HE'LL LIVE FOREVER

I WENT LOOKING FOR EDEN and the hundred dollars he owed me. I’d heard he was shooting a movie downtown. The sky had turned from white to purple before I finally found him, in a little church with yellow police tape covering the doors. When I walked in, he was talking to a young woman with a headset and a clipboard, but he hurried over when he saw me. For some reason he was dressed like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, right down to the cavalry hat and sunglasses.

“I thought you were dead,” he greeted me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Yeah, you were definitely dead,” he said. He took off his sunglasses to stare at me.

“Well, dead or not, here I am. And I’ve been looking for you.”

“I’ve been away,” he said. “I was shooting a film in Antarctica. It was so cold my piss froze before it hit the ground.” He shook his head and put the sunglasses back on. “It’s the edge of the fucking world down there, man.”

“Where’s my hundred dollars?” I asked him, but just then the woman with the clipboard came over.

“Time to work,” she said, sliding her arm around his waist. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty. She didn’t look at me.

“I can’t talk now,” Eden told me. “I’m in the middle of a shoot.” He pointed at the name tag hanging around his neck. It read Second Assistant Director. His whole life he was never anything but Second Assistant Director. “Thanks for coming by, though,” he added.

“I think I’ll stick around,” I said.

The woman and I sat together in one of the pews. This close I could smell the perfume she wore.

“You a friend of his?” she asked, turning pages on her clipboard.

“We’ve known each other forever,” I said, but she’d stopped listening to me already. Instead, she was leaning forward and whispering something into her headset.

Eden talked to an actor leaning against the altar at the back of the church, then he went over to the camera crew. A bank of lights had been set up outside, shining through one of the stained glass windows, and it turned his skin golden.

When he yelled “Action,” the actor, who looked vaguely like someone famous, took a half-dozen steps in our direction. Then a fiery mushroom lifted the altar up and set it on its side. Thunder echoed through the church, and I watched the flames rise up against the ceiling, where they boiled away a painted angel.

When I looked back down, the actor was on fire and flailing away at himself, and Eden was grabbing a fire extinguisher from the camera dolly.

“Is that really someone famous?” I asked the woman beside me, “or is it just a double?”

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, frowning.

We watched Eden and the cameraman extinguish the actor, who was screaming hysterically now.

“Was that a real altar?” I asked.

She looked at me for the first time. “Do you really need to be here?” she asked.

Eden came over to us and said, “That wasn’t what I wanted at all.”

The woman nodded and made a note on her clipboard. “Should we do another take?”

“Does Bob look like he’s ready for another take?” Eden asked. We all looked at the actor, who had walked over to us with the help of the cameraman. He looked to be badly burned only on his arms and neck, but his skin all over had the same greasy sheen as barbecued hot dogs. Up close, he didn’t look anything like anybody famous.

“My name’s Randall,” he said. It sounded like he was talking through water.

Eden frowned at him. “No, it’s Bob.”

“It’s Randall,” the woman with the clipboard whispered.

Eden was always making mistakes like that. Years later, when the cancer was finally killing him, he got out of his hospital bed and started tearing down all the curtains. “You’ve set up for the wrong scene,” he told the nurses when they tried to stop him.

The doctor told Eden’s mother he was delusional. “It’s hallucinations caused by the illness,” he said.

“If that’s so,” she answered, “then he’s been sick all his life.”

Randall started coughing from all the smoke, so we went out to the church steps. Five or six crew members were taking a coffee break there but they left when they saw Eden. He didn’t notice because he was taking Randall from the cameraman, who seemed grateful to be rid of him. The cameraman went off after the other crew members, who were watching us from the other side of the police tape now.

“Was it at least a good take?” Randall asked.

“Oh yes, it was very good,” the woman said.

“I don’t know much about these things,” I admitted when he looked at me, “but it certainly looked good from where I was sitting.”

“Thank God,” Randall said and licked his lips. His tongue was a brilliant pink against his burned lips.

“Well, I guess I’d better call an ambulance,” the woman said. She reached for a cell phone on her belt.

Eden put his hand over hers. “Do you have any idea what that would do to our insurance rates?” he asked. “No, he’s not hurt that bad.”

“Actually,” Randall said, “I think I’m hurt really bad.”

“I’ll drive him to the hospital myself,” Eden went on. He offered me his hand. “It was good seeing you again, but I have to get back to work now.”

“What about my hundred dollars?” I asked.

Eden looked at the woman. “What is this hundred dollars he keeps going on about?”

“You told me you’d give me a hundred dollars when you had your heart attack,” I said.

“Oh, that,” Eden said. “It wasn’t a heart attack. It was just palpitations.”

“That may be,” I said, “but I still drove you to the hospital.”

“But it wasn’t a heart attack,” Eden said, frowning.

“I wrecked my car,” I said.

“That’s right,” Eden said. “That’s when you got killed.”

“We had a deal,” I said. “I want my hundred dollars.”

Eden looked up at the sky, which was black now, and pushed his hat back. There was a dark rash on his forehead. “I don’t have it on me,” he said. “I’ll have to go to a bank machine.”

“I think I’ll come along.”

We went down the street to Eden’s Acura and put Randall in the back seat. The parts of his skin that were burned had already begun to blister, and he smelled like burned rubber. He was still conscious, though, which I figured was a good sign.

“Hang in there, Randy,” I said, tightening the seat belt around him. “You’ll be as good as new in no time.”

“Please don’t touch me,” he said. “Ah, Christ.”

