Neil Gaiman - The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories

It was raining when I arrived in L.A., and I felt myself surrounded by a hundred old movies.

There was a limo driver in a black uniform waiting for me at the airport, holding a white sheet of cardboard with my name misspelled neatly upon it.

"I'm taking you straight to your hotel, sir," said the driver. He seemed vaguely disappointed that I didn't have any real luggage for him to carry, just a battered overnight bag stuffed with T-shirts, underwear, and socks.

"Is it far?"

He shook his head. "Maybe twenty-five, thirty minutes. You ever been to L.A. before?"

"No."

"Well, what I always say, L.A. is a thirty-minute town. Wherever you want to go, it's thirty minutes away. No more."

He hauled my bag into the boot of the car, which he called the trunk, and opened the door for me to climb into the back.

"So where you from?" he asked, as we headed out of the airport into the slick wet neon-spattered streets.

"England."

"England, eh?"

"Yes. Have you ever been there?"

"Nosir. I've seen movies. You an actor?"

"I'm a writer."

He lost interest. Occasionally he would swear at other drivers, under his breath.

He swerved suddenly, changing lanes. We passed a four-car pileup in the lane we had been in.

"You get a little rain in this city, all of a sudden everybody forgets how to drive," he told me. I burrowed further into the cushions in the back. "You get rain in England, I hear." It was a statement, not a question.

"A little."

"More than a little. Rains every day in England." He laughed. "And thick fog. Real thick, thick fog."

"Not really."

"Whaddaya mean, no?" he asked, puzzled, defensive. "I've seen movies."

We sat in silence then, driving through the Hollywood rain; but after a while he said: "Ask them for the room Belushi died in."

"Pardon?"

"Belushi. John Belushi. It was your hotel he died in. Drugs. You heard about that?"

"Oh. Yes."

"They made a movie about his death. Some fat guy, didn't look nothing like him. But nobody tells the real truth about his death. Y'see, he wasn't alone. There were two other guys with him. Studios didn't want any shit. But you're a limo driver, you hear things."

"Really?"

"Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. They were there with him. All of them going doo-doo on the happy dust."

The hotel building was a white mock-gothic chateau. I said good-bye to the chauffeur and checked in; I did not ask about the room in which Belushi had died.

I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.

Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.

I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.

The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.

I watched a little television - the rerun wasteland: Cheers segued imperceptibly into Taxi, which flickered into black and white and became I Love Lucy - then stumbled into sleep.

I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.

The phone woke me. "Hey-hey-hey-hey. You made it okay then?"

"Who is this?"

"It's Jacob at the studio. Are we still on for breakfast, hey-hey?"

"Breakfast...?"

"No problem. I'll pick you up at your hotel in thirty minutes. Reservations are already made. No problems. You got my messages?"

"I..."

"Faxed 'em through last night. See you."

The rain had stopped. The sunshine was warm and bright: proper Hollywood light. I walked up to the main building, walking on a carpet of crushed eucalyptus leaves - the cough medicine smell from the night before.

They handed me an envelope with a fax in it - my schedule for the next few days, with messages of encouragement and faxed handwritten doodles in the margin, saying things like "This is Gonna be a Blockbuster!" and "Is this Going to be a Great Movie or What!" The fax was signed by Jacob Klein, obviously the voice on the phone. I had never before had any dealings with a Jacob Klein.

A small red sports car drew up outside the hotel. The driver got out and waved at me. I walked over. He had a trim, pepper-and-salt beard, a smile that was almost bankable, and a gold chain around his neck. He showed me a copy of Sons of Man.

He was Jacob. We shook hands.

"Is David around? David Gambol?"

David Gambol was the man I'd spoken to earlier on the phone when arranging the trip. He wasn't the producer. I wasn't certain quite what he was. He described himself as "attached to the project."

"David's not with the studio anymore. I'm kind of running the project now, and I want you to know I'm really psyched. Hey-hey."

"That's good?"

We got in the car. "Where's the meeting?" I asked.

He shook his head. "It's not a meeting," he said. "It's a breakfast." I looked puzzled. He took pity on me. "A kind of pre-meeting meeting," he explained.

We drove from the hotel to a mall somewhere half an hour away while Jacob told me how much he enjoyed my book and how delighted he was that he'd become attached to the project. He said it was his idea to have me put up in the hotel - "Give you the kind of Hollywood experience you'd never get at the Four Seasons or Ma Maison, right?" - and asked me if I was staying in the chalet in which John Belushi had died. I told him I didn't know, but that I rather doubted it.

"You know who he was with, when he died? They covered it up, the studios."

"No. Who?"

"Meryl and Dustin."

"This is Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman we're talking about?"

"Sure."

"How do you know this?"

"People talk. It's Hollywood. You know?"

I nodded as if I did know, but I didn't.

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.

The irritating question they ask us - us being writers - is: "Where do you get your ideas?"

And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

It began with a documentary on Charles Manson I was watching more or less by accident (it was on a videotape a friend lent me after a couple of things I did want to watch): there was footage of Manson, back when he was first arrested, when people thought he was innocent and that it was the government picking on the hippies. And up on the screen was Manson - a charismatic, good-looking, messianic orator. Someone you'd crawl barefoot into Hell for. Someone you could kill for.

