"Let's All Kill Constance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray Douglas)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

INSIDE the lobby there was a frozen army of Chinese coolies, concubines, and emperors, dressed in ancient wax, parading nowhere.

One of the wax figurines blinked. "Yes?"

God, I thought, a crazy outside, a crazy in, and Clyde Rustler moldering toward ninety or ninety-five.

Time shifted. If I ducked back out, I would find a dozen drive-ins where teenage waitresses roller-skated hamburgers.

"Yes?" the Chinese wax mannequin said again.

I moved swiftly through the first entry door and down the aisle under the balcony, where I stared up.

It was a big dark aquarium, undersea. It was possible to imagine a thousand film ghosts, scared by gunshot whispers, soaring to flake the ceiling and vanish in the vents. Melville's whale sailed there, unseen, Old Ironsides, the Titanic. The Bounty, sailing forever, never reaching port. I focused my gaze on up through the multiple balconies toward what had once been called nigger heaven.

My God, I thought, I'm three years old.

That was the year when Chinese fairy tales haunted my bed, whispered by a favorite aunt, when I thought death was just a forever bird, a silent dog in the yard. My grandfather was yet to lie in a box at a funeral parlor, while Tut arose from his tomb. What, I asked, was Tut famous for? For being dead four thousand years. Boy, I said, how'd he do that?

And here I was in a vast tomb under the pyramid, where I had always wished to be. If you lifted the aisle carpets, you'd find the lost pharaohs buried with fresh loaves of bread and bright sprigs of onions; food for far-traveling up-river to Eternity.

They must never ruin this, I thought. I must be buried here.

"It's not Green Glade Cemetery," said the old wax Chinaman nearby, reading my mind.

I had spoken aloud.

"When was this theater built?" I murmured.

The old waxwork let loose a forty-day flood: "1921, one of the first. There was nothing here, some palm trees, farmhouses, cottages, a dirt main street, little bungalows built to lure Doug Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford. Radio was just a crystal matchbox with earphones. Nobody could hear the future on that. We opened big. People walked or drove from Melrose north. Saturday nights there were veritable desert caravans of movie fanatics. The graveyard hadn't yet begun at Gower and Santa Monica. It filled up with Valentino's ruptured appendix in '26. At Grauman's opening night, Louis B. Mayer arrived from the Selig Zoo in Lincoln Park. That's where MGM got their lion. Mean, but no teeth. Thirty dancing girls. Will Rogers spun rope. Trixie Friganza sang her famous 'I Don't Care' and wound up an extra in a Swanson film, 1934. Go down, stick your nose in the old basement dressing rooms, you'll find leftover underwear from those flappers who died for love of Lowell Sherman. Dapper guy with mustache, cancer got him, '34. You listening?"

"Clyde Rustler," I blurted.

"Holy Jesus! Nobody knows him! See way up, that old projection room? They buried him there alive in '29 when they built the new projection room on the second balcony."

I stared up into phantoms of mist, rain and Shangri-la snow seeking the High Lama.

My shadow friend said: "No elevator. Two hundred steps!"

A long climb, with no Sherpas, up to a middle lobby and a mezzanine and then another balcony and another after that amid three thousand seats. How do you please three thousand customers? I wondered. How? If eight-year-old boys didn't pee three times during your film, you had it made!

I climbed.

I stopped halfway to sit, panting, suddenly ancient instead of halfway new.