The End of the End of Everything Page 7
Finally, Jack calls him in for a meeting. Like Karloff, Jack is a kind man. Anger is not his natural métier, yet the Creature is forced to stand dripping on the carpet in the director’s trailer, listening to his gentle rebuke. Somehow that makes it worse, Jack’s generosity of spirit. “I have no choice, you see,” the director admonishes him. “We’re on a tight schedule. We’re not making Gone With the Wind, you know.”
“It’s going to be a good picture,” the Creature says.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be a good picture. I said that we have to make our release date or both our careers are on the line.”
“Your career,” the Creature rasps. “What kind of career am I likely to have, Jack?”
“You’re unique. After people see this picture, offers are going to come rolling in.”
“Don’t patronize me, Jack. We both know there’s only one role I can play.”
Jack sighs. “I guess you’re right. But still, this is going to be a good film. You’ll get to play this role again.”
The Creature laughs humorlessly, snared in a dilemma even his human colleagues must share, forever trapped in the prison house of self. That’s the appeal of acting, he supposes: the chance to be someone else, if only for a little while. And isn’t that what he’s doing here, playing at being something he’s not? He’s not a monster. He never has been. If his range of roles is limited—if he is doomed to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon—well that’s Hollywood. He thinks of Karloff and Lugosi. Who does he want to become? Does he wish to accept his fate with grace or does he wish to rail perpetually against it, strung out on drugs and bitterness? Is being the Creature any different than being a carnival freak? Yet still he longs for his lost home. How he hates the poachers who have done this to him. He’d like to poke their eyeballs out, too. And eat them.
So maybe he’s a monster, after all.
“I need you on the set on time,” Jack is saying while these thoughts run through the Creature’s head. “It’s expensive to shoot underwater, especially with the 3D rig. Every time you don’t show up when you’re supposed to, you cost us money.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” the Creature says.
“Look, I know this is hard for you. Nobody ever said acting was easy. Look at Brando. Channel your anger into the role. I need you to be the Creature I know you can be.”
The Creature doesn’t know quite what Jack means by this. He doesn’t even know who—or what—he is anymore. Yet he vows to himself that he will try for something more complex than a B-movie monster—to draw not only upon his fury and resentment, but upon his passion for Julie. He vows to do better.
He does, too.
The Creature shows up promptly as requested. He lingers between shots. He tries to make small talk with the crew. But what is there to say, really? He’s an eight-foot amphibian, finned and armored in plates of bone. He could eviscerate any one of them with the twitch of a talon. Monster or not, he is a monster to them.
Not Julie, though, or so he tells himself. Perhaps Karloff is right: set against his natural environment, she seems to recognize his grace. Indeed she seems to share it. Unburdened by the clunky scuba tanks the men’s roles demand, she glides through the water. And between shots she dispenses with the bathrobe she’d taken to draping herself in on the Universal lot, as if swimming together has drawn them closer. Of all the actors on the set, she alone seems entirely at ease with him. They spend more and more time talking. As he lolls in the shallows, she tells him about her recent divorce and about growing up in Arkansas; she tells him about her first days in Hollywood, working as a secretary and taking voice lessons on the side. Yet she is still capable of blind cruelty.
“You’re lucky,” she says. “You never had to fight for your dreams.”
The Creature hardly knows how to respond. So what if Universal picked him up the minute William Alland laid eyes on him? Unlike Julie, he’ll never play another role in his life; all the elocution lessons in the world won’t change his inhuman growl. He’s not even sure what he aspires to anymore. Stardom? Freedom? A return to the Black Lagoon? In his dreams, he sweeps Julie into his embrace, carries her off to the Amazon, unveils to her the wonders of his vanished life: the splendid isolation of the Lagoon, the sluggish currents of the great river, the mystery of the crepuscular forest.
Maybe this newfound intimacy accounts for the otherworldly beauty of the Wakulla scenes. In the dailies, Julie cuts the surface, her white bathing suit shining down through the gloom like god light. The Creature stalks her from below, half-hidden among drifting fronds of thalassic flora, rapt by her ethereal beauty. His webbed hands cleave the water. Bubbles erupt skyward with his every kick. As she swims, he glides toward her from below, up, up, up, until he is swimming on his back beneath her and closing fast: a dozen feet, half a dozen, less, his immovable face frozen in an expression of impossible longing. He reaches out a tentative hand to brush her ankle as she treads water—and pulls it away at the last moment, as terrified of her rejection on celluloid as he is terrified of her rejection in life. What one does not risk, one cannot lose; worse yet, he thinks, what one does not risk, one cannot gain. A sense of inconsolable despair seizes him. In the images projected on the screen, he sees now how little their worlds can connect. She is a creature of the daylit skin of the planet, he of the shadowy submarine depths.
Jack praises the silent yearning in the Creature’s performance.