The trial started; and, a few weeks into it, the orator was gone, replaced by a shambling, apelike gibberer, with a cross carved into its forehead. Whatever the genius was was no longer there. It was gone. But it had been there.

The documentary continued: a hard-eyed ex-con who had been in prison with Manson, explaining, "Charlie Manson? Listen, Charlie was a joke. He was a nothing. We laughed at him. You know? He was a nothing!"

And I nodded. There was a time before Manson was the charisma king, then. I thought of a benediction, something given, that was taken away.

I watched the rest of the documentary obsessively. Then, over a black-and-white still, the narrator said something. I rewound, and he said it again.

I had an idea. I had a book that wrote itself.

The thing the narrator had said was this: that the infant children Manson had fathered on the women of The Family were sent to a variety of children's homes for adoption, with court-given surnames that were certainly not Manson.

And I thought of a dozen twenty-five-year-old Mansons. Thought of the charisma-thing descending on all of them at the same time. Twelve young Mansons, in their glory, gradually being pulled toward L.A. from all over the world. And a Manson daughter trying desperately to stop them from coming together and, as the back cover blurb told us, "realizing their terrifying destiny."

I wrote Sons of Man at white heat: it was finished in a month, and I sent it to my agent, who was surprised by it ("Well, it's not like your other stuff, dear," she said helpfully), and she sold it after an auction - my first - for more money than I had thought possible. (My other books, three collections of elegant, allusive and elusive ghost stories, had scarcely paid for the computer on which they were written.)

And then it was bought - prepublication - by Hollywood, again after an auction. There were three or four studios interested: I went with the studio who wanted me to write the script. I knew it would never happen, knew they'd never come through. But then the faxes began to spew out of my machine, late at night - most of them enthusiastically signed by one Dave Gambol; one morning I signed five copies of a contract thick as a brick; a few weeks later my agent reported the first check had cleared and tickets to Hollywood had arrived, for "preliminary talks." It seemed like a dream.

The tickets were business class. It was the moment I saw the tickets were business class that I knew the dream was real.

I went to Hollywood in the bubble bit at the top of the jumbo jet, nibbling smoked salmon and holding a hot-off-the-presses hardback of Sons of Man.

So. Breakfast.

They told me how much they loved the book. I didn't quite catch anybody's name. The men had beards or baseball caps or both; the women were astoundingly attractive, in a sanitary sort of way.

Jacob ordered our breakfast, and paid for it. He explained that the meeting coming up was a formality.

"It's your book we love," he said. "Why would we have bought your book if we didn't want to make it? Why would we have hired you to write it if we didn't want the specialness you'd bring to the project. The you-ness."

I nodded, very seriously, as if literary me-ness was something I had spent many hours pondering.

"An idea like this. A book like this. You're pretty unique."

"One of the uniquest," said a woman named Dina or Tina or possibly Deanna.

I raised an eyebrow. "So what am I meant to do at the meeting?"

"Be receptive," said Jacob. "Be positive."

The drive to the studio took about half an hour in Jacob's little red car. We drove up to the security gate, where Jacob had an argument with the guard. I gathered that he was new at the studio and had not yet been issued a permanent studio pass.

Nor, it appeared, once we got inside, did he have a permanent parking place. I still do not understand the ramifications of this: from what he said, parking places had as much to do with status at the studio as gifts from the emperor determined one's status in the court of ancient China.

We drove through the streets of an oddly flat New York and parked in front of a huge old bank.

Ten minutes' walk, and I was in a conference room, with Jacob and all the people from breakfast, waiting for someone to come in. In the flurry I'd rather missed who the someone was and what he or she did. I took out my copy of my book and put it in front of me, a talisman of sorts.

Someone came in. He was tall, with a pointy nose and a pointy chin, and his hair was too long - he looked like he'd kidnapped someone much younger and stolen their hair. He was an Australian, which surprised me.

He sat down.

He looked at me.

"Shoot," he said.

I looked at the people from the breakfast, but none of them were looking at me - I couldn't catch anyone's eye. So I began to talk: about the book, about the plot, about the end, the showdown in the L.A. nightclub, where the good Manson girl blows the rest of them up. Or thinks she does. About my idea for having one actor play all the Manson boys.

"Do you believe this stuff?" It was the first question from the Someone. That one was easy. It was one I'd already answered for at least two dozen British journalists.

"Do I believe that a supernatural power possessed Charles Manson for a while and is even now possessing his many children? No. Do I believe that something strange was happening? I suppose I must. Perhaps it was simply that, for a brief while, his madness was in step with the madness of the world outside. I don't know."

"Mm. This Manson kid. He could be Keanu Reaves?"

God, no, I thought. Jacob caught my eye and nodded desperately. "I don't see why not," I said. It was all imagination anyway. None of it was real.

"We're cutting a deal with his people," said the Someone, nodding thoughtfully.

They sent me off to do a treatment for them to approve. And by them, I understood they meant the Australian Someone, although I was not entirely sure.

Before I left, someone gave me $700 and made me sign for it: two weeks per diem.

