sinned!”
Lord, I thought, dear God, what did priests say in all those old films half a lifetime ago? From stupid remembrance, what!? I had this mad desire to fling myself out to sprint down the middle of nothing with the Beast in fresh flight.
But as I seized my breath, he let forth a dreadful whisper:
“Bless me, father—”
“I’m not your father,” I cried.
“No,” whispered the Beast.
And after a lost moment, added: “You’re my son.”
I gave a jump and listened to my heart knock down a cold tunnel into darkness.
The Beast stirred.
“Who …” pause “. . . do you think …” pause “. . . hired you?”
Dear God!
“I,” said the lost face behind the grille, “did.”
Not Groc? I thought.
And the Beast began to tell a terrible rosary of dark beads, and I could not but slowly, slowly sink back and back until my head rested on the paneling of the booth, and I turned my head and murmured:
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
“That was never my wish. Your friend stumbled on me. He made that bust. Madness. I would have killed him, yes, but he killed himself first. Or made it look as if. He’s alive, waiting for you …. ”
Where!? I wanted to shout. Instead I said: “Why have you saved me?”
“Why … One day I want my story told. You were the only one,” he paused, “. . . who could tell it, and tell it … right. There is nothing in the studio I do not know, or out in the world I do not know. I read all night long and slept in snatches and read more and then whispered through the wall, oh, not so many weeks ago: your name. He’ll do, I said. Get him. That is my historian. And my son.
“And it was so.”
His whisper, behind a mirror, had given me nomination.
And the whisper was here now, not fourteen inches off, and his breath pulsing the air like a bellows, between.
“Sweet Jerusalem’s bone-white hills,” said the pale voice. “I hired and fired, all and everyone, for thousands of days. Who else could do it? What else had I to do but be ugly and want to die. It was my work that kept me alive. Hiring you was a strange sustenance.”
Should I thank him? I wondered.
Soon, he almost whispered. Then:
“I ran the place at first, secondhand, behind the mirror. I knocked Leiber’s eardrums with my voice, predictions on markets, script editings, scanned in the tombs, and delivered to his cheek when he leaned against the wall at two A.M. What meetings! What twins! Ego and super-ego. The horn and the player of the horn. The small dancer. But I the choreographer under glass. My God, we shared his office. He making faces and pretending great decisions, I waiting each night to step forth from behind to sit in the chair by the empty desk with the single phone and dictate to Leiber, my secretary.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“How could you!?”
“I guessed.”
“Guessed!? What? The whole crazy, damned thing? Halloween? Twenty, oh God, twenty years ago?!”
He breathed heavily, waiting.