Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

  Up above, Whitmore, oxygen mask off, smiles down and wags the jet’s wings.

  Pull back to a panorama of the countryside; Corday and Agar grow smaller; the scene lifts, takes in jets, county, then state; miles up now the curve of the earth appears, grows larger, continue to pull back, whole of U.S., North and Central America appears. Beeping on soundtrack. We are moving along with a white luminescence which is revealed to be a Sputnik-type satellite.

  Beeping stops. Satellite begins to fall away from camera, lurching some as it hits the edges of the atmosphere. As it falls, letters slime down the screen: The End?

  Credits: A movie by Lois B. Traven.

  The lights come up. I begin to breathe again. I’m standing in the middle of the aisle, applauding as hard as I can.

  Everybody else is applauding, too. Everybody.

  Then my head really begins to hurt, and I go outside into the cool night and sit on the studio wall like Humpty-Dumpty.

  Lois is headed for the Big Time. She deserves it.

  The notes on my desk are now hand-deep. Pink ones, then orange ones from the executive offices. Then the bright red-striped ones from accounting.

  Fuck’ em. I’m almost through.

  I sat down and plugged on. Nothing happened.

  I punched Maintenance.

  “Sorry,” says Bobo. “You gotta get authorization from Snell before you can get back online, says here.”

  “Snell in accounting, or Snell in the big building?”

  “Lemme check.” There’s a lot of yelling around the office on the other end. “Snell in the big building.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

  So I have to eat dung in front of Snell, promise him anything, renegotiate my contract right then and there in his office without my business manager or agent. But I have to get this movie finished.

  Then I have to go over to Accounting and sign a lot of stuff. I call Bernie and Chinua and tell them to come down to the studio and clean up the contractual shambles as best they can, and not to expect to hear from me for a week or so.

  Then I call my friend Jukai, who helped install the first GAX-600 and talk to him for an hour and a half and learn a few things.

  Then I go to Radio Shack and run up a bill of $6,124, buy two weeks’ worth of survival food at Apocalypse Andy’s, put everything in my car, and drive over to the office deep under the bowels of the GAX-600.

  I have locked everyone else out of the mainframe with words known only to myself and Alain Resnais. Let them wait.

  * * *

  I have put a note on the door:

  Leave me alone. I am finishing the movie. Do not try to stop me. You are locked out of the 600 until I am through. Do not attempt to take me off-line. I have rewired the 600 to wipe out everything, every movie in it but mine if you do. Do not cut my power; I have a generator in here—if you turn me off, the GAX is history. (See attached receipt.) Leave me alone until I have finished; you will get everything back, and a great movie too.

  They were knocking. Now they’re pounding on the door. Screw’ em. I’m starting the scene where Guy (me) and Marie hitch a ride on the garbage wagon out of the communist pig farm.

  The locksmith was quiet but he couldn’t do any good, either. I’ve put on the kind of locks they use on the outsides of prisons.

  They tried to put a note on the screen. BACK OFF, I wrote.

  They began to ease them, pleading notes, one at a time through the razor-thin crack under the fireproof steel door.

  Every few hours I would gather them up. They quit coming for a while.

  Sometime later there was a polite knock.

  A note slid under.

  “May I come in for a few moments?” it asked. It was signed A. Resnais.

  GO AWAY, I wrote back. YOU HAVEN’T MADE A GOOD MOVIE SINCE LA GUERRE EST FINIE.

  I could imagine his turning to the cops and studio heads in his dignified humble way (he must be pushing ninety by now), shrugging his shoulders as if to say, well, I tried my best, and walking away.

  “You must end this madness,” says Marie. “We’ve been here a week. The room smells. I smell. You smell, I’m tired of dehydrated apple chips. I want to talk on the beach again, get some sunlight.”

  “What kind of ending would that be?” I (Guy) ask.

  “I’ve seen worse. I’ve been in much worse. Why do you have this obsessive desire to recreate movies made fifty years ago?”

  I (Guy) look out the window of the cheap hotel, past the edge of the taped roller shade. “I (Guy) don’t know.” I (Guy) rub my chin covered with a scratchy week’s stubble. “Maybe those movies, those, those things were like a breath of fresh air. They led to everything we have today.”

  “Well, we could use a breath of fresh air.”

  “No. Really. They came in on a stultified, lumbering dinosaur of an industry, tore at its flanks, nibbled at it with soft rubbery beaks, something, I don’t know what. Stung it into action, showed it there were other ways of doing things—made it question itself. Showed that movies could be free—not straightjackets.”

  “Recreating them won’t make any new statements,” said Marie (Moreau).

  “I’m trying to breathe new life into them, then. Into what they were. What they meant to . . . to me, to others,” I (Guy) say.

  What I want to do more than anything is to take her from the motel, out on the sunny street to the car. Then I want to drive her up the winding roads to the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Then I want her to lean over, her right arm around my neck, her hair blowing in the wind, and give me a kiss that will last forever, and say, “I love you, and I’m ready.”

