Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

Larry was in a silent rage when I got in. The studio and my agent had been on the phone all morning, wanting to know where I was. It was the day of the big scene between Nancy and Adam. I tried to explain to him the good news, that the whole city had been saved from disaster, but he just stared at me, dumbfounded. When I told him that this miracle proved the power of the Space Brothers and that the Watchers had been right, he lost his temper.

‘No, Sharleen, no!’ he shouted. ‘It proves the opposite, doesn’t it? It proves that the prophecy was wrong. And now you’ve lost your job with the studio and your agent says he never wants to see you again!’

Larry loved to think that he had been proved right about Martha’s prophecy. This sense of righteous anger was far more important to him than the possibility that the world had been saved from an apocalypse. But I had lost my job. So I promised Larry that I would find a new agent and not get too involved in anything like the Watchers for a while.

In the New Year we had some good news. A novelette of Larry’s that had run as a magazine series was reprinted in an Ace Double, a cheap paperback format where two stories are bound together. And, more encouragingly for him, a publishing house offered him a hardback deal for a novel he had submitted, with an option on a second. The Translucent Man got him a thousand-dollar advance and came out in June 1957. We still had to struggle that year but it wasn’t nearly as bad Larry made out. He was half in love with the idea of being the starving artist.

And I soon found myself another agent. For glamour photography at first, then later for these odd 8mm films. It would be me and another girl, both in corsets and suspenders. She would tie me up and gag me, then make out that she was spanking me hard with a hairbrush or a riding crop. In another one she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and I was on an examination table. She would put on rubber gloves and do all kinds of physical tests on me. I found that I could act in these scenes really easily, as if I was meant to do it. I secretly felt that the devil was punishing me, laughing at me for being a bad actress. I kept the truth about this work from Larry. I told him that I had been making ‘training films’.

I didn’t want to disturb him. He was working so hard trying to finish his next novel, American Gnostic . He would shut himself away for long writing sessions, fuelled up on amphetamines. He could go three, even four days without sleep. Then he would collapse into bed for forty-eight hours or so, occasionally waking to eat something or scribble notes, then he would be up and at it again. I worried about his health but Larry kept going, writing obsessively, convinced that this thing was to be a major work for him. It was as if there was some evil force driving him on. I suspected even then that there was something bad about this book.

And I felt lonely. I even considered making contact with some of the Watchers again, just on a social basis. But the group had completely split up. Martha had gone to join a Scientology centre in Arizona. Dr Headley had sold his house and was travelling the country, spreading the word of the Space Brothers. He had joined something called the College of Universal Wisdom and had spoken at a flying saucer convention at Giant Rock, California.

There was a kind of panic that October, when the Russians launched Sputnik. Fear that the Reds had beaten us into space. Along with many others, we went out to watch the night sky and try to catch a glimpse of this artificial satellite. Larry seemed pleased that the Soviets had been the first to put a spacecraft in orbit. He told me that it felt good to see the masses shocked out of complacency. And as he gazed up into the heavens I saw something of the Larry I had known when we had first met: a childlike wonder at the universe. He had just finished the novel and was happy and calm for once.

I remember being more affected by the second launch a month later. Sputnik 2 was sent up with a dog inside. Laika was a stray mongrel bitch that had been found wandering the streets of Moscow. She was chosen for the space mission because of her resilience. The American press called her ‘Muttnik’, but I didn’t see the joke. I felt a strange kinship with this poor creature. When I thought of her trapped in that metal capsule, hurtling through the cosmos, I was overwhelmed by despair and emptiness. When Larry asked why I was crying I told him: ‘Laika. I’m like her. I’m a bitch in space.’

Larry decided that we should go away that Christmas. I think it was because he felt that the previous December had been so traumatic and he was determined to avoid any memory of it. He also had delivered his novel and had received part of the advance. So we spent two weeks in Honolulu. The time passed like a dream: warm sea and cold cocktails, the palm trees fracturing the sunlight. But I felt a static charge, a fuzzing in the head; the distant surf was like TV interference in the next room. Anxiety in paradise. A growing fear of going home.

I don’t know quite what made me so dread the publication of Larry’s next novel. Maybe it was because he didn’t talk to me about it while he was working on it. Larry would usually show me something of what he was writing or read out sections to me. But not this one. Oh no, this one was a big secret that he wanted to keep from me. And when it came out in the spring of 1958 I could see why.

American Gnostic is as confused and rambling as any other of Larry Zagorski’s works but there were whole chunks of it I got straightaway. The mystery of Seth Archer, the rocket scientist with occult knowledge assassinated in a laboratory explosion; Lucas D. Hinkel, science-fiction writer and founder of the now-established state religion, the Cult of Futurology; obvious ‘borrowings’ from his past. As usual it was hard to understand what Larry really believed in. He portrays John Six, a humanoid visitor from another planet, arriving at the Sunday Mass of a ‘flying saucer chapel’, using language and information similar to that of the Watcher meetings. It was as if all along he had known that the Space Brothers existed, but he could deal with it only on his own terms. Worst of all for me was the character of Bella Berkeley, a naive and credulous actress in a ‘holovision blip-opera’ who falls in love with Six. It seemed a malevolent transformation of my personality. Bella is a constant victim of cruel comedy, of morbid sexual fantasy. And I realised with horror that this was what Larry really thought of me.

Of course he insisted that it was fiction, that he had merely used some aspects of my life, that Bella wasn’t me at all. Writers think that they can write what they like and just by changing the names they can get away with it. And they actually think that they can control it all. Whatever you might think of Martha and her automatic writing, at least she was honest, admitting that she just wrote what came to her. As I said before, Larry stole. He took all these ideas and experiences and claimed it as his own work. His own fiction. His own great novel.

And we had terrible arguments. He shouted at me that he had to be free to write what he wanted. So I told him what this freedom had cost. I told him what I had done to pay the rent and the bills. I saw the look of disgust on his face.

I couldn’t bear to be with him any more after that. I told him I was leaving him but he said that I should stay. He would go and live with his mother until he found a new place. It was pathetic.

So he left. He took a few things, put them in his car and drove away.

I was alone.

I started to feel scared. Someone was watching the house.

Someone was listening in.

I took some of Larry’s pills that he had left behind. Nembutals. They helped me sleep but when I woke up it took me a long time to work out where I was. What time was it? The sun was going down. I had the vision of an inhuman horizon. A star descending on a distant planet. A dead planet.