Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

Smile tho yr

is aching

the tiny tiny voice but NO! something’s wrong with her mic! A technician elegantly creeps onstage, fixes it in a jiffy, now garble of terrorstricken loving anticipatory sounds that Gwen’s never even heard from audience or crowd or anything ever — whalish sounds of primal anxiety&love&fear&primal love

Smile even tho it’s breaking

——& that. is. it.

The child can take no more.

The nightmare moment the audience thought would never come

is here.

Aleisha stares into the wings stage right, from the ballroom audience a ¼viewable spasmy clump of people is discernible there. Melanie. Gwen. Phoebe. Jesselle. Stage manager. Others. And Telma: unblinking, unstomping, uncrying, raging no more. Recipient of Aleisha’s beaten begging onstage eyes.

It happens so quickly, it’s only seconds, she was about to rescue her daughter, Jesselle was going to go out there too, hell even Gwen was but Telma tamped the mom’s arm & took the stage. The audience has not exhaled. They know this is no longer scripted. No one knows what’s going to happen, not even Gwen, but more than a few think they do: the big girl’s going to help the little girl walk offstage

NO.

Telma kneels to enfold her. Aleisha trembles.

Loud silence, then Telma begins

:) tho your heart is aching

Smile even tho it’s breaking

. . . but won’t go any further without her, her new BFF from Ontario CN. The silence grows louder. Telma gets behind her, still on her knees, arms enfolding/encircling her like a necklace, protecting, soothing, loving—& begins again— warbling whispering entreating lullaby-beseeching in Aleisha’s ear— MOTHERING— Gwen out of her fog now and into a dream, all of it dreamy———after a few false starts Telma gets her to talk — then talk-sing — then sing, her voice a thread of love entangled with Aleisha’s protecting loving loving LOVE

[they sing lyrics describing weather,

suggesting that as long as

there are skies above, one may persevere]

*

Masterfully, the accompaniment recedes (quickly, plaintively, breakingly) the conductor must’ve made that decision) until there is only

a

single

violin.

{Telma&Aleisha (together)}

[they sing lyrics suggesting

to remain steadfast

thru difficulties, the gloom

may lift and the

sun come out again]

*

& then it’s over.

Telma holds Aleisha

Aleisha holds back

burying her face in Telma/s blasted lambasted chest.

The mothers take the stage

& then:

pandemonium.

Fall Guy

Dolly

fell again. This time she sprained an arm and got what the doctor called a scalp hematoma; she bled beneath the skin. She got lucky, though, yet again — nothing broken. Nothing broken, nothing gained , said Bud aloud, in front of the caregiver with the worst English.

Bud sat on the edge of the bed. Mom looked all played out.

“Do you know what this is?”

“This?”

“This phase .”

She sounded almost lighthearted. Jaunty.

“No. What is it?”

“This is the deterioration-death phase. It’s old age. That’s what it is: the deterioration-death phase. If there was a coffin, you’d just crawl right in.”

“I can have one here tomorrow.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

They watched TV together, then Bud flipped through channels while Dolly slept. Reality show after reality show; the world was overdosing on reality. Once faddish, the New (filmed) Reality was the norm. Bud’s little theory was that the “blooper” was to blame. When he was a boy, he remembered John Wayne dropping by The Tonight Show with a blooper reel from his latest film — take after take of the Duke unable to make it through one scene or other without laughing. When he finally regained his composure, the virus had already passed to whoever was acting opposite him and the cycle began again. That sort of thing used to be a goof , a bonusburger you’d bring Johnny for kicks. It was fun, the folks at home liked the idea of being “in” on something plus it was sexy watching the squeaky gears of fame machinery at work. But when they started using blooper reels as “stingers” at the end of big feature comedies (a montage of mistakes, gaffes, and unprovoked hysteria over final credits), it was like climbing into a Philip K. Dick short story: the beginning of a fatal reality leak. If reality was the PDF , the blooper reel was the end of PDF inviolability , a gateway drug that hacked into reality to produce a highly addictive hybrid — reality programming — more potent than tired old reality itself. Cinematography died and gave birth to the photography of everything. Footage of the DP waking up in the morning, taking a shit and arguing with his wife before leaving for work (as DP on a feature film) was now as or more compelling than whatever fictional narrative he’d be hired to shoot. Formal storytelling no longer existed outside reality but had nestled inside ; writers gave TED talks on creating narratives that could be altered by the shake of an iPad. The wiki page on bloopers said the English called it “corpsing”—trying to make the live actor playing the corpse onstage laugh. Well, someone had hacked into fiction and contaminated it with reality; now fiction was the fata morgana, the ghostly relic on the laptop screen; the untampered PDF was a fanatical construction, at last thankfully extinct.

He stopped on a TNT doc about John Ford. There was a montage of men, galloping on horses. Suddenly the narrator was talking about horses that were specially trained to fall without injuring themselves. They called them — what else? — falling horses . He pictured Dolly on one, strapped to the saddle on the cover of an Hermès catalogue.

. .

Bud knew Michael would be jetlagged and was surprised when he agreed to meet. He said he needed to force himself to stay up because they were throwing a long-planned dinner party tonight for a writer who just published an acclaimed translation of Madame Bovary . Michael suggested the Coffee Bean, on Larchmont.

As it turned out, all the fuss in New Zealand was nothing more than — surprise — the actor wanting more to do. So Michael wrote three new scenes and elongated five more, without leaving the actor’s trailer. All the bullshit between star & director went poof .

“Wendy said the movie’s called Misericord …”

“That’s just a working title. Did Ooh Baby close your deal?”

“Yeah. I’ve already commenced.”

“I told you. What did I tell you?”

“Yes, you did. And I really thank you.”

“It’s from Biggie’s story? What they want you to adapt?”

“ Kind of. It’s a real story that Biggie found on the Internet. He made a few… changes .”

“Have you seen the two of them together?”

“Yeah, at the cancer thing.”

“Right! There’s something about them — the two of them, together — that’s terribly moving. Biggie’s sick, you know.”

“Something with his head?”

“They thought it was NPC, Niemann-Pick, but it isn’t. They don’t know what it is. If it was NPC, he’d be having seizures, & probably be fairly incapacitated by now. But he hasn’t had any seizures. Physically he seems to be fine. It’s a mystery.”