Wilde Stories 2018 Read online

  On the shore the Griffin and the Mock Turtle, in full costume, dance a pavane and sing “Beautiful Soup,” while Alice and the Cat watch.

  As that scene ends, a voice that’s somehow familiar whispers in my ear, “Remember when we were shooting on that stinking beach infested with truck tires and rats. The only way to get there was by walking under that expressway, hoping all the time it didn’t collapse as you did.”

  I turn and recognize the face. Carson is the name. She was the Griffin. Her girlfriend, Shep, was the Mock Turtle.

  Today they wear modified versions of their movie costumes. I recognize Gilda’s hand in this. Carson says, “For that four minute scene, I had to stand under the sun flapping my wings and wearing a bird mask. Shep had it worse. I think her shell started out as a bathtub.

  “Scott began okay as a director—a sweet guy. But when he did our scene he was less than half present. By the time he and that Golem cameraman found a take they liked we were dying for a drink.

  “There was nothing open in that hellhole. But you led us out of the neighborhood and trekked across Canal Street. There was actual life there, including a little deli that sold beer and wine.

  “I’m wearing this bird head and wings and Shep’s got the turtle shell on her back and they don’t let us in. But you’re a smiling pussycat and they welcome you, tickle your phony ears and sell you six packs and cold bottles of cheap wine. I love you for that still!”

  The two of them are headed out the Annex doors when Shep looks my way and finally speaks. “Watch us on the news!”

  The grand finale is the Knave Of Hearts trial. It was shot amid the mirrors and red velvet of an old-fashioned strip club that I’d found for Scott. Wonderland lizards, rabbits, lobsters, pigs sit in the jury box. The Red Queen and the Duchess glare at each other before a backdrop of a couple of dozen extras dressed as playing cards.

  On screen Jackstone made it look like the human playing cards are being shuffled, riffled and fanned. Viewing it I saw how, when the film got released, Jackstone was on his way to Hollywood.

  Scott assembled this whole scene, acquired the costumes, supervised the lighting, assigned lines to the performers, and arranged them around the location. When the last take was shot, Scott slumped against me and whispered, “It’s over.”

  What I remember about the end of shooting is getting Scott home after the wrap party. On his desk (the one I still use) I noticed a bill for costumes. It involved the kinds of numbers I’d never even thought about. Scott grabbed it. “This is an investment,” he said.

  In the Annex, the credits roll and my name pops up on the screen as Alice walks up the stairs of Down the Rabbit Hole with a slight smile that says she knows whatever is worth knowing about this town.

  There’s nice applause and the lights come up. A woman in a devastating suit whispers in my ear that she’s from the Tribeca Film Festival, a prestigious event run by Robert De Niro.

  That evening Gilda gives what she calls “A Survivors Party” for those connected with the movie who have made it to old age.

  She lets me announce that the Tribeca Film Festival is very interested in showing Some Kind of Wonderland. It’s ironic that it was filmed in Tribeca before that’s what this neighborhood was called.

  Gilda knows how to garner publicity. We watch social media display photos of actors she dressed as playing cards standing at attention in front of The Film Annex.

  New York One interviews Carson and Shep in their personae as the Gryphon and Mock Turtle as they sing while strolling down the Hudson River Park.

  Someone on radio calls the film “As surrealistic as Alice in Wonderland has always been.” It’s getting more and better attention than almost anything got fifty years ago.

  Gilda says, “We’re here to celebrate a young man who came to New York with a dream and died bringing it to life. Holman went for something dark—Carroll’s characters in a ruined city and an Alice who gets tough in ways he couldn’t.

  “That young man’s gone but his better half lives on.” She points to me and my eyes tear. The party is running down when I kiss everyone and go out the door. As the elevator opens Lucinda slips in beside me.

  “I’d like to visit Scott,” is all she says and we walk through the lobby and onto the side street. The upstairs light goes off in the rabbit’s house as we approach. “Gilda’s doing?” I ask.

