I saw Roy vanishing into the Mens outside, and found him standing at the white porcelain shrine worshiping Respighis Fountains of Rome. I stood beside him, noncreative, the old pipes frozen for the winter.
Look. I found this on Stage 13 just now.
Roy shoved a typewritten page onto the tile shelf before me.
The Beast Born at Last! The Brown Derby Tonight! Vine Street. Ten oclock.
Be there! or you lose everything!
You dont believe this! I gasped.
As much as you believed your note and went to the damn graveyard. Roy stared at the wall in front of him. Thats the same paper and typeface as your note? Will I go to the Brown Derby tonight? Hell, why not? Bodies on walls, missing ladders, raked-over prints in grass, papier-mache corpses, plus Manny Leiber screaming. I got to thinking, five minutes ago, if Manny and the others were upset by the scarecrow dummy, what if it suddenly disappeared, then what?
You didnt? I said. No? said Roy.
Roy pocketed the note. Then he took a small box from a corner table and handed it to me. Someones using us. I decided to do a little using myself. Take it. Go in the booth. Open it up.
I did just that. I shut the door.
Dont just stand there, called Roy. Open it! I am, I am.
I opened the box and stared in. My God! I cried.
What do you see? said Roy. Arbuthnot!
Fits in the box real nice and neat, huh? said Roy.
What made you do it?
Cats are curious. Im a cat, said Roy, hustling along. We were headed back toward the commissary. Roy had the box tucked under his arm, and a vast grin of triumph on his face.
Look, he said. Someone sends you a note. You go to a graveyard, find a body, but dont report it, spoiling whatever game is up. Phone calls are made, the studio sends for the body, and goes into a panic when they actually have a viewing.
How else can I act except out of wild curiosity. What kind of game is this? I ask. I can only find out by countermoving the chesspiece, yes? We saw and heard how Manny and his pals reacted an hour ago. How would they react, I wondered, lets study it, if, after finding a body, they lost it again, and went crazy wondering who had it? Me!
We stopped outside the commissary door. Youre not going in there with that! I exclaimed.
Safest place in the world. Nobody would suspect a box I carry right into the middle of the studio. But be careful, mate, were being watched, right now.
Where?! I cried, and turned swiftly.
If I knew that, it would all be over. Cmon. Im not hungry.
Strange, said Roy, why do I feel I could eat a horse?
14
On our way back into the commissary I saw that Mannys table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place.
Damn fool, I whispered.
Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled. Sure am, he said gladly. Move.
I moved to my place.
Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect.
Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult.
Pay attention! Fritz snapped his fingers. The introductions continue! He pointed along the table. Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenins very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenins body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!
Lenins makeup man? I said.
Cosmetologist. Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.
He was hardly larger than one of the Singers Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
Bow and scrape to me, he called. You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!
Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard, said Fritz. Observe the chair next to him!
An empty place.
For who? I asked.
Someone coughed. Heads turned. I held my breath.
And the Arrival took place.
This last one to arrive was a man so pale that his skin seemed to glow with an inner light. He was tall, six feet three I would imagine, and his hair was long and his beard dressed and shaped, and his eyes of such startling clarity that you felt he saw your bones through your flesh and your soul inside your bones. As he passed each table, the knives and forks hesitated on their way to half-open mouths.
After he passed, leaving a wake of silence, the business of life began again. He strode with a measured tread as if he wore robes instead of a tattered coat and some soiled trousers. He gave a blessing gesture on the air as he moved by each table, but his eyes were straight ahead, as if seeing some world beyond, not ours. He was looking at me, and I shrank, for I couldnt imagine why he would seek me out, among all these accepted and established talents. And at last he stood above me, the gravity of his demeanor being such it pulled me to my feet.
There was a long silence as this man with the beautiful face stretched out a thin arm with a thin wrist, and at the end of it a hand with the most exquisitely long fingers I had ever seen.
I put my hand out to take his.
His hand turned, and I saw the mark of the driven spike in the middle of the wrist. He turned his other hand over, so I could see the similar scar in the middle of his left wrist. He smiled, reading my mind, and quietly explained, Most people think the nails were driven through the palms. No. The palms could not hold a bodys weight. The wrists, nailed, can. The wrists. Then he turned both hands over so I could see where the nails had come through on the other side.
J. C. said Fritz Wong, this is our visitor from another world, our young science-fiction writer
I know. The beautiful stranger nodded and gestured toward himself. Jesus Christ, he said.
I stepped aside so he could sit, then fell back in my own chair.
Fritz Wong passed down a small basket full of bread. Please, he called, change these into fish!
I gasped.
But J. C., with the merest flick of his fingers, produced one silvery fish from amidst the bread and tossed it high. Fritz, delighted, caught it to laughter and applause.
The waitress arrived with several bottles of cheap booze to more shouts and applause.
This wine, said J.C., was water ten seconds ago. Please! The wine was poured and savored.
Surely I stammered.
The entire table looked up.
He wants to know, called Fritz, if your name is really what you say it is. With somber grace, the tall man drew forth and displayed his drivers license. It read:
Jesus Christ. 911 Beachwood Avenue. Hollywood. He slipped it back into his pocket, waited for the table to be silent, and said:
I came to this studio in 1927 when they made Jesus the King.
I was a woodworker out back in those sheds. I cut and polished the three crosses on Calvary, still standing. There was a contest in every Baptist basement and Catholic backwash in the land. Find Christ! He was found here. The director asked where I worked? The carpenters shop. My God, he cried, let me see that face! Go put on a beardl Make me look like holy Jesus, I advised the makeup man. I went back, dressed in robes and thorns, the whole holy commotion. The director danced on the Mount and washed my feet. Next
thing you know the Baptists were lining up at Iowa pie festivals when I dusted through in my tin flivver with banners THE KING IS COMING, GOING ON BEFORE.
Across country in auto bungalow courts, I had a great ten-year Messiah run, until vino and venality tattered my smock. Nobody wants a womanizing Saviour. It wasnt so much I kicked cats and wound up other mens wives like dime-store clocks, no, it was just that I was Him, you see?
I think I see, I said gently.
J. C. put his long wrists and long hands and long fingers out before him, as cats often sit, waiting for the world to come worship.
Women felt it was blasphemy if they so much as breathed my air. Touching was terrible. Kissing a mortal sin. The act itself? Might as well leap in the burning pit with an eternity of slime up to your ears. Catholics, no, Holy Rollers were worst. I managed to bed and breakfast one or two before they knew me, when I traveled the country incognito. After a month of starving for feminine acrobats, Id run amok. I just shaved and lit out across country, pounding fenceposts into native soil, duck-pressing ladies left and right.
I flattened more broads than a steamroller at a Baptist skinny dip. I ran fast, hoping shotgun preachers wouldnt count hymens and hymnals and wallop me with buckshot. I prayed ladies would never guess they had enjoyed a laying on of hands by the main Guest at the Last Supper.
When I wore it down to a nubbin and drank myself into a stupor, the studiod pick up my bones, pay off the sheriffs, placate the priests in North Sty, Nebraska, with new