I spent two days doing the treatment. I kept trying to forget the book, and structure the story as a film. The work went well. I sat in the little room and typed on a notebook computer the studio had sent down for me, and printed out pages on the bubble-jet printer the studio sent down with it. I ate in my room.

Each afternoon I would go for a short walk down Sunset Boulevard. I would walk as far as the "almost all-nite" bookstore, where I would buy a newspaper. Then I would sit outside in the hotel courtyard for half an hour, reading a newspaper. And then, having had my ration of sun and air, I would go back into the dark, and turn my book back into something else.

There was a very old black man, a hotel employee, who would walk across the courtyard each day with almost painful slowness and water the plants and inspect the fish. He'd grin at me as he went past, and I'd nod at him.

On the third day I got up and walked over to him as he stood by the fish pool, picking out bits of rubbish by hand: a couple of coins and a cigarette packet.

"Hello," I said.

"Suh," said the old man.

I thought about asking him not to call me sir, but I couldn't think of a way to put it that might not cause offense. "Nice fish."

He nodded and grinned. "Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China."

We watched them swim around the little pool.

"I wonder if they get bored."

He shook his head. "My grandson, he's an ichthyologist, you know what that is?"

"Studies fishes."

"Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that's like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it's always a surprise to them, going 'I never been here before.' They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, 'Who are you, stranger?'"

"Will you ask your grandson something for me?" The old man nodded. "I read once that carp don't have set life spans. They don't age like we do. They die if they're killed by people or predators or disease, but they don't just get old and die. Theoretically they could live forever."

He nodded. "I'll ask him. It sure sounds good. These three - now, this one, I call him Ghost, he's only four, five years old. But the other two, they came here from China back when I was first here."

"And when was that?"

"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 theatre 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?"

"I'm not sure. I'm meant to be writing a film, I think. Or at least, I'm waiting for them to tell me to start writing a film."

He scratched his nose. "All the film people stayed here, if I started to tell you them all now, I could talk till a week next Wednesday and I wouldn't have told you the half of them."

"Who were your favorites?"

"Harry Langdon. He was a gentleman. George Sanders. He was English, like you. He'd say, 'Ah, Pious. You must pray for my soul.' And I'd say, 'Your soul's your own affair, Mister Sanders,' but I prayed for him just the same. And June Lincoln."

"June Lincoln?"

His eyes sparkled, and he smiled. "She was the queen of the silver screen. She was finer than any of them: Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish or Theda Bara or Louise Brooks.... She was the finest. She had 'it.' You know what 'it' was?"

"Sex appeal."

"More than that. She was everything you ever dreamed of. You'd see a June Lincoln picture, you wanted to..." he broke off, waved one hand in small circles, as if he were trying to catch the missing words. "I don't know. Go down on one knee, maybe, like a knight in shinin' armor to the queen. June Lincoln, she was the best of them. I told my grandson about her, he tried to find something for the VCR, but no go. Nothing out there anymore. She only lives in the heads of old men like me." He tapped his forehead.

"She must have been quite something."

He nodded.

"What happened to her?"

"She hung herself. Some folks said it was because she wouldn't have been able to cut the mustard in the talkies, but that ain't true: she had a voice you'd remember if you heard it just once. Smooth and dark, her voice was, like an Irish coffee. Some say she got her heart broken by a man, or by a woman, or that it was gambling, or gangsters, or booze. Who knows? They were wild days."

"I take it that you must have heard her talk."

He grinned. "She said, 'Boy, can you find what they did with my wrap?' and when I come back with it, then she said, 'You're a fine one, boy.' And the man who was with her, he said, 'June, don't tease the help' and she smiled at me and gave me five dollars and said 'He don't mind, do you, boy?' and I just shook my head. Then she made the thing with her lips, you know?"

"A moue?"

"Something like that. I felt it here." He tapped his chest. "Those lips. They could take a man apart."

He bit his lower lip for a moment, and focused on forever. I wondered where he was, and when. Then he looked at me once more.

"You want to see her lips?"

"How do you mean?"

"You come over here. Follow me."

"What are we...?" I had visions of a lip print in cement, like the handprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

He shook his head, and raised an old finger to his mouth. Silence.

I closed the books. We walked across the courtyard. When he reached the little fish-pool, he stopped.

"Look at the Princess," he told me.

"The one with the red splotch, yes?"

He nodded. The fish reminded me of a Chinese dragon: wise and pale. A ghost fish, white as old bone, save for the blotch of scarlet on its back - an inch-long double-bow shape. It hung in the pool, drifting, thinking.

"That's it," he said. "On her back. See?"

"I don't quite follow you."

He paused and stared at the fish.

"Would you like to sit down?" I found myself very conscious of Mr. Dundas's age.

"They don't pay me to sit down," he said, very seriously. Then he said, as if he were explaining something to a small child, "It was like there were gods in those days. Today, it's all television: small heroes. Little people in the boxes. I see some of them here. Little people.

"The stars of the old times: They was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses...and when you met them, they were still huge. People believed in them.

"They'd have parties here. You worked here, you saw what went on. There was liquor, and weed, and goings-on you'd hardly credit. There was this one party...the film was called Hearts of the Desert. You ever heard of it?"

I shook my head.

