Robert Coover - A Night at the Movies Or, You Must Remember This

She thinks maybe it's about time to sit down and have a good cry, but while she's still only thinking about it, some guys in turbans, pajamas, and silky boots with curled toes come galloping along and snatch her up. "Hey, fellas, you wouldn't happen to have a cracker or something?" she asks hopefully, but they only heave her over the back end of the horse, her little heart's aloft, and go thundering off to some sheik's palace in an oasis.

So, okay, she's had a few surprises since the night she stepped into that movie lobby back in her old hometown all those years ago, but the biggest one is yet to come. This sheik is the very same guy who was standing under the poster and who she just left battling impossible odds back in that bunker, only now here he is with what is obviously a very phony moustache pasted on his lip, and she's made to understand that she's his new favorite and is to be his bride. Tonight. Of course, there are a lot of brides, the palace is full of veiled ladies sneaking about, there's a couple of dozen of them here in his bedroom alone, but she considers herself a gregarious person and doesn't mind company. She winks at the sheik to let him know she's in on whatever he's got in mind, but he only scowls darkly and bellows something about "stinking pig" and "prepare her for bridal sacrament." Okay, let him play it his way.

She's handed over to some eunuchs and serving girls who lead her down to a kind of shallow swimming pool full of bareass ladies and peel her rags off her. She pats her belly and points into her open mouth with her bunched fingers, but they don't get it. Oh well, it's a wedding, isn't it, probably there's going to be a banquet, she tells herself, ever the cheery optimist. She's just got her toe in the water, testing how hot it is, when up comes that driver of the gangsters' car again. The last couple of times she's seen him, he was crashing down a cliff in an exploding car and getting thrown into the maw of a smoking volcano, yet here he is again, disguised this time as a naked eunuch, and insisting to everybody that before her bath she has to be taken down to what he calls the "virginorium" for a health check.

Before she or anyone else can protest, he is hauling her at full pelt down a mirrored hall, her bare feet slapping boisterously on the marble floor, the rest of her all aquiver and goose-bumpy and no doubt rosy pink under all the grime. Her birthday suit, unfortunately, even as starved as she is, could still use a few tucks here and there, a fact that has probably not escaped all the people who are turning to stare at her galumphing by. He pushes her ahead of him suddenly into a dark corridor, presses his back to the wall, cranes his head around the corner. "It's clear!" he hisses. "There's a plane waiting out behind the camel barns. We've got to move fast!" "Wait a minute," she pants, "I know this guy, it's all right." "No, you don't! It's not who you think it is! This is his evil twin brother! Didn't you notice the telltale scar, the missing birthmark? Through forged papers he has stolen his brother's rightful inheritance! He'll stop at nothing! That's why you're involved!" "What?" It's getting pretty complicated. "Look, I'm not particular, they're both pretty cute." He seizes her wrist. "Let me show you something."

He drags her down more corridors, more stairs, more narrow passages. "Talk about stopping at nothing," she grumbles. They're now deep in the labyrinth of the palace. He puts his fingers to his lips, sidles cautiously toward a locked door. "This is the room of the favorites," he whispers. "First they dance for the sheik, they become his bride, and then they come here." He picks the lock with a piece of wire concealed mysteriously on his person. Inside: a whole roomful of severed heads! She screams. It's a kind of reflex. "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me," she whispers. They can hear footsteps approaching. He strokes the stone wall like a blind man trying to guess what it is. Suddenly, just as the footsteps come clattering down the stairs into the corridor, a piece of the wall slides open and they slip behind it, pressing the wall quickly together again like completing a puzzle.

The secret passage leads back to the harem pool. "Grab your clothes and let's get out of here!" he rasps. It's hardly worth it, all that's left are her raggedy blouse and bikini pants, and it's a hot climate anyway, but she does as she's told, having always been an easygoing sort. While she's pulling them on, the other eunuchs and serving girls crowd around, trying to herd her back into the pool again, but her friend makes a slicing gesture at his throat and grabs her by the hair. They all understand this and back away. If they're so good at sign language, she wonders, why didn't they get her something to eat when she asked them? It's only slowly dawning on her just how sinister this place really is. He drags her away by the hair, which she thinks is pushing the realism a bit too far, but before she can complain, they run into some of the apes who kidnapped her in the first place.

The head-chopping act doesn't work with these guys. "You! Dance!" one of them grunts, pushing her brusquely toward the sheik's bedroom. She trips and falls. If she can't even walk, do these mugs think she can dance? Her eunuch chum helps her to her feet, whispering furtively in her ear, "All right, this is it, kid!" "But I'm a rotten dancer!" she whimpers. "All I can do is polka!" "All you gotta do is be yourself — believe me, you can do it! Now, get in there and show 'em your stuff! I'll be waiting at the plane!"

She gets shoved into the sheik's bedroom where there's a big crowd gathered for her show, and the sheik asks her in his clumsy unpleasant accent, which she still suspects must be some kind of put-on, why she hasn't got out of her dirty old rags ("feelty olt wrecks," he calls them), and, thinking fast, she tells him that what she'd planned to do as her first number is the "Dance of the Filthy Pig." He looks skeptical and she tells him that it's very popular right now where she comes from and just to sit back and have a good time. She's never danced alone in public before, but once she's thought up the title, the rest comes easy. Anyone can do a dancing pig, especially if they've had a little cheerleading practice. She throws in a bit of dancing duck and dancing cow, which has the sheik boggling his eyes and twisting the ends of his moustache, and she might have gone on and done the whole barnyard (already — she can't help herself — she's thinking career) if they hadn't interrupted her with a loud gong and presented her with a covered platter: a banquet, after all! Her stomach gurgles shamelessly in anticipation.

What she finds when she lifts the lid, however, is the severed head of her eunuch friend, now wearing his old cloth driving cap, something metal between his pale blue lips. A key! She's crying on the inside, or maybe even throwing up, but on the outside she laughs crazily and snatches up the cloth cap with one hand, subtly cops the key with the other: bless his heart, his jaws are clamped around the key and she has to push on his face to get it out, sending the head rolling around on the marble floor, but this only adds authenticity to her second rendition, which she has just announced as "Follow the Bouncing Head." She tugs the cap down tight over her eyebrows and starts dancing wildly around the room, kicking the head ahead of her and chasing after, and, before they can recover from their amazement, boots it out the door and down the hall.

By the time she's found a way out of this pretzely loonybin, she can hear them clattering and shouting right behind her. This is going to be close! She sends her friend back down the corridor on one last mission, hoping to bowl a few of them over, and races out into the moonlight. She has no idea where the camel barns might be, but she just follows her nose and finds them soon enough. She lets the camels loose to confuse her pursuers, but the stupid things just stand there, chewing their cuds. "Next time I'm going to do the 'Dance of the Camelburgers'!" she screams furiously at them, and dashes out back where the old museum-piece of an airplane is parked. Even as she jumps up into the cockpit, she can hear the barns filling up behind her with rabid scimitar-swinging soreheads.