We reached the top of the hill and parked beside the ragged cyclone fence that surrounded ongoing construction. We wandered awhile, navigating an obstacle course of building debris and rubbish left behind by tourists, until we came into a depopulated zone with a grand view of the sky. It was jet black and remarkably clear. I watched Thad crane his neck to look at the stars, feeling a rush of sympathy and affection for the man. He had shown me a tender, stunt-free side of his soul; I was surprised and grateful, apart from feeling insecure that I had nothing comparable to give in return. I actually felt bad for having planned to corner him about Clea. I was suddenly certain of his innocence, and grateful the two had found each other.
“You know, when I first heard that human bodies were made from stardust, I thought it was a shuck. A Hallmark greeting card thing. But it’s true—we’re all dead stars.” He had that wonderful, gnomish smile on his face. Black Jack was his Goliath; he’d slain him and lived to tell the tale. I felt proud. He took off his jacket, laid it on the ground, then sat. “They say that when our sun dies, it won’t be anything spectacular. It’s a middling star. That’s the word astronomists use, ‘middling’—tough crowd, those astronomists! And when an ordinary star dies — they call them ordinary! That’s the official designation! I’m telling you, they’re tough sons of bitches — well, they say ordinary stars end up as inconspicuous white dwarves. But the killers, the real shock-and-awe five-alarm cocksuckers, when they die, they leave black holes… take everything with ’em, even the light. Even the light.” He paused, marveling at the unfathomable implication of his own words. “Jesus. I’m in high Observatory mode, huh. I should work here — someone give me a job!”
As if softly unspooling more secrets, he began to quote his beloved Leopardi, but the words seemed such his own, so exclusive to the timeless moment on that slope beneath celestial seas, syllables engrained as stardust into his bones, that he became the prodigal son, exiled Vorbalidian prince come home to roost in phantom pain and stellar tomb, middling and majestic, murderous and mundane, in blinding darkness and vacuumed, vanished light — boyish, transgressive and humble, so that I felt the vibratory strands of existence cocoon around us, in the great transparent cathedral of our shabbily awesome, gloriously stillborn life.
“I have always loved this lonesome hill,” he said. “And this hedge that hides the entire horizon, almost, from sight. But sitting here in a daydream, I picture the boundless spaces away out there, silences deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush in which my heart is hardly a beat from fear. And hearing the wind rush rustling through these bushes, I pit its speech against infinite silence — and a notion of eternity floats to mind, and the dead seasons—e le morte stagioni—and the season beating here and now, and the sound of it. So, in this immensity my thoughts all drown. And it’s soothing to be wrecked in seas like these.”
~ ~ ~
IT WAS FRIDAY — THE LAST day of shooting.
Thad never arrived.
Clea began to unravel. I stood by watching Nick Sultan put extras through fruitless, unfilmed paces: palace guardians in Greek chorus groupings on the painted plaster desert of the Outback. They were to pound their tom-toms during the twins’ battle royale which was set to unfold before a giant blue screen already in place. The old-school prop master stood in the wings holding ritual daggers in a customized teak box, ready to hand them to Morloch and the ensign if one (or the other) were ever to show. The harmless weapons were his responsibility but now that there were no warriors, he felt the chill of an unvoiced rebuke.
Hours passed. A pall descended. Lawyers, agents, and executives assembled. Stunt and camera doubles were ladled with the heavy cubist makeup of Vorbalids; it was decided Morloch’s side of the battle would be shot first, buying time in case Thad suddenly showed. Nick got a second wind and the crew went to work with the careful haste required of a production crisis. The pressure was on but at the same time things seemed so hopeless that it was off, too — a chance for stalwart below-the-liners to pragmatically strut their stuff in perspirey triple-time and ingratiate themselves to the studio. They’d be the real heroes of the day.
Clea sat in her canvas chair on the soundstage. The rest of us, temporarily liberated from our cages by Morloch to bear witness to his expected triumph (a few reaction shots were needed, nothing more), loitered in readiness. With the UPM’s sober, nodding submission, Nick Sultan reasserted to the studio brass there was no reason to worry because everything would soon be “in the can”—except for the ensign’s half of the blue-screened tussle. Word filtered back: the CGI gurus had determined that an ensign look-alike could be hired for a half day of second unit inserts to be shot on the following weekend. (It was unprecedented to allow anything to interfere with production stream; the next episode, well into preproduction, was scheduled to begin filming on Monday.) The footage of the Rattweil look-alike would be framed in judicious mediums rather than close-ups, digitally doctored to enhance the more than serviceable resemblance between Thad and his double, then spliced into the fight scene. The experts’ consensus was optimistic; failing success, redoubtable staff-geeks, fueled by Jerry’s Deli triple-deckers and twelve-packs of Red Bull, were already drafting radical story structure alternatives. When it was time to go home (we broke an hour early), spirits were running relatively high under the circumstances. The bullet, if not dodged, seemed to have passed through tissue without hitting any major organs.
In an attempt to throw a net over the missing actor, the studio had sent a P.A. to the Chateau earlier that morning. With the help of the conscientious hotel manager, the room was entered to ascertain if the guest had overslept or was in distress. Needless to say, Mr. Michelet was not to be found. The P.A. lay in wait all day long, to no avail. At 5:00 P.M., Clea and I relieved him of duty.
Throughout, I’d kept Miriam in the loop. She was awfully distressed but we agreed there was no reason as yet for her to hop on a plane. There was general apprehension about Thad’s physical and mental health, with even the occasional hint at foul play — ludicrous, but in our agitated exhaustion, we inevitably came to resemble newscasters during a disaster, vamping after losing live feed. Another sentiment, lighter in weight and leavened by anger, was the plain fact he had done enormous harm to his career, not to mention scotching any hopes of authoring a Starwatch volume, the scamminess of which now seemed abjectly pathetic. Miriam and I suddenly felt besmirched by the inanely precocious bestsellerdom strategy, mortified by our coconspiracy with this overtly unstable man.
Thus, Clea and I began our night watch.
Slowly, like the favorite Brahms intermezzo of her mom’s that she had touchingly learned by heart in the last few years, Clea began to tap at the confessional keys. She told me she’d come over to the Chateau to be with him after our trip to the Observatory, and they had argued about “stupid things.”