“Would you like to know some more of the things that I find so wonderful about the original film?”
“One… second.”
Kindnesses, flatteries, dishonest intellectual exchanges that I now presumed were part of our acquaintance, precluded any genuine elaboration on my enthusiasms. However, with an Appaloosa sigh, I launched into some exegetical remarks about The Crawling Hand just the same, remarking that it was important to think of the film in the context of the Manichaean era in which it was produced, the time of the very earthly and very flawed struggle between economic models, the time of the global Cold War, the outcome of which we know, of course, from our modern historical analyses. But if the film was produced in the context of that Manichaean structure, it also had Manichaean dialectical notions implicit within. As when Augustine of Hippo inveighed against the passivity of a knowledge-based relationship with God, I told Tyrone, The Crawling Hand promoted a death-is-not-the-end version of human life in which a man falls from the sky, or at least a portion of him does, and because he has fallen away from the struggle for good, he is portrayed as already given over to malevolence or sin. I also mentioned to Tyrone that he should read, if he had any time, Mani’s book of Secrets, which is alluded to by Paul, the leading man in the original film. Paul, in the film, speaks to the importance of secrets, because, I said, Paul tries to conceal the presence of the arm and, later, the fact that he has been infected by it.
Tyrone was not listening. I took his rook at F7, and the game began to collapse from under him.
Naturally, I said, I understood that horror films did not move a preponderance of right-thinking folks to wonderment, especially not those high-end dealers in antiquities who attempted to filch from the lowly regional bottom-feeders, those who have made a livelihood out of collecting with patience and vision over decades. Did Tyrone ever have a box full of doubles under his bed that he knew would come in handy in thirty years’ time? I imagined that he only understood the blue book value of the very rarest cards, and had been employed by some rich guy to make these acquisitions, and that was his job now. Perhaps he only enjoyed the theater of his attempts, the getting up close, the deceiving, the leaving town. Maybe there were a number of varieties of flattery that he’d used on me that could be codified into some kind of rule book for dealers in antiquity. Chapter One: Finding the mark. Settling in. How to make conversation with a person who has never had a fulfilling social life.
“I love the scene at the soda shop, or is it a diner, with the two girls, where there’s some kind of doo-wop music playing in the background that the teenagers are attempting to dance to. The proprietor of the store comes in and indicates that there should be no dancing in the burger joint, no dancing, and of course it always reminds me of Cotton Mather’s injunctions against Terpsichore, you know, young people dance and go down to hell. The scene proceeds,” I went on, “and we get our first shot of the leading male, Paul Lawrence, and he has a sort of sullen, learning-disabled aspect to him, which makes his later bacterial infection seem all the more convincing, and as he and his girlfriend, Marta, are about to leave for the beach, the jukebox kicks in with ‘The Bird’s the Word,’ by the Rivingtons, later reconfigured into that classic of early rock and roll ‘Surfin’ Bird.’ ”
“Why—”
“Still, the best sequences in the film are those in which the arm attacks people. I just love that stuff. There are two different ways to film the arm. Or this is how I reconstruct it. In general, the black-and-white horror film is, I’d agree, completely superior to its Technicolor relative, which was already, by 1963, edging out the competition. So anyway, the two ways to film the arm are, first, with a live actor just out of frame, where the arm can wiggle its fingers, you know, and then, second, there are the sequences with the rubberized severed arm that the actors need to hold flush to their own throats as they mime strangulation. The rubber arm is great in the case of Mrs. Hotchkiss, the woman who rents out Paul Lawrence’s room to him,” I explained. “She gives a wooden, monotonous performance, especially in the delivery of her lines, until the moment when the arm somehow jumps up from the floor in order to attack her. Then she sputters and flails around before falling to the ground so that they can cut between the rubberized arm and the live actor’s arm. Mrs. Hotchkiss gives the performance her all. A memorable bit, right? The filmmakers get down to business. It’s not like The Blob, where you have to wait so long for the blob to turn up.”
You’ve just got to trust me!
If this is what I think it is,
It could be very important for me!
A number of strategic exchanges had taken place on the chessboard, and I must confess that the rather long time between moves made it hard for me to concentrate effectively. This was perhaps Tyrone’s only path to victory, to bore me sufficiently. This match should not have reached the endgame stage, I warrant, because Tyrone was mistaken about his talents, but I wanted to allow Tyrone to believe that he had been in the hunt for a long time, not simply plowed under, so that I would appear to have won the novelization fair and square. This required skillful playing. As I say, I offered a few pieces. He couldn’t have known, however, that we were coming to one of my favorite endgames, the bishop and pawn endgame.
It was for chess-related reasons that the conversation took a turn into a kind of terrain that I would refer to as provocative, or mean-spirited, even mildly abusive, and I suppose it did so because when competition rears its head, when the loser perceives that he is the loser — in the ghastly moment of zugzwang, the moment in which any move is a bad move — then it is axiomatic that the outcome can no longer be delayed. The hand-to-hand begins, the mano a mano. Thus it was that Tyrone said:
“What makes you think you’re going to be able to write the novelization anyway? It’s not like you have any experience.”
The blackout had begun again, as I say, and now Ho Chi Minh had all but emptied of its excessively tanned and underemployed counterculturalists and university dropouts. The musty smell of snuffed candles was much in the air, a smell that anyone can love. I might have riposted to the dinosaur that I had written plenty of things, that the implications of my kind of story went beyond the margin of the page into my spectacularly boiled-down evocations of psychology. But what I said was:
“The same thing that probably makes you think that you are a fine chess player.”
What was it that Tyrone wanted? The interloper? As he blew a move with his bishop that would have, were he more adept, perhaps kept my king from heading boldly to the center of the board. Did Tyrone not want me to massacre him? Was there not some wish to be laid low by such as I, a small white man, with modest expectations for the last couple of decades of his life, in a forgotten corner of NAFTA? Tyrone could have done many things, he was brilliant, he was affable, he was usually sharply turned out, he’d had a spectacular education. Was he, too, just another one of the people who never managed to turn promise into anything concrete?
He held his great, dark brow in his hands as though it were made of crystal, as if the position of his men would somehow shatter his very brow. I had no conviction about where, when his hand flew from his temple, it would alight. But as it swept toward the king, his white king, my heart lifted up, and I felt in myself a great lofting into the skies, as he toppled the king onto its side.