Graham Masterton - Mirror

Still, he thought, gathering up his screenplay and sliding it carefully into his Reel Thing tote bag, nobody ever got anywhere in Hollywood by sitting at home and wishing.

He took one last look at the mirror before he left. It reflected nothing but the sitting room and himself and the morning sunlight. He was beginning to think that he must have hallucinated that ball. Maybe he would go talk to his friend Marion Gidley about it. She was into self-hypnosis and self-induced hallucinations and all that kind of stuff.

As he closed the door of his apartment behind him, he came across Emilio playing on the landing with a Transformer robot. 'How're you doing, Emilio?' he asked him.

Emilio looked up with big Hershey-colored eyes. 'Hi, Martin. Doing good.'

'What's that you've got there?'

'Datson 280 sports car, turns into an evil robot, look.'

With a complicated fury of clicking and elbow twisting, Emilio turned the sports car into a robot with a pin head and spindly legs. Martin hunkered down and inspected it. 'Pretty radical, hunh? I wish my car would turn into a robot.'

'Your car's junk.'

'Who said that?'

'My grandpa, he said your car's junk, and he wishes you wouldn't park it right outside the house, people are gonna think it belongs to him.'

'My car's better than that hearse that he drives.'

'My grandpa's car turns into a robot.'

'Oh, yeah?'

'It does, too, turn into a robot. He told me.'

Martin affectionately scruffed Emilio's hair, which Emilio hated, and got up to leave. He was halfway down the next flight of stairs, however, when he thought of something. 'You

don't happen to own a ball, do you?' he asked Emilio through the banister rails.

'Grandpa gave me a baseball.'

'No, no — I mean one of those bouncing plastic balls, blue and white.'

Emilio wrinkled up his nose and shook his head, as if the idea that he would own a bouncing blue and white ball was utterly contemptible. 'No way, Jose.'

Martin reached through the banister and tried to scruff his hair again, but Emilio ducked away. 'Don't keep doing that!' he protested. 'What do you think I am, some kind of gerbil?'

Martin laughed, and went off to keep his appointment at Fox.

June Lassiter was very calm and together and California-friendly; a woman's woman with frizzed-up black hair and pale, immaculate, hypo-allergenic makeup that had been created without causing any pain to animals. She wore a flowing white suit and a scarf around her neck that had been handprinted on raw silk by Hopi Indians. She took Martin to the Fox commissary and bought him a huge spinach salad and a carafe of domestic Chablis that was almost too cold to drink.

'You're raising ghosts, that's the trouble,' she drawled. Martin had a large mouthful of spinach, and all he could do was look at her thin wrist lying on the table with its faded tan and its huge loose gold bangle, and munch, and nod.

June said, 'Boofuls is one of those code words in Hollywood that immediately make people's brains go blank; you know, like Charles Manson.'

'People have tackled difficult Hollywood topics before. Look at Mommie Dearest.'' I

'Oh, sure,' June agreed. 'But in Mommie Dearest, Joan Craw- j ford eventually redeemed herself, and all the terrible things ' that she was supposed to have done to her children were | rationalized and forgiven. She was a drunken carping bitch j but she was a star, and in Hollywood that excuses everything. How can you do that with Boofuls? The boy was chopped up by his crazed grandmother and that was the end of the story. No redemption, no explanation, just an abrupt and brutal ending — even if you don't depict it on the screen.'

Martin wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'So what's the verdict?'

'Well, Martin, I haven't read your screenplay yet and it may be brilliant. I mean I've heard Morris talking about you and he's very complimentary about your work. But I have to tell you that Boofuls is the kiss of death. The only person who might conceivably touch it is Ken Russell; and you know what kind of a reputation he's got; enfant terrible, even at his age. Even if he'd agree to do it, you'd still have the devil's own job raising the money for it.'

Martin sat back. 'I don't know. It seems like such a natural. The music, the dancing, and if you could find the right kid to play Boofuls ...'

June shook her head. 'My advice to you is to file it and forget it. Maybe one day you'll be wealthy enough and influential enough to develop it yourself.'

They spent the rest of their lunch talking gossip: who was making which picture, and who was making whom. When they were leaving, June stood in the empty parking space marked G. Wilder and said, 'Get your name painted here first, Martin. Then make your musical.'

Martin gave her what he hoped was a laconic wave and walked back to his car, with his screenplay under his arm. As he went, he whistled 'Heartstrings'.

You play . . . such sweet music How can .. . I resist Every song . . .from your heartstrings Makes me feel I've .. .just been kissed

But he drove back along Santa Monica Boulevard with the wind whirring in the pages of the screenplay as it lay on the seat beside him, and he felt like tossing it out of the car. He was beginning to believe that Morris was right, that he was carrying this screenplay around like a sackful of stinking meat.

Hollywood's golden boy of the 1930s had died more than one kind of death.

He returned to his apartment shortly before three o'clock. Emilio was playing in the sunshine on the front steps. Emilio had obviously finished his lunch, because his T-shirt was stained with catsup. The steps were proving an almost insurmountable obstacle to a deadpan plastic Rambo; and the afternoon was thick with the sound of machine-gun fire.

'Full-scale war, hey?' asked Martin. Emilio didn't look up. Martin sat down on the steps and watched him for a while. 'It beats me, you know, how Rambo can gross seventy-five million dollars, with all its shooting and killing and phony philosophy ... and here, here' — slapping his screenplay in the palm of his hand - 'is the most entertaining and enchanting musical ever made, and everybody sniffs at me as if I've trodden in something.'

Emilio continued his war; this time with heavy shelling, which involved extra saliva.

'You should come up and watch some of my Boofuls movies,' Martin told him. 'Then you'd believe, you little Philistine.'

Emilio shaded his eyes with his grubby hand and looked at him. 'Who's Boofuls? Is he a cartoon?'

'Is he a cartoon? My God, doesn't that grandfather of yours teach you anything? Boofuls was a boy, just like you, except that he could sing and dance and make people happy. In other words he didn't sit in the dirt all day with some grotesque reproduction of Sylvester Stallone, pretending to zap Asiatics. Who's Boofuls, for God's sake.'

Emilio picked up a green plastic helicopter and waved it around for a while. 'That boy in your room can dance,' he remarked.

'Well, that's Boofuls,' said Martin. 'The boy in the poster, just above my bed.'

'No,' Emilio contradicted, shaking his head. 'The boy in your other room. The real boy.'

Martin frowned; and then reached out and took hold of Emilio's wrist, so that the helicopter was stopped in midattack. 'What real boy? What are you talking about?'

Emilio pouted and wouldn't answer.

'You went into my room?' Martin asked him. 'Today, when I was out, you went into my room?' ,

Emilio refused to do anything but pout.

'Listen, Emilio, if you went into my room I won't be mad at you. Come on, it's your grandfather's house, you can go where you want.'

Emilio slowly and sulkily twisted his wrist away.