Bruce Wagner - The Chrysanthemum Palace

“Aye, sir!—”

“Red alert! Engine room, damage report!”

“Still checking, Captain!” said the script supervisor, tucked behind a camera. (Her voice would eventually be looped.)

“Warp plasma inducers?”

“Intact. We have full power, but we’re ‘locked in.’ I’ve never seen a tractor beam of this magnitude, sir—”

“Bypass?”

“There’s no way,” said Cabott. “If we continue the attempt to free ourselves, we risk implosion.”

The captain leaned into the subwoofer-thingie to bark the patented bridge-to-engine-room “Realign the power grid!” (always a crowd-pleaser) before asking Cabott how much time we had. The android nanocalculated point-two-seven hours, at the outset.

“Will,” said Laughton, with (patentedly) urgent, almost seductive intimacy — it was the writers’ idea that whenever the shit hit the fan, crew members were to be addressed by first names—“ Get us out of here.”

I tried the instruments again but they wouldn’t budge. I shouted that we were being sucked into a vortex (at that moment, hating myself as both actor and man). The captain puzzled over what— who —was pulling us — while Thad stepped forward to stare gravely at the starscreen.

“I believe,” he said, “we are being appropriated by the Vorbalidian System.”

“Appropriated? What’s the meaning of it, Ensign?”

“It’s obvious they feel that a hostile incursion on their sacred Dome is imminent.”

“But, that’s… madness!” the captain opined, a bit over the top. It was one of those days where it seemed like he was doing an impression of himself.

“If I am to read the situation correctly,” said Thad, “their behavior can have only one meaning.” The bridge grew quiet as the camera dollied in on the rubbery, fetal face of the tyro ensign, his sweaty gaze pitched upward toward blue screen. A slow-zoom intercut would later reveal the lame-ass ingot in all its hoary, kandy-kolored tangerine-flaked digital glory. “It is a declaration of war.”

Before cutting, the director bade us stare a few extra beats in varying degrees of freaked-outedness at the screen, which in postproduction would project the twisted, Alfred E. Newmanesque visage of the badasssssssss Prince Morloch, his psychotic smile glaring down at us from the garish, faux-marbleized sanctuary of the Vorbalidian Dome.

1You may be legion.

2The door was actually pulled open on ropes by hidden grips, with the whoosh added in post. Everything you always wanted to know about space opera but were afraid to ask.

3Again, for the cognoscente: whenever the Demeter came under assault, an A.D. would instruct the actors to “shake”—but only the cameras moved. Also, I implore the readers to forgive excerpted “Prodigal” dialogue, for it is not my own.

THAT DAY, MIRIAM FLEW IN.

Ostensibly, she was here on business — to see Thad do his bit on the Starwatch set. Naturally, my secret hope was that she’d arranged her visit for the sole purpose of our getting, ahem, reacquainted. With a jealous twinge, I wondered if she’d been on any dates herself and if I’d popped into her head as she had into mine. The agent was ensconced a few floors below her client, who’d sensibly downgraded (with Miriam’s prodding) from the penthouse to an Art Deco apartment replete with piano, sixties-style kitchen, and long stone terrace. The girlie part of me thought it would have been fun if she’d rebooked our first-fling digs; maybe she wasn’t the nostalgic type. Still, there was a brave new boudoir to explore and I looked forward to beginning the courtship afresh.

The four of us planned a late supper. Mr. Michelet wrapped at 3:00 P.M. (the sudden onset of a headache being coincidental to his early release) and went back to the Chateau to lie down. Clea and I finished “chores” a few hours later. We drove to my gym on Sepulveda. I liked spending an hour on the treadmill, watching the latest dumb and dumber CNN horrors while Clea went through her paces in a cardio class of bitch-slapping, Showgirls -style aerobics. By the time we shook, showered, and protein-shaked, it was nearly eight.

Walking down the darkened hall of the Chateau, I could see the door to Thad’s suite was ajar. A muted Miriam greeted us with warm hugs, whispering how Thad’s migraine had become full-blown and they had to give him a shot. Indeed, the doctor was injecting him as we entered. The off-duty ensign wore a threadbare LAUGH FACTORY T-shirt; there was something sadly sweet sad about the grimy ring of Pan-Cake foundation still clinging to his neck. Clea rushed to the couch and kissed his cheek. He smiled adorably and said, “Call me Olga” (which only occurred to me later was an allusion to Chekhov’s headache-plagued schoolmarm). He gave me a wink.

“Bertram,” he said. “Darling, darling Bertram…”

I didn’t feel I’d yet earned such affections and was wary of his making fun. Such sensitivities betrayed my depths of feeling for the man.

“What are you giving him?” asked Clea of the doctor as she held Thad’s hand.

“A suppository and a shot of old malt whiskey,” said Thad, gamely.

The medico was in his late forties, with closely cropped white hair.

“A migraine cocktail,” he said. “Demerol and Vistaril.”

Clea cooed her tiresome When Harry Met Sally “I’ll have what he’s having” number — sleazy and overobvious. I was never a fan of the exhibitionist side of her that thought it hip to advertise addictions; to me, it vulgarly telegraphed relapse.

“V is for Vistaril,” Thad uttered, on the way to feeling no pain. “V is for vomit. V is for Vorbalid.”

“Will he sleep?” asked Miriam, conversationally. I imagined she’d been through this before.

“Like a patient eulogized upon a table,” said Thad, droopy-lidded. It was somehow reassuring that even in his current state he still liked a pun.

“He’ll sleep,” said the doctor. “We like to say the medicine won’t necessarily make the headache go away — it just won’t bother him anymore.”

“Wait,” said Thad, suddenly queasy. White-faced, he shakily stood. Clea braced him, as did Miriam from the other side.

“Do you want to go to the bathroom?”

He winced, his face relaxing as the vertigo receded. He took a deep breath before settling back on a pillow.

“That fucking starship bouillabaisse…”

“If you need to throw up, go right ahead,” said the doctor, folksily.

“Don’t be facile,” said Thad, soft targets refocusing.

“A horrible patient,” said Miriam, apologetically.

“Oh, he’s not so bad. But I should wait a while. He may need another shot.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? What are they? Two hundred a pop?”

“Thad!” scolded Clea. “Give the man a break. He came all the way at rush hour.”

“Dr. Chaldorer would never be so venal.”

“Is that your regular physician?” said the doc, affably.

“Not just my physician,” Thad rejoined. “He’s responsible for the entire crew. ”

“The film crew?”

“He’s a character in our show,” informed Clea, with a slight roll of the eyes.

“You’re an actor,” said the doc. He was a little square — I mean, not only could you see Thad’s Pan-Cake, but here we were at the Chateau. Hello.

“He’s doing Starwatch: The Navigators, ” Miriam offered.

I thought it strange the otherwise savvy, intuitive Miriam could grow situationally clunky, cheaply broadcasting the most negligible details of Thad’s identity or career — like an old-fashioned flack, she didn’t seem to have a clue about when to withhold or divulge. (I flashed on her painful chatter with Klotcher on the Vineyard.) At such moments, she seemed perversely inspired to blurt out whatever insipid, useless thing was most likely to wound or set him off.