  Lucinda shakes her head. “She was upset because the Rabbit Guy tried to follow her home. Remember Scott saying a great story had a kind of leakage. Bits of it get out and lodge in peoples’ heads? There’s plenty of that hanging around right now.”

  The townhouse door opens. The white rabbit, in a jacket and slacks that display a white tail steps out and walks away briskly. Lucinda and I look at each other, nod our heads and follow him uptown along dark Hudson Street. People on a corner smoking outside a club, do double takes as the rabbit passes.

  “It’s not just us: ordinary people can see him,” Lucinda says.

  Unable to stop thinking about Scott, I talk to her compulsively, saying stuff she already knows. “After he’d shot the film, when it was being edited, then shown to distributers he kept spending money on booze and grass. But I thought it was from his magic Trust Fund. As a kid, I’d learned not to notice things I didn’t want to see.

  “Then I discovered checks were bouncing. The rent was way overdue and his family didn’t want to know him. He mainly just lay there smashed out of his mind. Even I knew he was doing narcotics, but I somehow couldn’t talk to him about it.”

  The White Rabbit has led us into the West Village. He turns a corner and facing us is Down the Rabbit Hole. “Oh, my,” Lucinda says. Without the slightest hesitation, we follow him down the stairs. The bar has, like everything in the Village, been gentrified almost beyond recognition. The rabbit walks past the yuppie clientele, opens the door he opened in the movie and disappears.

  On occasion nostalgia has led me here over the decades. I know the door leads, not to a tunnel and a pool of tears, but to a closet full of cleaning equipment. Still, I open it to make sure. The bartender says, “Guy, the restroom’s the other way.”

  Lucinda takes my arm as we exit. Suddenly, on one wall of the bar, we see the whole crew: life size playing cards, birds, beasts, Duchess and Queens. She and I, Alice and The Cheshire Cat, are there. It’s not a photo but a kind of living mosaic all alive and nodding to us. We do a double take and they’re gone. The bartender and a couple of patrons who were looking our way are blinking and rubbing their eyes.

  “Talk about leakage,” Lucinda says when we get outside.

  “Scott created all that,” I say. “I feel like he created me. I even learned to talk like him. To support us when he was down, I ran dirty errands, worked late shifts at clubs, anything short of peddling my ass.

  “Around then, Jackstone came by. He was showing New York producers this reel of his camera sequences from our film. This was just before the studios brought him out to Hollywood. He saw Scott and just shook his head. But he connected me with a couple of guys about to film a cop TV movie, told them what I could do.

  “I gave them a tour of the waterfront; they gave me a few hundred bucks. Not a lot but it would pay the rent. So, I gave the money to this guy who’d changed my life. The clients wanted me the next day too. So I compounded my stupidity and left him alone in the apartment. When I came home and found him on the floor, I called for help but it was too late.”

  Because it was drugs, cops were called. Because I was a gay kid I got arrested.

  Lucinda knows this story but we need to tell it again no matter how it hurts. Tears come out of her good eye. “I’ll never forgive my addiction,” she says. “After Wonderland, the Warhol crowd and a couple of shock fashion photographers got interested in me. Bonibo was speed to keep you going and then junk to knock you out. I looked like the goddess of death, as you must remember.

  “Scott was doing Bonibo, she says. He told me he needed more, said he had to travel. So I
furnished his suicide.”

  We reach my place and she’s patting my back and I’m patting hers as we go inside. She calls Uber on her phone. I turn on the light and there’s Scott watching us from the photo.

  “Justin, you knew I’d dealt him the drugs. You could have told them and you didn’t. I still owe you.”

  “I used my one call to phone Gilda,” I said. “Even back then she was connected. Knew a crusading lawyer who got me released. He even found out Scott had put my name on the lease. Made it possible for me to survive.”

  A horn beeps. I see Lucinda’s car in front of the house. She goes to the glass and says, “Oh, Scottso, with you, there was never a regular day. Thank you.” She kisses the reflection and me before leaving.

  Then I kiss him as always and tell him, “Some Kind of Wonderland had a great day. I know you can feel it.”

