A Graveyard for Lunatics

I heard voices and saw headlines:

J. C. ARBUTHNOT DEAD BUT RESURRECTED.

?No!? I said to the white ceiling where the rain whispered, and the man fell. ?It wasn?t him. It?s a lie!? Wait until dawn, a voice said.

5

Dawn was no help.

The radio and TV news found no dead bodies.

The newspaper was full of car crashes and dope raids. But no J. C. Arbuthnot.

I wandered out of my house, back to my garage, full of toys, old science and invention magazines, no automobile, and my secondhand bike.

I biked halfway to the studio before I realized I could not recall any intersection I had blindly sailed through. Stunned, I fell off the bike, trembling.

A fiery red open-top roadster burned rubber and stopped parallel to me.

The man at the wheel, wearing a cap put backward, gunned the throttle. He stared through the windshield, one eye bright blue and uncovered, the other masked by a monocle that had been hammered in place and gave off bursts of sun fire.

?Hello, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch,? he cried, with a voice that lingered over German vowels.

My bike almost fell from my grip. I had seen that profile stamped on some old coins when I was twelve. The man was either a resurrected Caesar or the German high pontiff of the Holy Roman Empire. My heart banged all of the air out of my lungs.

?What?? shouted the driver. ?Speak up!?

?Hello,? I heard myself say, ?you stupid goddamn son-of-a-bitch you. You?re Fritz Wong, aren?t you? Born in Shanghai of a Chinese father and an Austrian mother, raised in Hong Kong, Bombay, London, and a dozen towns in Germany. Errand boy, then cutter then writer then cinematographer at UFA then director across the world. Fritz Wong, the magnificent director who made the great silent film The Cavalcanti Incantation. The guy who ruled Hollywood films from 1925 to 1927 and got thrown out for a scene in a film where you directed yourself as a Prussian general inhaling Gerta Froelich?s underwear. The international director who ran back to and then got out of Berlin ahead of Hitler, the director of Mad Love, Delirium, To the Moon and Back??

With each pronouncement, his head had turned a quarter of an inch, at the same time as his mouth had creased into a Punch-and-Judy smile. His monocle flashed a Morse code.

Behind the monocle was the faintest lurking of an Orient eye. I imagined the left eye was Peking, the right Berlin, but no. It was the monocle?s magnification that focused the Orient. His brow and cheeks were a fortress of Teutonic arrogance, built to last two thousand years or until his contract was canceled.

?What did you call me?? he asked, with immense politeness.

?What you called me,? I said, faintly. ?A stupid,? I whispered, ?goddamn son-of-a-bitch.?

He nodded. He smiled. He banged the car door wide.

?Get in!?

?But you don?t??

??know you? Do you think I run around giving lifts to just any dumb-ass bike rider? You think I haven?t seen you ducking around corners at the studio, pretending to be the White Rabbit at the commissary. You?re that??he snapped his fingers? ?bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Warlord of Mars? the illegitimate offspring of H. G. Wells, out of Jules Verne. Stow your bike. We?re late!?

I tossed my bike in the back and was in the car only in time as it revved up to fifty.

?Who can say?? shouted Fritz Wong, above the exhaust. ?We are both insane, working where we work. But you are lucky, you still love it.?

?Don?t you?? I asked.

?Christ help me,? he muttered. ?Yes!?

I could not take my eyes off Fritz Wong as he leaned over the steering wheel to let the wind plow his face.

?You are the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw!? he cried. ?You want to get yourself killed? What?s wrong, you never learned to drive a car? What kind of bike is that? Is this your first screen job? How come you write that crap? Why not read Thomas Mann, Goethe!?

?Thomas Mann and Goethe,? I said, quietly, ?couldn?t write a screenplay worth a damn. Death in Venice, sure. Faust? you betcha. But a good screenplay? or a short story like one of mine, landing on the Moon and making you believe it? Hell, no. How come you drive with that monocle??

?None of your damn business! It?s better to be blind. If you look too closely at the driver ahead, you want to ram his ass! Let me see your face. You approve of me??

?I think you?re funny!?

?Jesus! You are supposed to take everything that Wong the magnificent says as gospel. How come you don?t drive??

We were both yelling against the wind that battered our eyes and mouths.