"One of the biggest movies of 1926, up there with What Price Glory with Victor McLaglen and Dolores del Rio and Ella Cinders starring Colleen Moore. You heard of them?"

I shook my head again.

"You ever heard of Warner Baxter? Belle Bennett?"

"Who were they?"

"Big, big stars in 1926." He paused for a moment. "Hearts of the Desert. They had the party for it here, in the hotel, when it wrapped. There was wine and beer and whiskey and gin - this was Prohibition days, but the studios kind of owned the police force, so they looked the other way; and there was food, and a deal of foolishness; Ronald Colman was there and Douglas Fairbanks - the father, not the son - and all the cast and the crew; and a jazz band played over there where those chalets are now.

"And June Lincoln was the toast of Hollywood that night. She was the Arab princess in the film. Those days, Arabs meant passion and lust. These days... well, things change.

"I don't know what started it all. I heard it was a dare or a bet; maybe she was just drunk. I thought she was drunk. Anyhow, she got up, and the band was playing soft and slow. And she walked over here, where I'm standing right now, and she plunged her hands right into this pool. She was laughing, and laughing, and laughing...

"Miss Lincoln picked up the fish - reached in and took it, both hands she took it in - and she picked it up from the water, and then she held it in front of her face.

"Now, I was worried, because they'd just brought these fish in from China and they cost two hundred dollars apiece. That was before I was looking after the fish, of course. Wasn't me that'd lose it from my wages. But still, two hundred dollars was a whole lot of money in those days.

"Then she smiled at all of us, and she leaned down and she kissed it, slow like, on its back. It didn't wriggle or nothin', it just lay in her hand, and she kissed it with her lips like red coral, and the people at the party laughed and cheered.

"She put the fish back in the pool, and for a moment it was as if it didn't want to leave her - it stayed by her, nuzzling her fingers. And then the first of the fireworks went off, and it swum away.

"Her lipstick was red as red as red, and she left the shape of her lips on the fish's back. - There. Do you see?"

Princess, the white carp with the coral red mark on her back, flicked a fin and continued on her eternal series of thirty-second journeys around the pool. The red mark did look like a lip print.

He sprinkled a handful of fish food on the water, and the three fish bobbed and gulped to the surface.

I walked back in to my chalet, carrying my books on old illusions. The phone was ringing: it was someone from the studio. They wanted to talk about the treatment. A car would be there for me in thirty minutes.

"Will Jacob be there?"

But the line was already dead.

The meeting was with the Australian Someone and his assistant, a bespectacled man in a suit. His was the first suit I'd seen so far, and his spectacles were a vivid blue. He seemed nervous.

"Where are you staying?" asked the Someone.

I told him.

"Isn't that where Belushi...?"

"So I've been told."

He nodded. "He wasn't alone, when he died."

"No?"

He rubbed one finger along the side of his pointy nose. "There were a couple of other people at the party. They were both directors, both as big as you could get at that point. You don't need names. I found out about it when I was making the last Indiana Jones film."

An uneasy silence. We were at a huge round table, just the three of us, and we each had a copy of the treatment I had written in front of us. Finally I said:

"What did you think of it?"

They both nodded, more or less in unison.

And then they tried, as hard as they could, to tell me they hated it while never saying anything that might conceivably upset me. It was a very odd conversation.

"We have a problem with the third act," they'd say, implying vaguely that the fault lay neither with me nor with the treatment, nor even with the third act, but with them.

They wanted the people to be more sympathetic. They wanted sharp lights and shadows, not shades of gray. They wanted the heroine to be a hero. And I nodded and took notes.

At the end of the meeting I shook hands with the Someone, and the assistant in the blue-rimmed spectacles took me off through the corridor maze to find the outside world and my car and my driver.

As we walked, I asked if the studio had a picture anywhere of June Lincoln.

"Who?" His name, it turned out, was Greg. He pulled out a small notebook and wrote something down in it with a pencil.

"She was a silent screen star. Famous in 1926."

"Was she with the studio?"

"I have no idea," I admitted. "But she was famous. Even more famous than Marie Prevost."

"Who?"

"'A winner who became a doggie's dinner.' One of the biggest stars of the silent screen. Died in poverty when the talkies came in and was eaten by her dachshund. Nick Lowe wrote a song about her."

"Who?"

"'I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.' Anyway, June Lincoln. Can someone find me a photo?"

He wrote something more down on his pad. Stared at it for a moment. Then wrote down something else. Then he nodded.

We had reached the daylight, and my car was waiting.

"By the way," he said, "you should know that he's full of shit."

"I'm sorry?"

"Full of shit. It wasn't Spielberg and Lucas who were with Belushi. It was Bette Midler and Linda Ronstadt. It was a coke orgy. Everybody knows that. He's full of shit. And he was just a junior studio accountant for chrissakes on the Indiana Jones movie. Like it was his movie. Asshole."

We shook hands. I got in the car and went back to the hotel.

The time difference caught up with me that night, and I woke, utterly and irrevocably, at 4 a.m.

I got up, peed, then I pulled on a pair of jeans (I sleep in a T-shirt) and walked outside.