Yet the whole thing drives the director crazy nonetheless. Frustrated by the task of stitching the haunting underwater scenes together with the mundane L.A footage, he asks the studio for reshoots and is denied. For the first time—the only time—the Creature sees Jack angry, his face a mask of fury. “This could be so much more than another goddamn monster flick,” he says in the dim projection trailer, flinging away the 3D glasses perched on his nose. Even this angry gesture drives home the Creature’s inhumanity. Alone in the back row, he must pinch his glasses between two delicate claws. His flattened nose provides no bridge to support them. He has no external ears to hook them over. Everything about him is streamlined for his underwater existence.
The Creature grinds his cardboard glasses under one webbed foot. He slams out of the trailer, the door crumpling with a screech of tortured metal as he hurtles into the moonlit night. He is halfway to the water when Julie catches up with him. “Wait,” she says, “Wait—”
Her voice hitches in the place where his name ought to be—for of course he has no name, does he? He is the Creature, the Gill Man, nothing more. There has been no one to name him—even the freaks did not name him—and he has never thought to name himself. He would not know how to begin. Fred? John? Earl? Such human names fall leaden on the tongue, inadequate to describe a . . . a creature, a fiend, an inhuman monster. How will they credit him in the film? The Creature as the Creature?
“Wait,” Julie says again. “Creature, wa—”
The Creature whirls to face her, one massive hand drawn back to strike.
“Don’t,” she whispers, and the Creature checks the blow. For an instant, everything hangs balanced on a breath. Then the Creature lowers his hand, turns away, and shambles toward the water, his great feet flapping. Something feels broken inside him. Jack’s words—
—another goddamn monster flick—
—echo inside his head. That’s all he is, isn’t he? A monster. A monster who in a moment of fury, would have with a single swipe of his claws torn from her shoulders the head of the woman he loved. A monster who would in the grip of his rage, feed upon her blood. The Creature would cry, but even that simple human solace is denied him. The dark waters beckon.
“Wait,” Julie says. “Please.”
Almost against his will, the Creature turns to face her. She stands maybe a dozen feet away. In the moonlight, tears glint upon her cheeks. Beyond her, the men—Jack and Dick and Richard Denning, the third lead—stand silhouetted against the beacon of golden light pouring through the trailer’s shattered door.<
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“Why?” the Creature says, knowing the doom that will come upon him if he stays.
“Because,” Julie says, “because I love you.”
So Karloff was right. For a heartbeat, happiness—a great and abiding contentment that no mere human being can plumb—settles over the Creature like a benediction. But what is the depth of love, he wonders, its strange currents and dimensions? What is its price, and is he willing to pay it? And a line from another monster movie comes to him, one that Jack showed him in pre-production: It was beauty killed the beast.
This is Hollywood.
It vill fuck you every time.
“I love you, too,” he says in his inhuman rasp, and in the same instant, in his heart, he recants that love, refuses and renounces it. For Julie. For himself. He will not be the monster that loves. He will not be the monster that dies. He will not be their freak, their creature. He will not haunt their dreams. They can finish their fucking film with a man in a rubber suit.
The Creature puts his back to Julie and wades into the water, glimmering with moonlight. It welcomes him home, rising to his shins and thighs before the bottom drops away beneath him, and he dives. He has studied the locations, he has explored the Springs’ network of caverns: from here the Wakulla River to the St. Marks and Apalachee Bay, and thence to the Gulf. The Black Lagoon calls out to him across the endless miles, and so the Creature strikes off for home, knowing now how fleeting are the heart’s desires, knowing that Julie too would ebb into memory, this perfect moment lost, this happiness receding forever into the past.
Mating Habits
of the
Late Cretaceous
They’d come to the Cretaceous to save their marriage.
“Why not the Paleogene,” said Peter, who had resolutely refused to look at any of the material Gwyneth had sent him. “Or the Little Ice Age for that matter? Some place without carnivores.”
“There are only two resorts,” Gwyneth said, waving a brochure at him. “Jurassic and Cretaceous. People want to see dinosaurs.”
She wanted to see dinosaurs.
“And I’m afraid travel to inhabited eras is no longer permitted, Mr. Braunmiller,” the agent put in. “Ever since the Eckels Incident. So the Little Ice Age is out.”
“Besides,” Gwyneth said. “I wouldn’t mind a few carnivores.”
Peter sighed.
Cool air misted down from unseen vents. The agent’s desk, a curved wedge of gleaming mahogany, floated in emptiness. Surround screens immersed them in sensory-enhanced three-dimensional renderings from the available eras. One moment the hot siroccos of some time-vanished desert stung their skin. The next, the damp, shrieking hothouse of a Jurassic jungle sprang sweat from their brows.
“Why not a sim?” Peter asked.
“I’ve had enough of simulations, Peter,” Gwyneth said, thinking of the expense. Over Peter’s protests, she had mortgaged the house they’d bought three years ago, cashed in retirement and savings accounts, taken on loans they couldn’t afford.
All for this.
“You’re certain, then?” the agent asked.
Peter opened his mouth and closed it again.
Twilight waters washed the barren shingles of some ancient inland sea.
“We’re certain,” Gwyneth said.
Tablets materialized in front of them.
