?Your title was too good. I?m giving it back.
I leaped to grab Crumley?s hands.
?Crumb!! Oh, God! You
We both peered in his icebox.
?If you churn beer and gin in a Waring blender, is
?Why not
We tried.
24
And the phone rang.
?It?s for you,? said Crumley.
?Thank God!? I grabbed the phone. ?Roy!?
Roy said, ?I don?t want to live. Oh, God, this is terrible. Get over here before I go mad. Stage 13!?
And he was gone.
?Crumley!? I said.
Crumley led me out to his car.
We rode across town. I couldn?t get my teeth unclenched to speak. I held so hard to my knees that the circulation ran dead.
At the studio gate I told Crumley, ?Don?t wait. I?ll call in an hour and let you know??
I walked away and bumped into the gate. I found a phone booth near Stage 13 and ordered a taxi to wait outside Stage 9, a good one hundred yards away. Then I walked through the doors of Stage 13.
I stepped into darkness and chaos.
25
I saw ten dozen things which were a devastation to my soul.
Nearby, the masks, skulls, jackstraw legbones, floating ribs, skull faces of the Phantom had been uprooted and hurled across the stage in frenzies.
Further over, a war, an annihilation, had just fallen in its own dusts.
Roy?s spider towns and beetle cities were trodden into the earth. His beasts had been eviscerated, decapitated, blasted, and buried in their own plastic flesh.
I advanced through ruins, scattered as if a night bombing had rained utter destruction upon the miniature roofs, turrets and Lilliputian figurines. Rome had been smashed by a gargantuan Attila. The great library at Alexandria was not burned; its tiny leaflet books, like the wings of hummingbirds, lay in drifts across the dunes. Paris smoldered. London was disemboweled. A giant Napoleon had stomped Moscow flat forever. In sum, five years? work, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had been wasted in, what? Five minutes!
Roy! I thought, you must never see this!
But he had.
As I advanced across the lost battlefields and strewn villages I saw a shadow on the far wall.
It was a shadow from the motion picture
Oh, no, I whispered. It
It
I imagined Roy?s arrival, his shock, his outcry, his smothering despair, then his rage, with new despairs to drown and win after his call to me. Then his wild search for rope, twine, wire, and at last: downslung and drifting peace. He could not live without his wondrous midges and mites, his sports, his dears. He was too old to rebuild it all.
?Roy,? I whispered, ?that
They were never
Then, whispered Roy,
?Roy,? I said, ?would you leave me
Maybe.
?But you wouldn?t let someone hang you!??
Perhaps.