Smoke and Mirrors

“That would have been, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four. How old do I look to you?”

I couldn’t tell. He might have been carved from old wood. Over fifty and younger than Methuselah. I told him so.

“I was born in 1906. God’s truth.”

“Were you born here, in L.A.?”

He shook his head. “When I was born, Los Angeles wasn’t nothin’ but an orange grove, a long way from New York.” He sprinkled fish food on the surface of the water. The three fish bobbed up, pale-white silvered ghost carp, staring at us, or seeming to, the O’s of their mouths continually opening and closing, as if they were talking to us in some silent, secret language of their own.

I pointed to the one he had indicated. “So he’s Ghost, yes?”

“He’s Ghost. That’s right. That one under the lily—you can see his tail, there, see?—he’s called Buster, after Buster Keaton. Keaton was staying here when we got the older two. And this one’s our Princess.”

Princess was the most recognizable of the white carp. She was a pale cream color, with a blotch of vivid crimson along her back, setting her apart from the other two.

“She’s lovely.”

“She surely is. She surely is all of that.”

He took a deep breath then and began to cough, a wheezing cough that shook his thin frame. I was able then, for the first time, to see him as a man of ninety.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded. “Fine, fine, fine. Old bones,” he said. “Old bones.”

We shook hands, and I returned to my treatment and the gloom.

I printed out the completed treatment, faxed it off to Jacob at the studio.

The next day he came over to the chalet. He looked upset.

“Everything okay? Is there a problem with the treatment?”

“Just shit going down. We made this movie with . . . ” and he named a well-known actress who had been in a few successful films a couple of years before. “Can’t lose, huh? Only she is not as young as she was, and she insists on doing her own nude scenes, and that’s not a body anybody wants to see, believe me.

“So the plot is, there’s this photographer who is persuading women to take their clothes off for him. Then he shtups them. Only no one believes he’s doing it. So the chief of police—played by Ms. Lemme Show the World My Naked Butt—realizes that the only way she can arrest him is if she pretends to be one of the women. So she sleeps with him. Now, there’s a twist . . . ”

“She falls in love with him?”

“Oh. Yeah. And then she realizes that women will always be imprisoned by male images of women, and to prove her love for him, when the police come to arrest the two of them she sets fire to all the photographs and dies in the fire. Her clothes burn off first. How does that sound to you?”

“Dumb.”

“That was what we thought when we saw it. So we fired the director and recut it and did an extra day’s shoot. Now she’s wearing a wire when they make out. And when she starts to fall in love with him, she finds out that he killed her brother. She has a dream in which her clothes burn off, then she goes out with the SWAT team to try to bring him in. But he gets shot by her little sister, who he’s also been shtupping.”

“Is it any better?”

He shakes his head. “It’s junk. If she’d let us use a stand-in for the nude sequences, maybe we’d be in better shape.

“What did you think of the treatment?”

“What?”

“My treatment? The one I sent you?”

“Sure. That treatment. We loved it. We all loved it. It was great. Really terrific. We’re all really excited.”

“So what’s next?”

“Well, as soon as everyone’s had a chance to look it over, we’ll get together and talk about it.”

He patted me on the back and went away, leaving me with nothing to do in Hollywood.

I decided to write a short story. There was an idea I’d had in England before I’d left. Something about a small theater at the end of a pier. Stage magic as the rain came down. An audience who couldn’t tell the difference between magic and illusion, and to whom it would make no difference if every illusion was real.

That afternoon, on my walk, I bought a couple of books on Stage Magic and Victorian Illusions in the “almost all-nite” bookshop. A story, or the seed of it anyway, was there in my head, and I wanted to explore it. I sat on the bench in the courtyard and browsed through the books. There was, I decided, a specific atmosphere that I was after.

I was reading about the Pockets Men, who had pockets filled with every small object you could imagine and would produce whatever you asked on request. No illusion—just remarkable feats of organization and memory. A shadow fell across the page. I looked up.

“Hullo again,” I said to the old black man.

“Suh,” he said.

“Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like I ought to be wearing a suit or something.” I told him my name.

He told me his: “Pious Dundas.”

“Pious?” I wasn’t sure that I’d heard him correctly. He nodded proudly.

“Sometimes I am, and sometimes I ain’t. It’s what my mamma called me, and it’s a good name.”

“Yes.”

“So what are you doing here, suh?”