LITMIR.BIZ

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signals and probably thought solid matter could pass through solid matter if you only wish upon a star cleared our fender by inches.

      “Tinseltown, kiddo,” Henry said again, remembering to breathe.

      Henry Jessel was nine years my junior, but he’d always somehow been the leader in our friendship or partnership or whatever it was. He had all but seized control of my life, which entitled him to take fifteen percent of my income and call me “kiddo.” Henry Jessel was my literary agent. He got me my first novelization job, Captain Cut-Throat, the book version of a pirate movie which had lasted in the theaters almost a whole day; a book which sold dozens of copies. Then he loaded me on a plane for the Coast, where I, Jerry Jack Miller, became one of the least-known, best-paid writers in Hollywood, or anywhere else for that matter.

      And I didn’t even work in movies. Not exactly. Which was the problem. I was a ghost. My specialty was writing novels for TV stars who pretended to be novelists, which paid extraordinarily well, but my name seldom made it even into the dedication. I felt like I was pouring my talents down a black hole.

      “I just can’t do it anymore,” I said. “I stare at the blank screen and I can’t.”

      “You are behind on your next book,” Henry said, gravely.

      As we absorbed the quintessential Los Angeles experience, sitting grid locked in traffic in the dry-roasting August heat while the car’s air-conditioner strained desperately to cope, it all came out, how I’d loved it all at first, and done all the touristy things in the first few weeks out here: Disneyland, Universal, Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame—and that was where the disillusion began to set in, because Hollywood Boulevard is a wreck, with many of the great Deco theaters just burned-out shells between blocks of shabby storefronts and outlets for we-want-your-bucks religious cults; and there’s even a crack in Elvis’s star, right there in the sidewalk and nobody really cares except maybe the enormous dinosaur looking down over the rooftops; but for a while still I found the smaller weird things, the fun things, which kept me going for a while, like the Ackermansion and the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Frankenstein’s Restaurant (where the tables are haunted); and Venice Beach is really very nice, and I even made the pilgrimage to Bronson Canyon where they filmed any number of matinee westerns, not to mention Robot Monster; but I suppose it was when I saw Donald Fucking Duck’s footprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese, right next to Shirley Temple’s and Humphrey Bogart’s that it came to me, Hey, this whole goddamn town is a lie, which makes me the lie behind the lie—and—and—

      Henry reached over and put his hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way and said, “You don’t have to live in Hollywood, not at this stage of your career. Later, yes, but for now you could write your books just as well from a trailer park in Nebraska, and if you’d like me to arrange it—”

      “That’s not the point, Henry.”

      “No it isn’t. You aren’t getting to the point. Jerry, when you talk to me, I will listen. But when you just kvetch, I will let it wash over me like water over a stone until you get to the point. And, incidentally, Donald Duck doesn’t have a middle name, so watch it.”

      Traffic started moving again. In time we squeezed by the scene of a multiple-car accident, where it didn’t look like anyone was hurt but there were cops everywhere and people waving their arms and shouting; only we couldn’t hear what they were saying because the windows were up the and the air conditioning was on (which made it all unreal, like a movie with the soundtrack turned off), and that was when I got to the point we’d both been waiting for.

      “I’m nothing, Henry, nobody. I’m not an writer. I’m the guy who does space-operas for Carl Sanderson to put his name on. The man is an absolute fake. He’s a Schwarzenegger rip-off and even his muscles are fake. He’s supposed to be this square-jawed hero, but I happen to know that his jaw’s a fake too. It’s prosthetic. He got it from the same company that does Jack Palance’s cheekbones and Kirk Douglas’s chin. Christ, the way that moron gets on the talk shows you’d think he actually thinks he wrote those books, or can even read them.”

      “The man is an actor, Jerry. That’s his job. He’s been a cowboy, a gladiator, the robot on Cybercops, and now he’s the mercenary captain on Galactic Avengers. He’s fully capable of playing the role of a writer if the powers that be back in New York want to shell out hundreds of thousands of bucks for books with his name on them, and if he doesn’t actually know how to spell ‘the’ the same way twice in a row, that is a small and incidental detail which you and I are paid very well to take care of.”

      “I’m just a hack, Henry. I want to be something more, something real.”

      Since we were caught motionless in traffic again, Henry was able to turn to me with a look of genuine alarm on his face and say, “Jerry, you’re not having an attack of artistic integrity, are you?”

      “Well I—”

      “Jerry, remember what you were before I made you what you are. You’d published a few pretty sonnets in quarterlies which paid you in copies, and then there were your short stories for which the publishers sometimes threw in a packet of bird-seed; and then I said to you, ‘Put yourself in my hands,’ and you put yourself there, and now you live in a gorgeous house in Palos Verdes and you got a gorgeous wife and gorgeous kids, and your bank account is not at all below six figures. I’d say you’re doing pretty well, Jerry, but remember, it’s part of a bargain you and I made five years ago, and I get plans for you in the future too, but for it all to work, you’ve got to do your part while I do my part. I am sure you understand that, Jerry. I do not phrase that as a question. I made you an offer and you accepted, of your own free will, knowing what it would entail.”

      “Ah, Mephistopheles—”

      Once more he touched me on the shoulder in that father-knows-best sort of way and said, “I will take care of everything, Jerry. I’m your agent. Trust me.”

      And again the traffic started moving, pretty briskly this time, and all I said now was, “Where are we going anyway?”

      “You haven’t figured out?”

      “Henry, this is Los Angeles, which is like Manhattan only horizontal. It’s so big you can see the curvature of the Earth in some of the parking lots. No, I don’t know where we’re going or what it is exactly we’re trying to accomplish.”

      “Think of it as emergency therapy, Jerry. Something to get the creative juices flowing.”

      “A sanatorium then, for shock treatment?”

      “More of a secret, something which, as they’d say in the military, is available on a need-to-know basis. Now you need to know, so that’s where we’re going.”

      “Ah, I see.”

      “No you don’t.”

      “So you’re psychic now, too?”

      “No need, Jerry. But as your literary agent, I do have certain talents.”

      “You and Carl Sanderson both.”

      “Exactly.”

      There was an ominous resonance to that last line, but I didn’t say anything more and just stared out the window as we got off the Freeway a little past Burbank and turned and turned again and again; and if Henry knew where he was going then maybe he really did have special powers. Maybe I even dozed off for a while because as the sun went down I start I looked at my reflection in the windshield and for a long moment of helpless, utter horror, I saw not my own face, but that of Carl Sanderson, heroic space mercenary of large screen and small; then I was clawing away at my face and it came off and underneath was a robot and cowboy and a gladiator and Kermit the Frog and a bug-eyed, drooling Smile Face and then just a skull, which cracked into dust and bits, and there I was sitting in the car next to Henry with no head at all, and he reached over and screwed a giant light bulb into my neck; which he switched on somehow, and put a paper mask on top of it, which started to burn through from the heat of the bulb—

      And then the car came

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