A Graveyard for Lunatics

Rain showered the white tombstones.

I gave the ladder a gentle shake.

“My God!” I yelled.

For the old man, on top of the ladder, toppled.

I fell out of the way.

He landed like a ten-ton lead meteor, between gravestones. I got to my feet and stood over him, not able to hear for the thunder in my chest, and the rain whispering on the stones and drenching him.

I stared down into the dead man’s face.

He stared back at me with oyster eyes.

Why are you looking at me? he asked, silently.

Because, I thought, I know you!

His face was a white stone.

James Charles Arbuthnot, former head of Maximus Films, I thought.

Yes, he whispered.

But, but, I cried silently, the last time I saw you, I was thirteen years old on my roller skates in front of Maximus Films, the week you were killed, twenty years ago, and for days there were dozens of photos of two cars slammed against a telephone pole, the terrible wreckage, the bloody pavement, the crumpled bodies, and for another two days hundreds of photos of the thousand mourners at your funeral and the million flowers and, weeping real tears, the New York studio heads, and the wet eyes behind two hundred sets of dark glasses as the actors came out, with no smiles. You were really missed. And some final pictures of the wrecked cars on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it took weeks for the newspapers to forget, and for the radios to stop their praise and forgive the king for being forever dead. All that, James Charles Arbuthnot, was you.

Can’t be! Impossible, I almost yelled. You’re here tonight up on the wall? Who put you there? You can’t be killed all over again, can you?

Lightning struck. Thunder fell like the slam of a great door. Rain showered the dead man’s face to make tears in his eyes. Water filled his gaping mouth.

I spun, yelled, and fled.

When I reached the taxi I knew I had left my heart back with the body.

It ran after me now. It struck me like a rifle shot midriff, and knocked me against the cab.

The driver stared at the gravel drive beyond me, pounded by rain.

“Anyone there?!” I yelled.

“No!”

“Thank God. Get out of here!”

The engine died.

We both moaned with despair.

The engine started again, obedient to fright.

It is not easy to back up at sixty miles an hour.

We did.

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I sat up half the night looking around at my ordinary living room with ordinary furniture in a small safe bungalow house on a normal street in a quiet part of the city. I drank three cups of hot cocoa but stayed cold as I threw images on the walls, shivering.

People can’t die twice! I thought. That couldn’t have been James Charles Arbuthnot on that ladder, clawing the night wind. Bodies decay. Bodies vanish.

I remembered a day in 1934 when J. C. Arbuthnot had got out of his limousine in front of the studio as I skated up, tripped, and fell into his arms. Laughing, he had balanced me, signed my book, pinched my cheek, and gone inside.

And, now, Sweet Jesus, that man, long lost in time, high in a cold rain, had fallen in the graveyard grass.

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.

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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.