Jack Pendarvis: Movie Stars

1

IN SHORT, EXPLAINED THE TELEPHONE VOICE OF THE SOOTHING woman, very little work, a nice salary, freedom, a place to live, all bills and expenses taken care of invisibly by invisible hands. There were no strings. She reiterated that he would be required to teach just one class of his own devising per semester.

“My own devising, huh?” said Cookie. It sounded like a trick.

“The Fellowship is designed to give you maximum time to work on your own projects, whatever they may be. You’re familiar with the composer Sir Robert Mandala? Best known for his 1965 symphonic suite Six Hypnagogic Pieces ? The score famously included instructions for putting the orchestra into a trance prior to each performance, an anomaly in his catalog, an early experiment, yet it drew us to Sir Robert and his work. Sir Robert chose to spend his term as a Woodbine Fellow finishing his long-awaited opera Benedict Arnold , an earthy subject, you might say. He dedicated the score to us.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, an honor. So, as you can see, the personal work in which he was engaged during his term was not about conventionally paranormal subjects, despite the interests of the school. He enjoyed complete freedom and so will you. Incidentally, Sir Robert was so inspired by our students and our program here that he decided to compose his next opus on the subject of the yeti. As you can see, then, the relationship was mutually beneficial. Sir Robert had been stuck on the last act of Benedict Arnold for thirty years prior to his acceptance of the Fellowship. We restored his creativity. Sir Robert, when last heard from, was hiking into the Himalayas at the age of nearly eighty.”

“That’s great,” said Cookie.

“He was never seen again.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” said Cookie.

“The premiere of Benedict Arnold was given in Fort Worth, where it received stellar reviews.”

“That’s good,” said Cookie.

“But the composer was not there to hear it. He is missing and presumed dead, of course.”

“That’s too bad,” said Cookie.

“We were drawn to you initially because of your marvelous novel Look Behind You . Our board believes it shows extraordinary sensitivity to matters supernatural.”

“Oh, that was a novelization,” said Cookie.

The woman asked what a novelization was and Cookie had to tell her in so many words that it was hack work so some corporation could make a few more pennies off a movie, and that the few people who had bought his mass-market paperback novelization of Look Behind You did so because Tommy Lee Jones was on the cover. It had nothing to do with Cookie’s so-called talents, except for meeting deadlines, of which he was the king. He could say that for himself.

Later, Cookie’s wife came home.

Cookie’s wife smelled so good, like a flower smoking a cigarette. She gave off warm waves. Cookie liked it when she leaned in and whispered. She always had a fever. She was a nature poet with superpowers brought on by her constant fever — a well-known nature poet who should remain anonymous here.

“Well, we’re moving to Mississippi and I’m going to teach at a ghost college,” said Cookie.

“Okay,” said his wife.

Cookie liked his wife. She was up for anything.

“I’d love to stop writing about pies for a living,” Cookie said.

“You don’t have to convince me. And you’ve got that thing you’ve been wanting to work on.”

“That thing has ceased to interest me.”

“Maybe it will start to interest you again. Or maybe you’ll get a new idea.”

“A new thing,” said Cookie.

“A new thing,” said his wife.

They clinked imaginary glasses. Ghostly glasses!

2

It was in a snug loft above an unpromising dentist’s office that Cookie took up his residence at the ghost college. There was no TV. A large, iconic white tooth, made of plastic and lit from within, shone under the bedroom window, and as Cookie and his wife would soon discover, it was never turned off.

During the day, when Cookie was trying to write, came the whine of the drill and the screams of little children.

Some fifteen years before, when the space, upstairs and down, had been occupied by a renowned doll hospital, an extraordinarily cruel murder — never solved — had occurred in the very loft where Cookie and his wife now lived.

The generally sullen and mostly demure student who had shown them around upon their arrival, a young woman with bangs and cateye glasses, told them with an inappropriate burst of open delight how the killer had pooped on the floor.

It was hard to sleep that night. Cookie’s wife tried to distract him with a loose floorboard. “Listen, it makes a donkey sound,” she said. She demonstrated. The loose floorboard made a hee when she stepped on it and a haw when she lifted her foot.

Cookie was amused, but it proved a vague and temporary amusement.

“This is all my fault,” he said.

By now his wife was sitting at the little desk, working on a poem about the floorboard. Look at her. She was a visionary. A poem about a floorboard!

“Why are we here?” Cookie said. “Where there’s no TV? What am I going to do without TV?”

“Write,” said the nature poet.

“How did we get shut up in this little place in the middle of nowhere with the stench of death all over it?”

But it did give Cookie an idea for a first sentence: “The murder house had been turned into a bed and breakfast.”

He imagined a big old Victorian house in the flat middle of Indiana: back in Victorian times, a man in a velvet suit had lived there and smothered his visitors with a special pillow. A hundred years later, a woman inherits the house from a distant relative she never knew she had.

But there’s a caretaker who dresses up as the murderer and gives tours. Teenage girls want him to take their pictures as they lie in the murder bed and he holds a pillow menacingly over their heads. He comes to the gymnasiums of their schools and gives lectures in character:

“Do I appear familiar? I invented a tonic that is still in use today. My talents include playing the harpsichord and adeptness at spontaneous rhyme. I owned a rather famous pet raccoon named Nero. Before the days of my more unpleasant notoriety, my raccoon was written up in Collier’s magazine as perhaps the largest domesticated specimen in existence at that particular moment in American history, though it must be admitted that raccoons in general were smaller then. How I envy your twenty-first century its healthy and enormous raccoons!

“I am credited with inventing the saying ‘Somebody pinch me’ to express a surprise so very pleasant that one feels one must be dreaming. In 1892, I was put on trial for murder. Here in your twenty-first century, many people believe that I did not murder anyone. Others put the estimate at seventeen. My name is William Butter.

“I, William Butter, died in my own bed. I was never convicted of any crime. When my body was found, my hair had turned completely white. Just the day before, witnesses had referred to it as ‘a healthy chestnut in coloration.’ Yet at the moment of my death, even my pubic hair turned white.”