And without a word, he bolts out of his seat and races up the aisle stairs until he disppears into the projection room.
Sylvia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and hates herslf for her stupidity.
She opens her eyes and on the screen the kiss is over and Dorothy pushes out of the Scarecrow’s arms, almost falls to the bricks and then runs out of screen view. And the Scarecrow is left embarrassed, staring at the camera without anything to say, without an explanation, until he too runs off in another direction, leaving wisps of straw drifting in the air behind him.
Oz vanishes and the screen is filled with black leader that has huge white letters and numbers written on it. Sylvia gets out of her seat and walks up to the projection booth. The door is open and the projector is still humming and cranking, but Propp, of course, is nowhere to be seen. There’s a square opening in the floor at the rear of the booth. She steps inside and looks to see a spiral staircase which she climbs down into a closet that leads out to the concession stand.
She leans on the candy counter and looks forward at the main entrance of the theatre. The double glass doors are pushed wide open, a set of keys hanging from an interior lock.
Sylvia stands still until her breathing calms and all she can hear is the slap-and-purr sound of the movie reel upstairs, the tail end of the film perpetually revolving on the take-up arm of the projector. She listens until she decides not to turn it off. She pushes her hands into the pockets of her coat to confirm what she already suspects. The film canisters are gone.
Then she moves out the front door and starts to walk home.
25
Jakob loves scouting locations. If some quirk of nature or God were to prevent him from being an auteur, he thinks he could still find a reasonable percentage of happiness as a set scout. He’s convinced he could be dropped from a plane into any locale on the planet — urban, suburban, full-blown rural — and he’d be able to find the exactly correct visuals for any hypothetical film in development. And in any art form so dependent on collaboration, scouting requires no interaction beyond that of his inner-eye and his outer eye.
It’s a question of determining coordinates, of uncovering real world field-sites that agree with the images already screened in the skull-cinema. You look at the printed page where the screenwriter has written.
EXT. TRAIN STATION — NIGHT
and you know, from the context of the narrative, from the endless number of movies you’ve seen in your life, from the specific throb in the center of your bone marrow, you know what this train station must look like.
It must look like this.
Like Gompers Station, Jakob decides, exactly like Gompers Station once the correct angles are established and the lighting is battled out and the dry-ice machine has pumped the perfect balance of smoke and water into the air.
Jakob is sitting fifty feet above the ground, his legs dangling toward the fastest lane of the interstate. He’s perched on the small lip of steel staging that supports an enormous billboard that reads
Aldrich Brothers Opticians
in the lobby of the Justman Building
“Because We’ll See You Through”
From this height and distance, he can get a beautiful wide-angle of Gompers and he knows, if he can make it haunting enough, this is the shot he’ll use to both open and close his film.
Jakob has been sitting up on the billboard lip for almost an hour. He keeps staring out over the train station with his bare eyes, then lifting the Seitz and staring all over again through the camera’s eye. Something is troubling him, but he’s yet to discover what it is. It’s an absence of some sort, a missing component to the total picture. It’s something he knows, instinctively, in his gut, that he can correct. It’s a hole that needs to be filled, some kind of minor element like a truant wine bottle that should be in the rail bed, a pane of glass that needs to be broken. If he’s patient and sits long enough, the gap will reveal itself. Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do.
It would have been easier in Maisel, he thinks, but ease is not what makes a great film. Quinsigamond is a deranged stepmother with very sharp claws. But this is why it’s the perfect place, the only place, to film Little Girl Lost.
He takes in the night air, thick with the rain that keeps threatening to fall, arches his shoulders backwards and wonders how Felix will dispose of Jiri Fric’s body. Then he pushes the thought away and lifts the Seitz back to his eye, peers through, aiming down at the station. And, for the first time all night, he sees movement.
He zooms in and adjusts his focus manually. There, poking out of one of the Saville Co. Storage cars. And she’s gone before he can shoot any film. He shifts the camera up on his shoulder, points it skyward, looks over the whole of the lot. He brings the camera back, aims at the storage car, waits ten seconds. Waits another twenty. There, again, the head edges out beyond the door, furtive, like an animal aware of an unseen predator.
The head lingers this time. It’s a young girl, preteen. She takes another look around the yard, then shifts her body, throws her legs out the door and eases herself down to the ground, in an anticipatory crouch. Then, as if a switch is thrown, she bolts toward a waste Dumpster across the yard, hauls herself up by climbing a pile of scrap metal next to the bin, and rolls like a gymnast down into the trash, disappearing from the frame completely.
Jakob’s heart is racing with epiphany. This is the face he has been looking for, the saint that will bless his film. This is, without doubt, without any equivocation, the face that will fuel every inch of celluloid he’ll expose. This is the Little Girl Lost.
All he’ll need is a single, perfect, still shot. Something he can blow up to wall-size for the chancellery interrogation scene and integrate into the newspaper mock-ups. Something he can transpose, full-screen, a ghost-image, over the anti-hero’s final moments.
And then he’s climbing, racing down the struts of the billboard like some arrogant prince of a traveling circus who has nothing but contempt for gravity. He leaps the last five feet to the breakdown lane of the highway, cradling the Seitz like a baby pulled from a burning tenement. He dashes across the interstate, ignoring the awful horn blast of the refrigeration trucks barreling down on him. He jumps over the guardrail, does a graceless, full-speed dance down the embankment that rolls into the perimeter of Gompers. And then he freezes, not sure how to proceed. If he rushes her, he’ll panic her back into hiding and lose his central image forever. But if he calls out to her, gives her warning, she’ll have even more time to cut and run. So he decides the best thing to do is probably keep his distance, but follow her, wait for her to appear in some random shaft of light, and shoot as much film as he can without her ever knowing,
He moves as quietly as possible, positions himself behind an Elias Freight boxcar. He gets on one knee, brings up the Seitz and finds his focus. And then he finds the girl. Incredibly, she’s even better in closer proximity, matching, almost too well, the rough sketches he made in the back of his notebook. She has the kind of eyes that make dialogue irrelevant. The flowing blonde hair, matted now in places, that gives her a vulnerable but feral look. She’s dressed in filthy clothing that looks like cast-off rags.
Jakob watches as she begins to chew on something found in the Dumpster, maybe a crust of bread. She tears into it with her teeth, pushing it into her mouth until the cheeks bulge like those of a squirrel. Her skin is smudged with ash and dirt and Jakob thinks it could be deliberate, a crude camouflage or war paint.