Remake

“Wrong way, Corrigan,” I said, turning her around to face the front. The sign read Beverly Hills, which didn’t seem very likely. “Where did you want to get off?”

She shrugged off my arm, and turned back to the screen.

“The way out’s that way,” I said, pointing to the front.

She shook her head and pointed at Fred Astaire emerging out of the fog. “Through there,” she said, and sank down to sitting, her white skirt in a circle. The screen went silver, reflecting her sitting there, fishing through her empty palm, and then to golden fog. The lead-in to the ILMGM promo.

I stared at the wall, which didn’t look like a wall, or a mirror. It looked like what it was, a fog of electrons, a veil over emptiness, and for a minute it all seemed possible. For a minute I thought, Alis didn’t get off at Sunset Boulevard. She didn’t get off the skids at all. She stepped through the screen, like Mia Farrow, like Buster Keaton, and into the past.

I could almost see her in her black skirt and green weskit and gloves, disappearing into the golden fog and emerging on a Hollywood Boulevard full of cars and palm trees and lined with rehearsal halls full of mirrors.

“Anything’s Possible,” the voice-over roared.

The Marilyn was on her feet again and weaving toward the back wall.

“Not that way,” I said, and sprinted after her.

It was a good thing she hadn’t been headed for the screens this time — I’d never have made it. By the time I got to her, she was banging on the wall with both fists.

“Let me off!” she shouted. “This is my stop!”

“The way off’s this way,” I said, trying to turn her, but she must have been doing rave. Her arm was like iron.

“I have to get off here,” she said, pounding with the flat of her hands. “Where’s the door?”

“The door’s that way,” I said, wondering if this was how I had been the night Alis brought me home from Burbank. “You can’t get off this way.”

“She did,” she said.

I looked at the back wall and then back at her. “Who did?”

“She did,” she said. “She went right through the door. I saw her,” and puked all over my feet.

MOVIE CLICHE #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious, and everybody gets the point.

SEE: The Wizard of Oz, Field of Dreams, Love Story, What’s New, Pussycat?

I got the Marilyn off at Wilshire and took her to rehab, by which time she’d pretty much pumped her own stomach, and waited to make sure she checked in.

“Are you sure you’ve got time to do this?” she said, looking less like Marilyn and more like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

“I’m sure.” There was plenty of time, now that I knew where Alis was.

While she was filling out paperwork, I accessed Vincent. “I have a question,” I said without preamble. “What if you took a frame and substituted an identical frame? Could that get past the fibe-op ID-locks?”

“An identical frame? What would be the point of that?”

“Could it?”

“I guess,” he said. “Is this for Mayer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What if you substituted a new image that matched the original? Could the ID-locks tell the difference?”

“Matched?”

“A different image that’s the same.”

“You’re splatted,” he said, and signed off.

It didn’t matter. I already knew the ID-locks couldn’t tell the difference. It would take too much memory. And, as Vincent had said, what would be the point of changing an image to one exactly like it?

I waited till the Marilyn was in a bed and getting a ridigaine IV and then got back on the skids. After LaBrea there was nobody on them, but it took me till three-thirty to find the service door to the shut-off section and past five to get it open.

I was worried for a while that Alis had braced it shut, which she had, but not intentionally. One of the fibe-op feed cables was up against it, and when I finally got the door open a crack, all I had to do was push.

She was facing the far wall, looking at the screen that should have been blank in this shut-off section. It wasn’t. In the middle of it, Peter Lawford and June Allyson were demonstrating the Varsity Drag to a gymnasium full of college students in party dresses and tuxes. June was wearing a pink dress and pink heels with pompoms, and so was Alis, and their hair was curled under in identical blond pageboys.

Alis had set the Digimatte on top of its case, with the compositor and pixar beside it on the floor, and snaked the fibe-op cable along the yellow warning strip and around in front of the door to the skids feed. I pushed the cable out from the door, gently, so it wouldn’t break the connection, and opened the door far enough so I could see, and then stood, half-hidden by it, and watched her.