of fear and magic, memory and pain.
I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.
I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.
The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.
The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.
I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.
In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.
A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.
On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.
She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.
“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. “I got out, didn’t I?”
Then she stood up and walked around the room.
“I can’t believe this hotel is still standing,” she said. “I used to fuck here.” Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.
“Do you worship me?” she asked.
I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.
“Nobody remembers anything anymore,” she said. “It’s a thirty-minute town.”
There was something I had to ask her. “Where are the stars?” I asked. “I keep looking up in the sky, but they aren’t there.”
She pointed at the floor of the chalet. “You’ve been looking in the wrong places,” she said. I had never before noticed that the floor of the chalet was a sidewalk and each paving stone contained a star and a name—names I didn’t know: Clara Kimball Young, Linda Arvidson, Vivian Martin, Norma Talmadge, Olive Thomas, Mary Miles Minter, Seena Owen…
June Lincoln pointed at the chalet window. “And out there.” The window was open, and through it I could see the whole of Hollywood spread out below me—the view from the hills: an infinite spread of twinkling multicolored lights.
“Now, aren’t those better than stars?” she asked.
And they were. I realized I could see constellations in the street lamps and the cars.
I nodded.
Her lips brushed mine.
“Don’t forget me,” she whispered, but she whispered it sadly, as if she knew that I would.
I woke up with the telephone shrilling. I answered it, growled a mumble into the handpiece.
“This is Gerry Quoint, from the studio. We need you for a lunch meeting.”
Mumble something mumble.
“We’ll send a car,” he said. “The restaurant’s about half an hour away.”
The restaurant was airy and spacious and green, and they were waiting for me there.