively through musicals made during the fifties. But if there were parallel timefeeds, and Alis had somehow found a way to get in and out of those other universes, there was no reason she couldn’t be in movies made later. Or earlier.
I started through the Busby Berkeleys, short as they were on dancing, and found her tapping without music in Gold Diggers of 1935 and in the big finale of 42nd Street, but that was it. I did better (and apparently so had she) in non-Busbys. Hats Off, wearing a hat, natch, and Show of Shows and Too Much Harmony, “Buckin’ the Wind” in a number made for Marilyn, in garters and a white skirt that blew up around her stockinged legs. She was in Born to Dance, too, but in the chorus, and I couldn’t find her in any other Eleanor Powell movies.
It took me a week to finish the b-and-w’s, during which time I couldn’t get through to Heada, and she didn’t access me. When my comp finally did beep, I didn’t wait for her to come on. “Did you find out anything?” I said.
“I found out all right!” Mayer said, twitching. “You haven’t sent in a movie in three weeks! I was planning to give the whole package to my boss at next week’s meeting, and you’re wasting time with Rising Sun, which isn’t even on the list!”
Which meant Vincent was costarring in the role of Joe Spinell as snitch in The Godfather II.
“I needed to replace a couple of scenes,” I said. “There were too many visuals to do wipes. One of them’s a dance number. You don’t know anybody who can dance, do you?” I watched him, looking for some sign, some indication that he remembered Alis, knew her, had wanted to pop her badly enough that he’d pasted her face in over a dozen dancers’. Nothing. Not even a pause in the twitches.
“There was a face at a couple of the parties a while back,” I said. “Pretty, light brown hair, she wanted to dance in the movies.”
Nothing. It wasn’t Mayer.
“Forget dancers,” he said. “Forget The Time Machine. Just take the damned alcohol out! I want the rest of that list done by Monday, or you’ll never work for ILMGM again!”
“You can count on me, Mr. Potter,” I said, and let him tell me he was shutting down my credit.
“I want you sober!” he said.
Which, oddly enough, I was.
I took “Moonshine Lullaby” out of Annie Get Your Gun and the hookahs out of Kismet to show him I’d been listening, and started through the forties, looking for alcohol and Alis, two birds with one ff. She was in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and in the hoedown number in Babes on Broadway, wearing the pinafore she’d had on the night she’d come to ask me for the disk.
Heada came in while I was watching Three Little Girls in Blue, which had an assortment of bustles and Vera-Ellen, but no Alis.
“I found the exec,” she said. “He’s working for Warner now. He says they’re looking at ILMGM as a possible takeover.”
“What’s his name?” I said.
“He wouldn’t tell me anything. He said the reason they haven’t rereleased Somewhere in Time is because they couldn’t decide whether to cast Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe.”
“I’ll talk to him. What’s his name?”
She hesitated. “I talked to the hackates, too. They said last year they were transmitting images through a negative-matter region and got some interference that they thought was a time discrepancy, but they haven’t been able to duplicate the results, and now they think it was a transmission from another source.”