I wanted to see the stars, but the lights of the city were too bright, the air too dirty. The sky was a dirty, starless yellow, and I thought of all the constellations I could see from the English countryside, and I felt, for the first time, deeply, stupidly homesick.

I missed the stars.

I wanted to work on the short story or to get on with the film script. Instead, I worked on a second draft of the treatment.

I took the number of Junior Mansons down to five from twelve and made it clearer from the start that one of them, who was now male, wasn't a bad guy and the other four most definitely were.

They sent over a copy of a film magazine. It had the smell of old pulp paper about it, and was stamped in purple with the studio name and with the word ARCHIVES underneath. The cover showed John Barrymore, on a boat.

The article inside was about June Lincoln's death. I found it hard to read and harder still to understand: it hinted at the forbidden vices that led to her death, that much I could tell, but it was as if it were hinting in a cipher to which modern readers lacked any key. Or perhaps, on reflection, the writer of her obituary knew nothing and was hinting into the void.

More interesting - at any rate, more comprehensible - were the photos. A full-page, black-edged photo of a woman with huge eyes and a gentle smile, smoking a cigarette (the smoke was airbrushed in, to my way of thinking very clumsily: had people ever been taken in by such clumsy fakes?); another photo of her in a staged clinch with Douglas Fairbanks; a small photograph of her standing on the running board of a car, holding a couple of tiny dogs.

She was, from the photographs, not a contemporary beauty. She lacked the transcendence of a Louise Brooks, the sex appeal of a Marilyn Monroe, the sluttish elegance of a Rita Hayworth. She was a twenties starlet as dull as any other twenties starlet. I saw no mystery in her huge eyes, her bobbed hair. She had perfectly made-up cupid's-bow lips. I had no idea what she would have looked like if she had been alive and around today.

Still, she was real; she had lived. She had been worshipped and adored by the people in the movie palaces. She had kissed the fish, and walked in the grounds of my hotel seventy years before: no time in England, but an eternity in Hollywood.

I went in to talk about the treatment. None of the people I had spoken to before were there. Instead, I was shown in to see a very young man in a small office, who never smiled and who told me how much he loved the treatment and how pleased he was that the studio owned the property.

He said he thought the character of Charles Manson was particularly cool, and that maybe - "once he was fully dimensionalized" - Manson could be the next Hannibal Lecter.

"But. Um. Manson. He's real. He's in prison now. His people killed Sharon Tate."

"Sharon Tate?"

"She was an actress. A film star. She was pregnant and they killed her. She was married to Polanski."

"Roman Polanski?"

"The director. Yes."

He frowned. "But we're putting together a deal with Polanski."

"That's good. He's a good director."

"Does he know about this?"

"About what? The book? Our film? Sharon Tate's death?"

He shook his head: none of the above. "It's a three-picture deal. Julia Roberts is semiattached to it. You say Polanski doesn't know about this treatment?"

"No, what I said was - "

He checked his watch.

"Where are you staying?" he asked. "Are we putting you up somewhere good?"

"Yes, thank you," I said. "I'm a couple of chalets away from the room in which Belushi died."

I expected another confidential couple of stars: to be told that John Belushi had kicked the bucket in company with Julie Andrews and Miss Piggy the Muppet. I was wrong.

"Belushi's dead?" he said, his young brow furrowing. "Belushi's not dead. We're doing a picture with Belushi."

"This was the brother," I told him. "The brother died, years ago."

He shrugged. "Sounds like a shithole," he said. "Next time you come out, tell them you want to stay in the Bel Air. You want us to move you out there now?"

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm used to it where I am." "What about the treatment?" I asked.

"Leave it with us."

I found myself becoming fascinated by two old theatrical illusions I found in my books: "The Artist's Dream" and "The Enchanted Casement." They were metaphors for something, of that I was certain; but the story that ought to have accompanied them was not yet there. I'd write first sentences that did not make it to first paragraphs, first paragraphs that never made it to first pages. I'd write them on the computer, then exit without saving anything.

I sat outside in the courtyard and stared at the two white carp and the one scarlet and white carp. They looked, I decided, like Escher drawings of fish, which surprised me, as it had never occurred to me there was anything even slightly realistic in Escher's drawings.

Pious Dundas was polishing the leaves of the plants. He had a bottle of polisher and a cloth.

"Hi, Pious."

"Suh."

"Lovely day."

He nodded, and coughed, and banged his chest with his fist, and nodded some more.

I left the fish, sat down on the bench.

"Why haven't they made you retire?" I asked. "Shouldn't you have retired fifteen years ago?"

He continued polishing. "Hell no, I'm a landmark. They can say that all the stars in the sky stayed here, but I tell folks what Cary Grant had for breakfast."

"Do you remember?"

"Heck no. But they don't know that." He coughed again. "What you writing?"

"Well, last week I wrote a treatment for this film. And then I wrote another treatment. And now I'm waiting for...something."

"So what are you writing?"

"A story that won't come right. It's about a Victorian magic trick called 'The Artist's Dream.' An artist comes on to the stage, carrying a big canvas, which he puts on an easel. It's got a painting of a woman on it. And he looks at the painting and despairs of ever being a real painter. Then he sits down and goes to sleep, and the painting comes to life, steps down from the frame and tells him not to give up. To keep fighting. He'll be a great painter one day. She climbs back into the frame. The lights dim. Then he wakes up, and it's a painting again..."