“Just a few releases to sign,” the agent said. “Warranties, indemnities against personal injury—”
“I thought the yoke—” Peter said, and a fresh draft of whispering air blew down upon them.
“The lawyers insist,” the agent said, smiling.
An hour later, forms signed in triplicate, notarized, and filed away, the agent ushered them into an airlock. When they stripped, Gwyneth could feel Peter’s gaze upon her; she didn’t so much as glance at him, though he was lean and fit, as well muscled at thirty-five as he had been at their wedding seven years before. Stinging jets of anti-bacterial spray enveloped them. Industrial-strength compressors blasted them dry. They dressed in tailored, featherweight safari gear, and cycled through another airlock, their luggage hovering behind them. The adjoining chamber was bereft of luxury—no surround screens or polished mahogany, no calming mists of murmuring air. Their boots rang on polished concrete. Fluorescent globes floated high in the latticed spaces above them, leaching color from their faces. White-clad technicians looked up from their tablets as the airlock dilated. Behind them crackled the time machine, more impressive than Gwyneth had thought it would be, a miracle of sizzling yellow-green energy, the raw stuff of creation itself, harnessed by human ingenuity and bound screaming into colossal spider arms of curving steel and iron.
The technicians took charge of them. The hiss of hypodermic injections followed, then diaphanous bands of black that melted closed around their wrists like wax. The technician touched Gwyneth’s; far down in its polished depths a series of lights—orange and red and green—flashed once and was gone.
Her yoke.
The other technician, finishing up with Peter, smiled. “Your guide will meet you on the other side,” he said. “Ready to go?”
The time machine spat fire, throwing off scorching arcs of green and yellow.
They stepped into the light.
And were gone.
A sheet of green flame blinded them. Time blurred—a day, a week, a year, then more, the centuries peeling away like leaves, so that Gwyneth, who was barely thirty-four, felt young and alive as she had not felt in this last year. The time machine stank of history, of the sun beating down upon the tiered pyramids of new-built Aztec temples; of wheat flourishing for the first time under the hands of men; and further yet, of a dark age where shrewd monkeys huddled in terror around their lightning-struck fires. But Eckels had closed all that to them, and just as well, Gwyneth supposed, for he had bestowed upon them in its lieu the immense panorama of geologic time. And how she longed to step out of her life into a world fresh made, where great Triceratops lifted his three-pronged head and the sky-flung demon of the age, titanic Quetzalcoatlus, still spread his leathery wings; where the greatest of the thunder lizards, the tyrant king of all that he surveyed, Tyrannosaurus Rex, yet bestrode the terrified earth. Where, most of all, none of it had happened yet, and she could pretend that maybe it never would.
Then there was an enormous jolt, and Gwyneth cried aloud in terror or delight. Peter reached for her hand, and a lean, leathery man whose smile never reached his eyes stood before them.
They were there.
It was a resort, all right—a rugged dream carved out of the primeval wilderness. Below and to the west, a long savannah sloped away to a distant glimmer of sea. Above and to the east a jagged mountain range knifed through the earth’s crust, so that morning came late there and afternoons lingered into a blue twilight that seemed to stretch out forever. To the south and to the north, encircling arms of forest fell in ranks toward the distant plain. And in the heart of it all, like a precious stone set in swirls of green and brown, gleamed Cretacia, a maze of sandy paths and hidden glades where clear fountains tumbled and stone benches grew black with lichen. Private cabanas perched on tiers cut into the wooded ridges, and jeweled swimming pools glinted among the trees. Below the whitewashed sprawl of the hotel itself wound a quaint commercial district. Restaurants staffed by murmuring servers crowded up against narrow shops that sold books—actual books—and bath salts and summer dresses at such exorbitant rates that Gwyneth laughed in disbelief.
Yet her heart quickened in delight when the tall man with fine crinkles around his eyes—Wilson, Robert Wilson, he’d introduced himself—thumbed open their door for the first time and she saw the sheer decadence of the place: a bower of eggshell white and blue with a bed veiled in gauzy shadow, a vase of tropical flowers, and a south-facing floor-to-ceiling window (no sim screen, but glass, thick, reinforced glass) that gave upon a forested ravine, where something small and dappled scurried through the shadows, and if you stood on tip-toe and craned your neck, yo
u could catch a glimpse of diamonds glittering upon the sea.
“I’ll leave you to unpack,” Wilson said, and turning from the window Gwyneth saw him—really saw him—for the first time: a hard, sun-baked man with sandy hair and an unhandsome face like a promontory of granite. His khakis were worn and stained, his boots scuffed. For a moment she was ashamed of their own gear, so new that it rustled when they walked.
“The concierge can take care of all your needs here on the grounds,” Wilson said. “If you want to go outside—when you want to go outside—I’ll be your guide.”
Turning from the window, Peter extended his hand. Gwyneth saw to her horror the folded fifty inside it.
Wilson stiffened. “No thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.”
The door closed softly behind him.
“Peter,” Gywneth said. “You’ve insulted him now. He’s a wilderness guide, not a bellhop.”
“Just as well, I suppose. God knows we can’t afford to spend another dime.”