  Then I will press down the accelerator, and we will go through the guard rail, hang in the air, and begin to fall faster and faster until the eternal blue sea comes up to meet us in a tender hand-shaped spray, and just before the impact she will smile and pat my arm, never taking her eyes off the windshield.

  “Movies are freer than they ever were,” she says from the bed. “I was there. I know. You’re just going through the motions. The things that brought about those films are remembered only by old people, bureaucrats, film critics,” she says with a sneer.

  “What about you?” I (Guy) ask, turning to her. “You remember. You’re not old. You’re alive, vibrant.”

  My heart is breaking.

  She gives me (Guy) a stare filled with sorrow. “No I’m not. I’m a character in a movie. I’m points of light, fixed on a plane.”

  A tear-gas canister crashes through the window. There is a pounding against the door.

  “The cops!” I (Guy) say, reaching for the .45 automatic.

  “The pimps!” Marie says.

  The room is filling with gas. Bullets fly. I fire at the door, the window shades, as I reach for Marie’s hand. The door bursts open.

  Two quick closeups: her face, terrified; mine, determined, with a snarl and a holy wreath of cordite rising from my pistol.

  My head is numb. I see in the dim worklight from my screen the last note they stuck under the door fluttering as the invisible gas is pumped in.

  I type fin.

  I reach for the non-existent button which will wipe everything but This Guy Goes to Town . . . and mentally push it.

  I (Guy) smile up at them as they come through the doors and walls: pimps, Nazis, film critics, studio cops, deep-sea divers, spacemen, clowns, and lawyers.

  Through the windows I can see the long geometric rows of the shrubs forming quincunxes, the classical statuary, people moving to and fro in a garden like a painting by Fragonard.

  I must have been away a long time; someone was telling me, as I was making my way toward these first calm thoughts, that This Guy . . . is the biggest hit of the season. I have been told that while I was on my
four-week vacation from human cares and woes that I have become that old-time curiosity: the rich man who is crazy as a piss ant.

  Far less rich, of course, than I would have been had I not renegotiated my contract before my last, somewhat spectacular, orgy of movie-and-lovemaking in my locked office.

  I am now calm. I am not looking forward to my recovery, but suppose I will have to get some of my own money out of my manager’s guardianship.

  A nurse comes in, opens the taffeta curtains at another set of windows, revealing nice morning sunlight through the tiny, very tasteful, bars.

  She turns to me and smiles.

  It is Anouk Aimee.

  AFTERWORD

  I predicted all the crap you’re seeing at the Googleplex in this story 20 years ago. All the explosions, all the CGI etc. etc.

  Of course, the movies in this story are lots better than any you’ll ever see at the Mall.

  I wanted a story in which the French New Wave of the late 50s and early 60s was recreated, made new again. Those films burst on the cinema world with a power audiences not seeing them for the first time can’t comprehend—now, all their tricks are just part of the cinematic grammar, i.e. how movies are made. They—(mostly reviewers associated with Cahiers du Cinema—Truffaut, Godard, that bunch) tried to invent cinema anew (since both American and French films were mostly snoozing in the 1950s)—make it fun again, tell new stories, or old ones new ways.

  As I said elsewhere—what they really had going for them was a not-very-good grasp of English—they watched what was happening in American and British films but pretty much had to figure out their own dialogue (hence their preference for American B-movies—you could follow the action in those if you were a chimpanzee who’d never seen a movie—you didn’t need to know the language to see the movie.)

  Some of the old guys, too—Resnais, Chabrol—who’d been working in the business already—saw what the new guys were doing and started making films their own way.

  You got your novelist friends and acquaintances to write a screenplay (something they’d never ever considered until you asked) or you adapted some Fawcett Gold Medal American paperback (you had a bilingual friend read it and tell you what happened in the book); you paid $200 in francs for the rights to some poor hack in Hoboken who’d written it, and you took your crew of 2 and 2 actors out onto the streets of some Paris burb, and you made a film, which, in the early Sixties made the American distributor half a million bucks on his $10,000 investment . . .

  It was a heady time for French cinema.

  Up here in the 1980s present I saw the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin on the wall—as soon as we got computers in the cinema business, things would change, and probably for the worse. Only I got it ass-backwards (“Pioneers leave ugly towns.”)—instead of one person and one computer, it’s 7 zillion people and 5000 computers—have you ever sat all the way through the credits of a movie with lots of CGI stuff in it? 2nd assistant to virtual swing-crew dolly grip—Eddie “Sweezel” Mopac and “Sweezel’s” relatives applaud.

  Anyway: I wrote this on December 15-18, 1986 for George Zebrowski’s first round of Synergy anthologies. It says here I goobered with it some more on March 9, 1987, which I don’t remember. (YES I DO. Some Moron at HBJ wanted me to take out the JFK-Marilyn-Jackie scene because Jackie had just sued someone for 6 bazillion simoleons and won—I was talking about the uses to which the computer stuff could make anyone do anything on the screen. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’) I get into these fights with morons all the time. Zebrowski of course backed me—the scene stayed in, slightly altered. That was the two-minute rewrite on March 9, three months after I’d written the story. It was a paragraph to start with, and it was still a paragraph when I got through with it.