"...and the other illusion," I told the woman from the studio, who had made the mistake of feigning interest at the beginning of the meeting, "was called 'The Enchanted Casement.' A window hangs in the air and faces appear in it, but there's no one around. I think I can get a strange sort of parallel between the enchanted casement and probably television: seems like a natural candidate, after all."

"I like Seinfeld," she said. "You watch that show? It's about nothing. I mean, they have whole episodes about nothing. And I liked Garry Shandling before he did the new show and got mean."

"The illusions," I continued, "like all great illusions, make us question the nature of reality. But they also frame - pun, I suppose, intentionalish - the issue of what entertainment would turn into. Films before they had films, telly before there was ever TV."

She frowned. "Is this a movie?"

"I hope not. It's a short story, if I can get it to work."

"So let's talk about the movie." She flicked through a pile of notes. She was in her mid-twenties and looked both attractive and sterile. I wondered if she was one of the women who had been at the breakfast on my first day, a Deanna or a Tina.

She looked puzzled at something and read: "I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll?"

"He wrote that down? That's not this film."

She nodded. "Now, I have to say that some of your treatment is kind of... contentious. The Manson thing...well, we're not sure it's going to fly. Could we take him out?"

"But that's the whole point of the thing. I mean, the book is called Sons of Man; it's about Manson's children. If you take him out, you don't have very much, do you? I mean, this is the book you bought." I held it up for her to see: my talisman. "Throwing out Manson is like, I don't know, it's like ordering a pizza and then complaining when it arrives because it's flat, round, and covered in tomato sauce and cheese."

She gave no indication of having heard anything I had said. She asked, "What do you think about When We Were Badd as a title? Two d's in Badd."

"I don't know. For this?"

"We don't want people to think that it's religious. Sons of Man. It sounds like it might be kind of anti-Christian."

"Well, I do kind of imply that the power that possesses the Manson children is in some way a kind of demonic power."

"You do?"

"In the book."

She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.

"Well, I don't think the studio would see that as appropriate," she said.

"Do you know who June Lincoln was?" I asked her.

She shook her head.

"David Gambol? Jacob Klein?"

She shook her head once more, a little impatiently. Then she gave me a typed list of things she felt needed fixing, which amounted to pretty much everything. The list was TO: me and a number of other people, whose names I didn't recognize, and it was FROM: Donna Leary.

I said, Thank you, Donna, and went back to the hotel.

I was gloomy for a day. And then I thought of a way to redo the treatment that would, I thought, deal with all of Donna's list of complaints.

Another day's thinking, a few days' writing, and I faxed the third treatment off to the studio.

Pious Dundas brought his scrapbook over for me to look at, once he felt certain that I was genuinely interested in June Lincoln - named, I discovered, after the month and the president, born Ruth Baumgarten in 1903. It was a leatherbound old scrapbook, the size and weight of a family Bible.

She was twenty-four when she died.

"I wish you could've seen her," said Pious Dundas. "I wish some of her films had survived. She was so big. She was the greatest star of all of them."

"Was she a good actress?"

He shook his head decisively. "Nope."

"Was she a great beauty? If she was, I just don't see it."

He shook his head again. "The camera liked her, that's for sure. But that wasn't it. Back row of the chorus had a dozen girls prettier'n her."

"Then what was it?"

"She was a star." He shrugged. "That's what it means to be a star."

I turned the pages: cuttings, reviewing films I'd never heard of - films for which the only negatives and prints had long ago been lost, mislaid, or destroyed by the fire department, nitrate negatives being a notorious fire hazard; other cuttings from film magazines: June Lincoln at play, June Lincoln at rest, June Lincoln on the set of The Pawnbroker's Shirt, June Lincoln wearing a huge fur coat - which somehow dated the photograph more than the strange bobbed hair or the ubiquitous cigarettes.

"Did you love her?"

He shook his head. "Not like you would love a woman..." he said.

There was a pause. He reached down and turned the pages.

"And my wife would have killed me if she'd heard me say this..."

Another pause.

"But yeah. Skinny dead white woman. I suppose I loved her." He closed the book.

"But she's not dead to you, is she?"

He shook his head. Then he went away. But he left me the book to look at.

The secret of the illusion of "The Artist's Dream" was this: It was done by carrying the girl in, holding tight on to the back of the canvas. The canvas was supported by hidden wires, so, while the artist casually, easily, carried in the canvas and placed it on the easel, he was also carrying in the girl. The painting of the girl on the easel was arranged like a roller blind, and it rolled up or down.

"The Enchanted Casement," on the other hand, was, literally, done with mirrors: an angled mirror which reflected the faces of people standing out of sight in the wings.

Even today many magicians use mirrors in their acts to make you think you are seeing something you are not.

It was easy, when you knew how it was done.

"Before we start," he said, "I should tell you I don't read treatments. I tend to feel it inhibits my creativity. Don't worry, I had a secretary do a precis, so I'm up to speed."

