“The things we do to keep on keepin’ on,” the helicopter pilot says to Syd over the juddering of the rotors and engine roar. “Me, I pretend I’m choppering over Nam.”
“Nam?”
“Viet. Like in that Kakami movie.” He makes big googly eyes and waggles his tongue to simulate craziness-at least Syd hopes it’s a simulation.
“You mean Coppola.” Yet the notion of Kakami making a war movie isn’t that far-fetched. He has the earnestness and passion, the requisite sense of moral absolutes that Syd himself lacks. He tightens his seat belt. The blue-green Pacific and rocky island shorelines pierced with towering evergreens are far below. Toy scenery, an art director’s mock-ups. There are no more mysteries, the whole wide world is charted and toe-tagged, but that knowledge does little to lessen Syd’s unease.
“Ride of the Valkyries” crackles into Syd’s headset.
“Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning!” whoops the pilot, pulling back hard on the joystick.
When Syd had arrived at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal by cab a couple of hours earlier, his shoes and socks reeking of sewage, it was mired in chaos. The Queen of Coquitlam had rammed the marina, sinking several pleasure craft and damaging the ferry dock. Sailings were cancelled for at least the remainder of the day. People swarmed the wharf, cellphones pressed to temples or thumbs busily texting their loved ones or their lawyers, while gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Syd bought himself a pair of drugstore sandals and chartered a helicopter to get to the island location.
While he’d waited by the makeshift landing pad beside the ferry terminal’s parking lot, two ferret-faced guys sprawled on the curb behind him, slurping coffee and muttering together. One of them shredded a paper napkin as if wreaking vengeance on a life-long enemy. “And that guy who plays Voldemort and calls himself Rafe, what’s that about? It’s spelled Ralph.”
His buddy shrugged.
“It’s British,” Syd said.
“Huh?”
“Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles. If you go in for that kind of thing.”
“Twinkletoes? Effin’ Brits. That is just so wrong.”
The other guy eyed Syd suspiciously. “How do you know that?”
“I’m a movie producer.”
They had looked him over: his orange-and-green flip-flops and rolled-up, sewage-splotched pants, his shirt half hanging out over the front of the slacks-and guffawed. “Yeah right.” One of them had proffered him a fat joint.
In the confines of the helicopter, the cheap sandals exude a warm rubber smell that clogs Syd’s nostrils. And they’re giving his toes wedgies. He’s so uncomfortable he may as well add a butt thong and call it a day. Syd feels naked, almost impotent, stuck in a shuddering tin can half a mile above sea level with a madman, his feet exposed-their pale flesh and untended toenails proclaiming: Here is a man no longer in complete control of the situation. If only he’d stayed wharf-side in his own stinking hand-stitched Italian footwear with Cheech and Chong Jr., fired up the doobie (did people still call them doobies?), and said to hell with Kakami, the production, and the whole freaking business.
“Island looks bigger,” Syd says on approach, the helicopter still in one piece despite the pilot’s Kilgore impressions.
“Always does from the air.”
“I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.”
As they circle lower, Syd sees something far below in a clearing moving swiftly. A deer, a bobcat?
“Someone’s in an awful hurry,” says the pilot.
A man?
“Mr. Gross? Mr. Gross!” The first AD, with her truncheon-wielding Afrikaner accent, moves in on Syd as he lurches from the helicopter. She runs hunched over, one hand holding down her frothing mass of hair, the other waving a clipboard, pages fluttering from it crazily in the downdraft. Drew follows, sobbing, and a pissed-off David Mathers, complaining in a loud, over-enunciating voice that he’s due to shoot a guest spot for Little Mosque on the Prairie in two weeks less a day and this better not yada, contract, yada yada, residuals, et cetera. A pale, double-jointed woman in a glittering gymnastics leotard appears at Syd’s elbow, whispering (why whispering?) something about a Cirque de Soleil audition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The nuns, all in swimsuits or yoga gear, swarm over. The Stay Puft-headed DOP brings up the rear, piggybacking a teenaged girl, the Victoria jailbait who plays the baby nun.
They converge on Syd like a kind of ooze, their hopes and dreams, their messy lives, their schedules thrust at him as if he were Jesus Christ Superstar healing lepers. Syd holds out his hands, palms outward, both steadying himself and fending them off. The helicopter tilts up and away behind him.
One by one the actresses who play the nuns turn blue-grey and waterlogged. They flop onto their backs or fronts, still and swollen, seemingly floating. The first AD opens her mouth, tongue clawing for air. Out of her left nostril scuttles a small brown crab, followed by another and another. The DOP has a gash in his gut where it’s been impaled by a tree branch. It sticks out the other side, looking for all the world like a cheap illusionist’s trick, save for the all-too-real blood. Minutes pass, or hours, then, as if someone’s pulled focus and upped the volume, they’re all their own clamouring selves again.
The weather is unseasonably warm for early October; the air on Syd’s toes disconcerting but not entirely unpleasant. “Okay, okay. Can someone tell me exactly what’s going on?” Please God, no, not the squawk. He sounds like a seagull. “When was the last time anyone saw Kakami?”
The ghostly gymnast places a hand on Drew’s chest. “Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” Syd resists the urge to give the distressed location manager a hug. He’s through with dispensing hugs.
“One minute he was standing right there.” After another intake and outtake of air, Drew points towards a spot a few feet away. “And the next minute-”
“I know, poof, gone, without a trace. Not even a whiff of sulphur.”
Drew crosses his (her?) arms. “You don’t have to believe me. I know what I saw.”
The first AD is composed but seething; her hair appears to move of its own accord, like a nest of vipers. “I was conferring with Mr. Kakami about the shooting script late-morning but he appeared distracted. He cut the scene in which Mother Superior has the vision of playing soccer with the Shaolin monks. Without any explanation. Miss Gong Li refuses to come out of her yurt.”
“Let me think,” Syd says. “All of you, go. Frolic, yoga, or whatever it is you do for fun here. Just let me think a minute.”
A kid, some PA or other in a Rain Dog T-shirt, orange hair shaved to his scalp, round blue eyes like a baby’s, shyly approaches him. “Mr. K. talked to me right before he disappeared. He told me only to tell you. The stuff he told me.”
“So, tell me.”
The boy moves closer, taking up a greater portion of Syd’s personal space than he deems kosher. Syd inches back gingerly, like you would from an unpredictable small animal clutching a treasure to its chest, maybe a squirrel with a nut. “He talked about everything. He talked about love. He made me see things aren’t always the way they seemed.” The boy is flushed, his tone reverent, speaking with a kind of dangerous devotion that makes Syd wonder what had been going on on this island these past few weeks. “His voice, it was like he was all voice, you know. I’d never noticed that about him before.”
“He talked to you about love?”
“It’s not what you think. It was pretty general, not advice about girls and stuff. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I can’t explain it the way he did. And he told me to tell you, ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ And maybe yours.”