Connie Willis - Remake

“No,” I said, looking at the screen.

“Well, you will in a few minutes.” She pulled the blankets off the bed. “Lie down, and I’ll get you some water. Ridigaine’s fast, but it’s rough. The best thing is if you can—”

“Sleep it off,” I said.

She brought a glass of water in and set it by the bed. “Access me if you get the shakes and start seeing things.”

“According to you, I already am.”

“I didn’t say that. I just said you should check out this Virginia Gibson before you jump to any conclusions. After the ridigaine does its stuff.”

“Meaning that when I’m sober, it won’t look like her.”

“Meaning that when you’re sober, you’ll at least be able to see her.” She looked steadily at me. “Do you want it to be her?”

“I think I will lie down,” I said to get her to leave. “My head aches.” I sat down on the bed.

“It’s starting to work,” she said triumphantly. “ Access me if you need anything.”

“I will,” I said, and lay back.

She looked around the room. “You don’t have any more liquor in here, do you?”

“Gallons,” I said, gesturing toward the screen. “Bottles, flasks, kegs, decanters. You name it, it’s in there.”

“It’ll just make it worse if you drink anything.”

“I know,” I said, putting my hand over my eyes. “Shakes, pink elephants, six-foot-tall rabbits, ‘and how are you, Mr. Wilson?’ ”

“Access me,” she said, and left, finally.

I waited five minutes for her to come back and tell me to be sure and piss, and then another five for the snakes and rabbits to show up, or worse, Fred and Eleanor, dressed in white and dancing side by side. And thinking about what Heada’d said. If it wasn’t a paste-up, what was it? And it couldn’t be a paste-up. Heada hadn’t heard Alis talking about wanting to dance in the movies. She hadn’t seen her, that night down on Hollywood Boulevard, when I offered her a chance at one. She could have been digitized that night, been Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, anybody she wanted. Even Eleanor Powell. Why would she have suddenly changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a dancer nobody’d ever heard of? An actress who’d only appeared in a handful of movies. One of which starred Fred Astaire.

“We’re this close to having time travel,” the exec had said, his thumb and finger almost touching.

And what if Alis, who was willing to do anything to dance in the movies, who was willing to practice in a cramped classroom with a tiny monitor and work nights in a tourate trap, had talked one of the time-travel hackates into letting her be a guinea pig? What if Alis had talked him into sending her back to 1954, dressed in a green weskit and short gloves, and then, instead of coming back like she was supposed to, had changed her name to Virginia Gibson and gone over to MGM to audition for a part in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? And then gone on to be in six other movies. One of which was Funny Face. With Fred Astaire.

I sat up, slowly, so I wouldn’t turn my headache into anything worse, and went over to the terminal and called up Funny Face.

Heada had said Fred Astaire was still in litigation, and he was. I put a watch-and-warn on both the movie and Fred in case the case got settled. If Heada was right — and when wasn’t she? — Warner would turn around and file immediately, but if there was a glitch or Warner’s lawyers were busy with Russ Tamblyn, there might be a window. I set the watch-and-warn to beep me and called up the list of Virginia Gibson’s musicals again.

Starlift was a World War II b-and-w, which wouldn’t give me as clear an image as color, and She’s Back on Broadway was in litigation, too, for someone I’d never heard of. That left Athena, Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, and Tea for Two, none of which I could remember ever seeing.

When I called up Athena, I could see why. It was a cross between One Touch of Venus and You Can’t Take It with You, with lots of floating chiffon and health-food eccentrics and almost no dancing. Virginia Gibson, in green chiffon, was supposed to be Niobe, the goddess of jazz and tap or something. Whatever she was, it wasn’t Alis. It looked like her, especially with her hair pulled back in a Greek ponytail. “And with a fifth of bourbon in you,” Heada would have said. And a double dose of ridigaine. Even then, it didn’t look as much like her as the dancer in the barnraising scene. I called up Seven Brides, and the screen stayed silver for a long moment and then started scrolling legalese. “This movie currently in litigation and unavailable for viewing.”

Well, that settled that. By the time the courts had decided to let Russ Tamblyn be sliced and diced, I’d be chooch free and able to see it was just somebody who looked like her, or not even that. A trick of lights and makeup.

And there was no point in slogging through any more musicals to drive the point home. Any resemblance was purely alcoholic, and I should do what Doc Heada said, lie down and wait for it to pass. And then go back to slicing and dicing myself. I should call up Notorious and get it over with.

“Tea for Two,” I said.

Tea was a Doris Day pic, and I wondered if she was on Alis’s bad-dancer list. She deserved to be. She smirked her way toothily through a tap routine with Gene Nelson, set in a rehearsal hall Alis would have killed for, all floor space and mirrors and no stacks of desks. There was a terrible Latin version of “Crazy Rhythm,” Gordon MacRae singing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and then Virginia Gibson’s big number.

And there was no question of her being Alis. With her hair down, she didn’t even look that much like her. Or else the ridigaine was kicking in.

The routine was Hollywood’s idea of ballet, more chiffon and a lot of twirling around, not the kind of routine Alis would have bothered with. If she’d had ballet back in Meadowville, and not just jazz and tap, but she hadn’t, and Virginia obviously had, so Alis wasn’t Virginia, and I was sober, and it was back to the bottles.

“Forward 64,” I said, and watched Doris smirk her way through the title number and an unnecessary reprise. The next number was a big production number. Virginia wasn’t in it, and I started to ff again and then stopped.

“Rew to music cue,” I said, and watched the production number, counting the frame numbers. A blond couple stepped forward, did a series of toe slides, and stepped back again, and a dark-haired guy and a redhead in a white pleated skirt kicked forward and went into a side-by-side Charleston. She had curly hair and a tied-in-front blouse, and the two of them put their hands on their knees and did a series of cross kicks. “Frame 75-004, forward 12,” I said, and watched the routine in slow motion.

“Enhance quadrant 2,” and watched the red hair fill the screen, even though there wasn’t any need for an enhancement, or for the slowmo, either. No question at all of who it was.

I had known the instant I saw her, the same way I had in the barn-raising scene, and it wasn’t the booze (of which there was at least fifteen minutes’ worth less in my system) or klieg, or a passing resemblance enhanced with rouge and eyebrow pencil. It was Alis. Which was impossible.

“Last frame,” I said, but this was the Good Old Days when the chorus line didn’t get into the credits, and the copyright date had to be deciphered. MCML. 1950.

I went back through the movie, going to freeze frame and enhance every time I spotted red hair, but I didn’t see her again. I ff’d to the Charleston number and watched it again, trying to come up with a theory.