He had a beard and long hair and looked a little like Jesus, although I doubted that Jesus had such perfect teeth. He was, it appeared, the most important person I'd spoken to so far. His name was John Ray, and even I had heard of him, although I was not entirely sure what he did: his name tended to appear at the beginning of films, next to words like EXECUTIVE PRODUCER. The voice from the studio that had set up the meeting told me that they, the studio, were most excited about the fact that he had "attached himself to the project."

"Doesn't the precis inhibit your creativity, too?"

He grinned. "Now, we all think you've done an amazing job. Quite stunning. There are just a few things that we have a problem with."

"Such as?"

"Well, the Manson thing. And the idea about these kids growing up. So we've been tossing around a few scenarios in the office: try this for size. There's a guy called, say, Jack Badd - two d's, that was Donna's idea - "

Donna bowed her head modestly.

"They put him away for satanic abuse, fried him in the chair, and as he dies he swears he'll come back and destroy them all.

"Now, it's today, and we see these young boys getting hooked on a video arcade game called Be Badd. His face on it. And as they play the game he like, starts to possess them. Maybe there could be something strange about his face, a Jason or Freddy thing." He stopped, as if he were seeking approval.

So I said, "So who's making these video games?"

He pointed a finger at me and said, "You're the writer, sweetheart. You want us to do all your work for you?"

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.

Think movies, I thought. They understand movies. I said, "But surely, what you're proposing is like doing The Boys from Brazil without Hitler."

He looked puzzled.

"It was a film by Ira Levin," I said. No flicker of recognition in his eyes. "Rosemary's Baby." He continued to look blank. "Sliver."

He nodded; somewhere a penny had dropped. "Point taken," he said. "You write the Sharon Stone part, we'll move heaven and earth to get her for you. I have an in to her people."

So I went out.

That night it was cold, and it shouldn't have been cold in L.A., and the air smelled more of cough drops than ever.

An old girlfriend lived in the L.A. area and I resolved to get hold of her. I phoned the number I had for her and began a quest that took most of the rest of the evening. People gave me numbers, and I rang them, and other people gave me numbers, and I rang them, too.

Eventually I phoned a number, and I recognized her voice.

"Do you know where I am?" she said.

"No," I said. "I was given this number."

"This is a hospital room," she said. "My mother's. She had a brain hemorrhage."

"I'm sorry. Is she all right?"

"No."

"I'm sorry."

There was an awkward silence.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Pretty bad," I said.

I told her everything that had happened to me so far. I told her how I felt.

"Why is it like this?" I asked her.

"Because they're scared."

"Why are they scared? What are they scared of?"

"Because you're only as good as the last hits you can attach your name to."

"Huh?"

"If you say yes to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it's a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don't risk losing status."

"Really?"

"Kind of."

"How do you know so much about all this? You're a musician, you're not in films."

She laughed wearily: "I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?"

"No."

"Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They've all got them." Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, "Look, I've got to go," and she put down the phone.

I couldn't find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.

I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.

White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.

I stared at it gloomily.

"You okay?"

I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.

"You're up early."

"I slept badly. Too cold."

"You should have called the front desk. They'd've sent you down a heater and extra blankets."

"It never occurred to me."

His breathing sounded awkward, labored.

"You okay?"

"Heck no. I'm old. You get to my age, boy, you won't be okay either. But I'll be here when you've gone. How's work going?"

"I don't know. I've stopped working on the treatment, and I'm stuck on 'The Artist's Dream' - this story I'm doing about Victorian stage magic. It's set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts."

He nodded, slowly. "'The Artist's Dream'..." he said. "So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think I'm either of them."

I turned to go and then something occurred to me.

"Mister Dundas," I said. "Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?"

He shook his head.

"You never wrote a screenplay?"

"Not me," he said.

"Promise?"

He grinned. "I promise," he said.

I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of Sons of Man and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn't want it, now that they had bought it.

I tried to write "The Artist's Dream" some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.

I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.

I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:

I'm thinking about England in the rain,

a strange theatre on the pier: a trail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The fear should be of going bleak insane,

the magic should be like a fairytale.

I'm thinking about England in the rain.

The loneliness is harder to explain -

an empty place inside me where I fail,

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I think of a magician and a skein

of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.

I'm thinking about England in the rain...

The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain

and here's a sword, a hand, and there's a grail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,

tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.

I'm thinking about England, in the rain

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I didn't know if it was any good or not, but that didn't matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn't written before, and it felt wonderful.

I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.

The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd, in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man's girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.

The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.

I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.

In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.

A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.

"Are you going to tell me not to give up?" I asked her.

On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.

She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.

"Why on earth would I do that?" she asked. In my dream she smelled of gin and old celluloid, although I do not remember the last dream I had where anyone smelled of anything. She smiled, a perfect black-and-white smile. "I got out, didn't I?"

Then she stood up and walked around the room.

"I can't believe this hotel is still standing," she said. "I used to fuck here." Her voice was filled with crackles and hisses. She came back to the bed and stared at me, as a cat stares at a hole.

"Do you worship me?" she asked.

I shook my head. She walked over to me and took my flesh hand in her silver one.

"Nobody remembers anything anymore," she said. "It's a thirty-minute town."