  PAN AND HOOK

  ADAM MCOMBER

  Do not imagine me nymph, nor fey, nor ragged spirit of the air. I am a stranger body still. Once, I walked on burnished hooves through the leafy shade of unspoiled Arcadia. Shadows of lush fir spilled over me. I carried a flute of tethered reeds. And there was always music. Or at least the memory of it. I tripped from stone to stone, sometimes pausing to pick lice from the fur of my hindquarters. My mind was quiet, stilled by trees and streams. But in my heart, there hung a kind of longing: a heavy, dripping nest. It was difficult to name all the creatures that inhabited the nest. I could only say that I knew they would never leave me. And I, in turn, would never be permitted to take my leave of them.

  How many a handsome soldier did I frighten on those long-ago forest paths? Men, in the dusky light, grew startled at the sound of my music. They claimed they glimpsed a pair of lamp-lit eyes. They heard a violent rustling. There were stories told about me around the campfire. The Beast of Parnon stalks us, they said, the goat-god of the wilderness. And yet, I meant those young Romans no harm. In truth, I longed to hold them, to comfort them. I wanted kiss their full Roman lips and stroke the hard white scars on their shoulder blades.

  I remember one dark haired boy, a youth whose name I never learned. I chased him into a copse of Alder trees. He trembled. And then he prayed.

  “What have I done?” he said. “The gods—the gods are angry.”

  I attempted a gentle expression. “I am not angry,” I said.

  The boy fell to his knees. He shook and wept. Later, I learned he drowned himself in the Tiber.

  There was an earlier age, of course, more rustic and more faith-filled. I was worshipped then. Priests made sacrifices in my name. Pindar writes that the virgins sang of me. They called me Ba’al and Tammuz. They wailed and struck their breasts. In truth, the songs of virgins did not interest me. Instead of listening to their paeans, I would climb the barren mountainsides. And in the darkness there, I’d teach handsome shepherds to touch themselves in nighttime fields. I instructed those men how to soothe one another. How to kiss and be kind. I remember the scent of the herdsmen, flesh and sweat and leather. They lay together amongst the broken pillars of long-dead civilizations, wrapped in one other’s arms. They were satisfied, clear of eye. And that, to me, was worship. That was praise.

  But there are no longer any shepherds on the hill or Roman soldiers in the wood. Man is a fool for time. And always, he abandons his gods. Here is how I too was abandoned: One morning, a sailor called Thamus—not a particularly beautiful or interesting boy—was on his way to Florence. Near the coast, he heard what he believed to be a divine voice coming over the water. The voice, in haunted tones, said: Pan is dead. Proclaim it. The Great God Pan is dead. I was in the forest when I heard the echo of those words. I listened all day and into evening, hoping for some refute. But the wood remained silent. And I knew the incantation that the voice had spoken was somehow true. The boy, Thamus, repeated it in village and city: Pan is dead. Pan is dead. The dreadful words, over and again. And Pan was dead. As was Ba’al and Tammuz and even the Beast of Parnon. I was left a nameless thing. Forsaken.

  I retreated to an island then, a bleak outcropping in the sea. It was a small enough rock to have no name. White lilies grew from its crags, and great storms sometimes welled. I took no interest such things. I did not play my pipe or gambol along the shores. I hoped only that this place, this empty Never-Was, might be a vessel strong enough to hold my grief. I told myself I must learn to feel at home on the cold island. For I too would “never be” again. I found a grotto. I slept in a cave near a pool of black water. And there I did not dream. For what would be the point of that?

  And then one day, many years after my arrival on the island, I heard a clamor upon the sea. There was shouting, and there was canon fire. I scuttled from my cave and perched upon a stone to watch two great ships do battle in the island’s narrow cove. I saw fire. The ocean itself turned dark with soot. And after a long while, when one ship had sunk and the other had sailed victorious, I slunk back to my cave, wondering whom the dying men might have prayed to in their last moments.

