Ray Bradbury - A Graveyard for Lunatics

I saw two ghosts on the path through the weeds. One woman leading another, going away.

“An actress,” Father Kelly had said. “I forget the name.” The weeds blew down the path with a dry whisper. One ghost woman came back on the path alone, weeping. “Constance—?” I called out quietly.

I walked around down Gower and over to look in through the studio gate.

Hitler in his underground bunker in the last days of the Third Reich, I thought.

Rome burning and Nero in search of more torches.

Marcus Aurelius in his bath, slitting his wrists, letting his life drain.

Just because someone, somewhere, was yelling orders, hiring painters with too much paint, men with immense vacuum cleaners to snuff the suspicious dust.

Only one gate of the whole studio was open, with three guards standing alert to let the painters and cleaners in and out, checking the faces.

At which point Stanislau Groc roared up inside the gate in his bright red British Morgan, gunned the engine, and cried: “Out!”

“No, sir,” said the guard quietly. “Orders from upstairs. Nobody leaves the studio for the next two hours.”

“But I’m a citizen of the city of Los Angeles! not this damn duchy!”

“Does that mean,” I said through the grille, “if I come in, I can’t go out?”

The guard touched his cap visor and said my name. “You can come in, and out. Orders.”

“Strange,” I said. “Why me?”

“Dammit!” Groc started to get out of his car.

I stepped through the small door in the grille and opened the side door of Groc’s Morgan.

“Can you drop me at Maggie’s editing room? By the time you’re back they’ll probably let you out.”

“No. We’re trapped,” said Groc. “This ship’s been sinking all week, and no lifeboats. Run, before you drown, too!”

“Now, now,” said the guard quietly. “No paranoia.”

“Listen to him!” Groc’s face was chalk-pale. “The great studio-guard psychiatrist! You, get in. It’s your last ride!”

I hesitated and looked down into a face that was a Crosshatch of emotions. All the parts of Groc’s usually brave and arrogant front were melting. It was like a test pattern on a TV screen, blurred, clearing up, then dissolving. I climbed in and slammed the door, which banged the car off on a maniac path.

“Hey, what’s the rush!?”

We gunned by the sound stages. Each one was wide open and airing. The exteriors of at least six of them were being repainted. Old sets were being wrecked and carried out into the sunlight.

“On any other day, lovely!” Groc shouted above his engine. “I would have loved this. Chaos is my meat. Stockmarkets crashed? Ferryboats capsized? Superb! I went back to Dresden in 1946 just to see the destroyed buildings and shell-shocked people.”

“You didn’t?!”

“Wouldn’t you like to have seen? Or the fires in London in 1940. Every time mankind behaves abominably, I know happiness!”

“Don’t good things make you happy? Artistic people, creative men and women?”

“No, no.” Groc sped on. “ That depresses. A lull between stupidities. Just because there are a few naive fools mucking up the landscape with their cut roses and still-life arts only shows in greater relief the troglodytes, midget worms and sidewinding vipers that oil the underground machineries and run the world to ruin. I decided years ago, since the continents are vast sludge works, I would buy the best-size boots and wallow in it like a babe. But this is ridiculous, us locked inside a stupid factory. I want to laugh at, not be destroyed by, it. Hold on!” We swerved past Calvary.

I almost yelled.

For Calvary was gone.

Beyond, the incinerator lifted great plumes of black smoke.

“That must be the three crosses,” I said.

“Good!” Groc snorted. “I wonder—will J. C. sleep at the Midnight Mission tonight?”

I swiveled my head to look at him.

“You know J. C. well?”

“The muscatel Messiah? I made him! As I made others’ eyebrows and bosoms, why not Christ’s hands! So I pared the extra flesh to make his fingers seem delicate: the hands of a Saviour. Why not? Is not religion a joke? People think they are saved. We know they’re not. But the crown-of-thorns touch, the stigmata!” Groc shut his eyes as he almost drove into a telephone pole, swerved and stopped.

“I guessed you had done that,” I said, at last.

“If you act Christ, be Him! I told J. C. I will make you spike marks to show at Renaissance exhibitions! I will sew you the stigmata of Masaccio, da Vinci, Michelangelo! From the Pieta’s marble flesh! And, as you’ve seen, on special nights—”

“—the stigmata bleed.”

I knocked the car door wide. “I think I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“No, no,” Groc apologized, laughing shrilly. “I need you. What an irony! To get me out the front gate, later. Go talk to Botwin, then we run like hell.”

I held the door half open, undecided. Groc seemed in such a joyful panic, hilarious to the point of hysteria, I could only shut the door. Groc drove on.

“Ask, ask,” said Groc.

“Okay,” I tried. “What about all those faces you made beautiful?”

Groc pedaled the gas.

“They’ll last forever, I told them, and the fools believed. Anyway, I am retiring, if I can get out the front gate. I have bought passage on a round-the-world cruise tomorrow. After thirty years my laughs have turned to snake spit. Manny Leiber? Will die any day. Doc? Did you know? He’s gone.”

“Where?”

“Who knows?” But Groc’s eyes slid north toward the studio graveyard wall. “Excommunicated?”

We drove. Groc nodded ahead. “Now Maggie Botwin I like. She’s a perfectionist surgeon, like me.”

“She doesn’t sound like you.”

“If she ever did, she’d die. And you? Well, disillusionment takes time. You’ll be seventy before you find you’ve crossed minefields yelling to an idiot troop, this way! Your films will be forgotten.”

“No,” I said.

Groc glanced over at my set chin and stubborn upper lip.

“No,” he admitted. “You have the look of the true sainted fool. Not your films.”

We rounded another corner and I nodded to the carpenters, the cleaners, and painters: “Who ordered all this work?”

“Manny, of course.”

“Who ordered Manny? Who really gives orders here? Someone behind a mirror? Someone inside a wall?”

Groc braked the car swiftly and looked ahead. I could see the stitch marks around his ears, nice and clear.

“It can’t be answered.”

“No?” I said. “I look around, what do I see? A studio, in the midst of production on eight films. One a huge one, our Jesus epic, with two more days of shooting to go. And suddenly, on a whim, someone says: Slam the doors. And the crazed painting and cleaning happens. It’s madness to shut a studio with a budget that runs at least ninety to a hundred thousand dollars a day. What gives?”

“What?” said Groc, quietly.

“Well, I see Doc and he’s a jellyfish, poisonous, but no spine. I look at Manny and his behind is just right for highchairs. You? There’s a mask behind your mask and another under that. None of you have the dynamite kegs or the electric pump plunger to knock the whole damn studio down. Yet down it goes. I see a studio as big as a white whale. Harpoons fly. So there’s got to be a real maniac captain.”

“Tell me, then,” Groc said, “Who is Ahab?”

“A dead man standing on a ladder in the graveyard, looking over, giving orders. And you all run,” I said.

Groc blinked three slow iguana-lizard blinks of his great dark eyes.