There was something I had to ask her. "Where are the stars?" I asked. "I keep looking up in the sky, but they aren't there."

She pointed at the floor of the chalet. "You've been looking in the wrong places," she said. I had never before noticed that the floor of the chalet was a sidewalk and each paving stone contained a star and a name - names I didn't know: Clara Kimball Young, Linda Arvidson, Vivian Martin, Norma Talmadge, Olive Thomas, Mary Miles Minter, Seena Owen...

June Lincoln pointed at the chalet window. "And out there." The window was open, and through it I could see the whole of Hollywood spread out below me - the view from the hills: an infinite spread of twinkling multicolored lights.

"Now, aren't those better than stars?" she asked.

And they were. I realized I could see constellations in the street lamps and the cars.

I nodded.

Her lips brushed mine.

"Don't forget me," she whispered, but she whispered it sadly, as if she knew that I would.

I woke up with the telephone shrilling. I answered it, growled a mumble into the handpiece.

"This is Gerry Quoint, from the studio. We need you for a lunch meeting."

Mumble something mumble.

"We'll send a car," he said. "The restaurant's about half an hour away."

The restaurant was airy and spacious and green, and they were waiting for me there.

By this point I would have been surprised if I had recognized anyone. John Ray, I was told over hors d'oeuvres, had "split over contract disagreements," and Donna had gone with him, "obviously."

Both of the men had beards; one had bad skin. The woman was thin and seemed pleasant.

They asked where I was staying, and, when I told them, one of the beards told us (first making us all agree that this would go no further) that a politician named Gary Hart and one of the Eagles were both doing drugs with Belushi when he died.

After that they told me that they were looking forward to the story.

I asked the question. "Is this for Sons of Man or When We Were Badd? Because," I told them, "I have a problem with the latter."

They looked puzzled.

It was, they told me, for I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll. Which was, they told me, both High Concept and Feel Good. It was also, they added, Very Now, which was important in a town in which an hour ago was Ancient History.

They told me that they thought it would be a good thing if our hero could rescue the young lady from her loveless marriage, and if they could rock and roll together at the end.

I pointed out that they needed to buy the film rights from Nick Lowe, who wrote the song, and then that, no, I didn't know who his agent was.

They grinned and assured me that that wouldn't be a problem.

They suggested I turn over the project in my mind before I started on the treatment, and each of them mentioned a couple of young stars to bear in mind when I was putting together the story.

And I shook hands with all of them and told them that I certainly would.

I mentioned that I thought that I could work on it best back in England.

And they said that that would be fine.

Some days before, I'd asked Pious Dundas whether anyone was with Belushi in the chalet, on the night that he died.

If anyone would know, I figured, he would.

"He died alone," said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. "It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone."

It felt strange to be leaving the hotel.

I went up to the front desk.

"I'll be checking out later this afternoon."

"Very good, sir."

"Would it be possible for you to...the, uh, the groundkeeper. Mister Dundas. An elderly gentleman. I don't know. I haven't seen him around for a couple of days. I wanted to say good-bye."

"To one of the groundsmen?"

"Yes."

She stared at me, puzzled. She was very beautiful, and her lipstick was the color of a blackberry bruise. I wondered whether she was waiting to be discovered.

She picked up the phone and spoke into it, quietly.

Then, "I'm sorry, sir. Mister Dundas hasn't been in for the last few days." "Could you give me his phone number?"

"I'm sorry, sir. That's not our policy." She stared at me as she said it, letting me know that she really was so sorry...

"How's your screenplay?" I asked her.

"How did you know?" she asked.

"Well - "

"It's on Joel Silver's desk," she said. "My friend Arnie, he's my writing partner, and he's a courier. He dropped it off with Joel Silver's office, like it came from a regular agent or somewhere."

"Best of luck," I told her.

"Thanks," she said, and smiled with her blackberry lips.

Information had two Dundas, P's listed, which I thought was both unlikely and said something about America, or at least Los Angeles.

The first turned out to be a Ms. Persephone Dundas.

At the second number, when I asked for Pious Dundas, a man's voice said, "Who is this?"

I told him my name, that I was staying in the hotel, and that I had something belonging to Mr. Dundas.

"Mister. My grandfa's dead. He died last night."

Shock makes cliches happen for real: I felt the blood drain from my face; I caught my breath.

"I'm sorry. I liked him."

"Yeah."

"It must have been pretty sudden."

"He was old. He got a cough." Someone asked him who he was talking to, and he said nobody, then he said, "Thanks for calling."

I felt stunned.

"Look, I have his scrapbook. He left it with me."

"That old film stuff?"

"Yes."

A pause.

"Keep it. That stuff 's no good to anybody. Listen, mister, I gotta run."

A click, and the line went silent.

I went to pack the scrapbook in my bag and was startled, when a tear splashed on the faded leather cover, to discover that I was crying.

I stopped by the pool for the last time, to say good-bye to Pious Dundas, and to Hollywood.

Three ghost white carp drifted, fins flicking minutely, through the eternal present of the pool.

I remembered their names: Buster, Ghost, and Princess; but there was no longer any way that anyone could have told them apart.

The car was waiting for me, by the hotel lobby. It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport, and already I was starting to forget.