  Dave Garnett picked it up for his SF Orbit Yearbook, an attempt to establish a British YBSF (that didn’t work: the complaint: too many Yanks in it. He said—this is about the English Language, but they didn’t hear him.) This one is of course in my collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures.

  Another note: for an early Armadillocon, Ruth Barrett got me, Neal Barrett Jr. and Joe Lansdale to record 2 of our stories, reading in various music and sermon-recording studios around the state and put together a 3-cassette pkg called The Gonzo Tapes (all in three days!) and sold them out at the Armadillocon. I still have mine—where’s yours? (Recordings of me reading my stories are rare: Ellen Datlow’s done some in the last few years on CD—this will soon be remedied by me recording EVERYTHING in Howard Who? (as an audio-book) before a few nights of invited audiences.

  Start lining up NOW.

  HOUSEHOLD WORDS; OR, THE POWERS-THAT-BE

  “His theory of life was entirely wrong. He thought men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellow have turkey for their Christmas dinner. . . .”

  —Thomas Carlyle

  He was the first to find out the immense spiritual power of the Christmas turkey.

  —Mrs. Oliphant

  Under a deep cerulean November sky, the train stopped on a turn near the road one half-mile outside the town of Barchester.

  Two closed carriages waited on the road. Passengers leaned out the train windows and watched as a small man in a suit as brown as a Norfolk biffin stepped down from the doorway at the end of the third railcar.

  Men waved their hats, women their scarves. “Hurray Charlie!” they yelled. “Hoorah, Mr. Dickens! Hooray for Boz!”

  The small man, accompanied by two others, limped across the cinders to a group of men who waited, hats in hand, near the carriages. He turned, doffed his stovepipe hat to the train, and waved to the cheering people.

  Footmen loaded his traveling case and the trunk of props from the train into the last carriage.

  The train, with barely a lurch, moved smoothly on down the tracks toward the cathedral tower of the town, hidden from view by trees. There a huge crowd, estimated at more than three thousand, would be waiting for the author, to cheer him and watch him alight.

  The welcoming committee had met him here to obviate that indignity, and to take him by a side street to his hotel, avoiding the crowds.

  When the men were all in, the drivers at the fronts of the carriages released their brakes, and the carriages made their way quickly down the road toward town.

  Promptly at 8 p.m. the lights in the Workingman’s Hall came up to full brilliance.

  Onstage were three deep-magenta folding screens, the center one parallel to the audience, the two wings curved in slightly toward them. The stage curtains had been drawn in to touch the wings of the screen. Directly in front of the center panel stood a waist-high, four-legged small table. At the audience’s right side of the desk was a raised wooden block; at its left, on a small lower projection, stood a glass and a sweating carafe of ice water; next to the water were an ivory letter opener and a white linen handkerchief. The top of the table was covered with a fringed magenta cloth that hung below the tabletop only an inch or so.

  Without preamble, Charles Dickens walked with a slight limp in from the side of the stage and took his place behind the desk, carrying in his hand a small octavo volume. When he stood behind the thin-legged table his whole body, except for the few inches across his waist, was fully visible to the audience

  There came a thunderous roar of applause, wave after wave, then as one the audience rose to its feet, joyed for the very sight of the man who had brought so much warmth and wonder to their heater-sides and hearths.

  He stood unmoving behind the desk, looking over them with his bright brown eyes above the now-familiar (due to the frontispiece by Mr. Frith in his latest published book, Pip’s Expectations) visage with its high balding forehead, the shock of brownish hair combed to the left, the large pointed beard and connected thick mustache. He wore a brown formal evening suit, the jacket with black vel
vet lapels worn opened showing his vest and watch chain His shirt was white, with an old-fashioned neck stock in place of the new button-on collars, and he wore an even more old-fashioned bow tie, with two inches of end hanging down from the bows.

  After two full minutes of applause, he nodded to the audience and they slowed, then stopped, sitting down with much clatter of canes and rustle of clothing and scraping of chairs, a scattering of coughs. From far back in the hall came a set of nervous hiccups, quickly shushed.

  “My dear readers,” said Dickens, “you do me more honor than I can stand. Since it is nearing the holiday season. I have chosen my reading especially as suits that most Christian of seasons.” Murmurs went around the hall. “As I look around me at this fine Barchester crowd, I see many of you in the proud blue and red uniforms of Her Majesty’s Power Service, and I must remind you that I was writing in a time, more than two decades gone, when things in our country were neither as Christian as we should have liked, nor as fast and modern as we thought. To mention nothing of a type of weather only the most elderly—and I count myself among them—remember with absolutely no regrets whatsoever.” Laughter. “As I read should you my auditors be moved to express yourselves—in matters of appreciation and applause, tears, or indeed hostility”—more laughter—please be assured you may do so without distracting or discomfiting me in any adverse way.”

  He poured a small amount of water from carafe to glass and drank. “Tonight, I shall read to you The Christmas Garland.”