Every day she looked worse. Since the funeral she'd been going regularly to UCLA hospital for tests. The people, the place, the tests scared her and made our being there even more important.
Although she knew he'd planned to stay with a friend, Sasha asked Wyatt the second day if he would stay with her too. That did some good, because they quickly got down to talking about what it was like to be grievously, finitely ill. I told her about my experiences with people in our Cancer Theater Group; Wyatt said what it was like to wake up every morning and remember two seconds after consciousness raised its curtain that today could easily be it.
Sometimes they wanted me with them, sometimes not. Sometimes from another room I'd listen hard to the murmurs and bursts of their voices and think they were telling secrets only they could know or fathom. Death, or imminent death, must have a language of its own, a specific grammar and vocabulary that's understood only on that side of the fence.
Theater is a positive art. At the very least, it tries to add life to words. If the words are already alive and beautiful, good drama helps lift them off the earth. I have seen that happen in the theater, more than once even with our cancer group in New York. The actors I worked with there brought enthusiasm and fear and final energy to whatever we were doing. I could direct them, but whatever talent or inspiration they had was enhanced more by the enormous threat of their ticking clocks than anything I said. I saw myself as giving them only what could fit through a small hole in a glass window or chain-link fence. For me the experience was invaluable because their energy and efforts were instructive and elementaclass="underline" Everything was motivated by the clearest, healthiest greed I'd ever seen – the greed that demands another day of life.
When I heard Wyatt and Sasha talking, I thought of that fence and how unclimbable it was until you found yourself suddenly, horribly, on the other side at some unexpected time in your life.
In his best Finky Linky voice, Wyatt called out from the car, "Are we going, or are you scanning the lilacs?"
I broke off a spray and brought it with me. "When is Sasha supposed to be back?"
"Depends on whether they could do her test quickly. Probably a few hours."
Opening the door, I dropped the flowers on the dashboard. "Tell me about these tests."
He gunned the car and started away from the curb. "They take things out of you and shoot things in. They look at your guts like they're a video game but never tell you who's winning when they're finished. You drink things so your guts light up like Las Vegas, and then they say you can go to the bathroom now and flush Vegas down the toilet. It's humiliating and frightening and the worst part is, when they actually do show you pictures or graphs or whatever, they don't look like anything. You feel like a big fucking fool because it's your body in that readout, but you can't understand it. You've got to rely on all these patronizing technicians to tell you what's actually happening inside your own poor fucked-up body. You want to understand so badly that when they start to talk, you concentrate as hard as possible, but it still doesn't make sense. They say 'hemoglobins' and 'white cell counts' and so much more that your brain closes down and you can't understand any of it.
"But they even know that'll happen, so they stop using medical terms and start talking to you like you're retarded. One doctor I consulted had this glitzy computer game where you had to fight off the cancer cells entering your body. If you did it successfully, you won – lived. The thing made little blips: bleep, bleep, bleep. I played that damned game and won once. It felt so good. Here I was playing this absurd computer game, pretending the little blips were the good guys in my body."
He pulled up to a stop sign and looked at me.
"The tests are shit, Weber. The kind they're probably giving Sasha today are the second-line ones. They give you those when they know you've got it bad but want to find out just how bad before they start recommending any kind of therapy."
"What did you do the first time you heard you had it?"
"Went out and bought a pastrami sandwich. Nothing ever tasted so good in my whole life. Bought a pastrami sandwich and a pack of Marlboros. Hadn't smoked in – years, but what the hell, huh?"
On the long drive to Artus's place, we spoke about all the "something wrongs" of the last days.
"You know what else is wrong? His killing Flea. There's no way in the world Strayhorn would've killed that dog."
"Even if he was crazy?"
"Even so. I lived with him too long. He wasn't that kind of man. He used to catch mosquitoes and free them outside the window. That dog was pure love for him. He liked everything about it. Why kill it?"
"Because he'd gone mad."
We talked on and on. One of us would throw out an idea or a theory and it would be dissected or replaced or banked off the walls of possibility like a billiard ball.
Wyatt dropped his big one shortly before we arrived. "I bet . . ."
"What?"
"I was going to say something weird, but it makes complete sense. Everything that's happened, and everything we've been talking about . . . it's all Dr. Faustus." He continued looking at the road with an expressionless driver's face. In my deepest heart, perhaps my deepest fear, I had thought about this possibility too.
"Tell me."
"What you're asking, Weber, is to tell you I believe that still happens. But you know I do."
"Tell me how you came up with it."
He rolled his head around on his neck as if he'd suddenly gotten a bad driver's cramp. "We all read Dr. Faustus in college. A smart guy's unhappy with his life. Nothing's worked out the way he wanted. What can he do about it? Talk to God. But God's not answering, so the guy goes downstairs.
"Lucifer says sure, I'll help. I'll make things better, but your soul's mine after you die.
"Faustus agrees and signs on the dotted line. We know what happens next – he gets the power he wants, but he uses it for all the wrong reasons. Has all the power in the natural world but uses it to make Helen of Troy appear so he can screw her.
"Is this starting to sound familiar?"
"Phil. He was so depressed back then, he would've done anything."
"He did – he wrote Midnight! But he was also smart, Weber. Don't forget that. Here's why he made his deal. It's only my theory. He signed something important over, sure, but only because he thought he could do without it. He was wrong."
"What'd he give up?"
Wyatt turned and gave me a cold look. "His moral balance. Phil made the best horror films in the world, the greatest horror films ever. But they're too great – too horrible.
"His fame came from making contemptible, ugly nightmares. At first it was kind of a cynical lark, but then it had him by the balls and wouldn't let go. Look at how he was always trying to get involved in other projects. But somehow, every time, he was pulled back down into that Midnight shit.
"Only once did it look like he was really going to get out of it. But then – things happened: An angel appeared, and let's assume for a minute it really was an angel and not just some strange little girl. She told him not to shoot the scene. But he did. Result? Two of his best friends were killed in an accident so bizarre no one can believe it.
"You don't think there're links there? You don't see cause and effect? In the end, the Other Guy won everything: brilliant movies that made Bloodstone a cult figure. Evil is okay so long as it's original. That's good publicity. Then Strayhorn's so eaten up with guilt he shoots himself. Finally, as a little extra perk, Crazy Phil not only kills himself but one of the few things he really loved – a completely innocent and loving dog."