  It was then, on the rocky rim of my home, that I saw a smear of blood. The blood smelled human. It smelled male. My heart quickened. I peered into the darkness of my cave and discerned there a shape: a man, hunched and shivering. I realized he must have been one of the sailors from the sunken ship. He’d somehow dragged himself here from the sea. The man was handsome, dark, wearing a red coat with buttons made of gold. His black hair dripped with brine. The pale fingers of one hand trembled on his knee.

  I crawled toward him in the darkness, hoping not to frighten him. The sailor, perhaps the captain of the sunken ship according to his regalia, bled. He’d been wounded in the battle. There was a deep cut on his cheek. And his left hand, I realized, was entirely missing. It had been hacked away. Yellow bone, hook-like in its shape, protruded from the meat of his wrist.

  The sailor opened his eyes when he heard my approach. It had been so long since I was close to a man, since I’d smelled a man’s scent and felt a man’s breath. I realized, in that moment, how badly I wanted this sailor. If he would not worship me, at least he might know me, make me feel as though I continued to exist. To my amazement, he did not recoil at my approach. Instead, he smiled wanly. “Peter—” he whispered there in the darkness of the cave. His lips were bloodless, nearly white. “You’re covered in dirt. You’ve been playing—the river.”

  I said nothing. For I was not, nor had I ever been, called “Peter.” And I did not know what river he spoke of.

  “I’m sorry,” the sailor said. “I’m so sorry.” He winced in pain. “I’ve wanted to tell you—so many years—I sailed—”

  I leaned forward, imagining, for a brief moment, that this bleeding sailor in his red jacket might be the ghost of the other sailor, Thamus, who had long ago proclaimed my death. Thamus had finally come to apologize to me.

  Then the sailor spoke again: “You called me James,” he said. “You tried to hold my hand there by the river. To kiss me. I said you were mad, a strange little nymph. The river Eton, the place we used to go—remember how bright the sun was on those afternoons, Peter?”

  I looked into the sailor’s eyes.

  He did not see me, but instead appeared to recall some long-ago moment.

  “I pretend from time to time—” he said. “I pretend that—” He reached for me. “Come closer, Peter.”

  I crouched.

  “Will you stroke my cheek,” he said, “as you used to do?”

  I touched him, ever so gently, with the sharp claw of my hand.

  He raised his own bleeding stump. It appeared as though he thought he was stroking me as well.

  “The ship came upon us swiftly,” he whispered. “Pirates. Just off the coast of the island. What is the name of this island, Peter?”

  Never-Was, I thought.

  He sighed. “And my hand—my poor hand.”

  I gazed at the yellow shard of bone emerging from his wrist.

  The sailor spread his lips. There was blood on his teeth. “So strange—” he s
aid. “I dreamed of you just last night, Peter. We were together on board the ship, the Roger. Only, in my dream, it did not sail upon the waters. It flew. We traveled together through the clouds. I held you, and we watched a flock of gulls move around us like a school of silvery porpoises. When night fell, we did not land but glided still amongst the bright lamps of the stars.”

  I touched the sailor’s cheek again. His flesh had turned cold.

  “I wish that you would kiss me now,” James said. “As once you wished to do.”

  I leaned forward. But before my lips touched his, I paused. Why I did, I cannot say. For wasn’t this what I’d longed for? Wasn’t this what I’d most desired? Yet to have it now, with a dying man—

  It was in that pause that the sailor’s eyelids fluttered. His eyes flashed bright. His gaze grew focused. And his expression changed. Fear passed over his dark features. He saw me for what I was. Not Peter. But the Goat. Not the boy he loved. But something he could not even imagine. Something that lived hidden away on an island. Something awful and sad.

  The sailor’s phantom hand fell away. His breath grew still.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard the divine voice speaking once again. Pan is dead. And Peter is dead. And now so too, the captain.

  I lay down next to the dead man. I put my arms around him. We remained like that as the sun set on the island, and the night birds began to sing.

  THE SUMMER MASK

  KARIN LOWACHEE

  I met you in the summer when the butterflies began to dance.

  You were missing your nose, your right eye, and the top of your lips. Some of your teeth. It made conversation a sort of whistle.