Eden drove us toward the hospital. It was just past nine o’clock, but the day was still like a sauna, the air burning my lungs whenever I took a breath. To make matters worse, the Acura’s air conditioning was broken. Randall hooked his fingers into the vent beside him. “Can’t you make this thing work?” he pleaded. I leaned out the window to catch the breeze.

We hit a long line of cars and slowed to a stop. Eden pounded the horn. “I hate the summers here,” he said. “Every year I think, maybe this is the one where it gets better.”

“It never does, though,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “But maybe someday.”

I looked around the car to pass the time and found some empty pill bottles by my feet. “What are these?” I asked, examining one. They were all unmarked.

“They’re for my condition,” Eden said.

“What condition?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” Eden said. He pounded the horn again.

“Is it anything I could have?” Randall asked. “I’m really hurting here.”

Eden searched through his pockets with one hand and came up with another bottle. He passed it to me, and I took out one of the yellow capsules inside.

“What do they do?” Randall asked.

“They make you feel like you’re coming apart,” Eden said. “But they take care of the pain.”

I reached back and laid the capsule on Randall’s tongue, then watched him as he tried to swallow it.

“You can have one, too, if you like,” Eden said to me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m done with all that.”

Just then Randall caught sight of himself in the rear-view mirror. “Is that me?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so,” I told him.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, raising his hands to the burned parts of his face and neck. “Look at me! I’m ruined!”

“It’s not that bad,” Eden said. He pounded the horn again.

Randall looked like he wanted to cry, but I think all the moisture in his eyes had dried up. “I’m supposed to work on a fucking HBO film next month. How am I supposed to do that with a face like this?”

“These things happen,” Eden said.

“I look like a mutant! Like the Elephant Man or something!”

“You’ll move on.”

“I’ll fucking sue!”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

After a while the traffic started rolling again. We were driving past the police station when Eden suddenly jammed both feet down on the brake pedal. “Jesus Christ, it’s John Cusack!”

“Where?” Randall and I both asked, but Eden was already pulling a U-turn onto the other side of the street. “The blue Beamer two cars ahead,” he said, ignoring the horns sounding all around us.

“What are you doing?” I said. “We have to get my hundred dollars. We have to get Randall here to the hospital.”

“That’s right,” Randall sighed.

“Get the script,” Eden said.

“The script?” I looked around the car until he pointed at the glove compartment. When I opened it, a stack of water-stained papers fell out.

“I’ve been trying to get it to John for years,” he said. “I wrote it with him in mind.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s an action adventure crossed with a black comedy. Like Grosse Point Blank meeting the Coen brothers in their Barton Fink stage.”

I glanced at the first few pages. Poor Eden. Even back then it was clear he was never going to be anybody. “I don’t know about this,” I said.

But Eden wasn’t paying attention any more. He’d managed to get behind the BMW and now he stuck his head out the window. “Johnnie!” he yelled. “Hey, Johnnie, it’s me!”

Ahead of us the BMW driver stepped on it. Eden put both feet on the gas pedal and followed.

“You really know him?” I asked.

“No,” Eden admitted, “but it was worth a try.” He reached under his seat and pulled out a camcorder. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “You might as well film this. We might be able to use it later.”

I leaned out the window again, enjoying the wind now that we were driving fast, and focused the camera on the car ahead of us. “Are you sure it’s him?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s John all right.”

We chased the BMW through the city, recklessly passing cars in both lanes and running red lights. It was like we were in a movie ourselves. I turned the camera on Eden. “So tell me, Eden,” I said, “why do you want him to have this script?”

“Well, that’s a bit of a stupid question,” Eden said. “I mean, if I wrote the script with him in mind, then doesn’t it stand to reason I’d want him to see it?”

“What if he doesn’t take it?” I asked, but he wouldn’t answer me.

Then we were in Chinatown, and I was filming the passing shops. There were lights everywhere, and the rushing air smelled like bread. “Can I have a part in your film?” I asked. “You can forget about the hundred bucks if you give me a part in the film.”

But Eden didn’t answer, because he was hitting the brakes. “Oh shit!” he said.

Twenty feet in front of us, the BMW was trapped behind a line of cars at a red light. Cusack got out, one of those club things for locking steering wheels in his hand. Everything was in slow motion. Eden drove around the side of the BMW to stop from hitting it, and Cusack put up his hand. He opened his mouth wide just before we drove into him.

“Shit!” Eden said again as Cusack disappeared under the front of the Acura, one hand briefly clawing at the hood. We came to a stop. “I just killed John Cusack,” Eden said. Then he jumped out and ran around to the front of the car. I reached over and put the car into park before going after him. Most of the people at the stalls beside us turned to watch, and I made sure I got a good crowd shot. The smell of bread was gone now, replaced by that of rotten vegetables.

“Is he really dead?” I asked, stopping beside Eden and turning the camera on the fallen man.

“This isn’t John Cusack,” Eden said.

I zoomed in on the other man. It was true. He had dark hair, but other than that he didn’t look anything like Cusack. He stared up at us, his mouth pushing out little pink bubbles. His body looked broken in ways I hadn’t been able to imagine before.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Eden added.

“I told you,” I said.

“This isn’t the time for that.”

“We should really get out of here,” I said. But it was already too late. A cop pulled up then, parking behind the Acura. He had one of those little cameras mounted on his dash, and I filmed it filming us.

The cop talked into his radio for a moment, then got out and started walking toward us. He stopped for a long moment to look at Randall, who’d passed out against the window. “What happened to this guy?” he asked.

“It’s all right,” I said, “he’s an actor.”

The cop stared at Randall for a moment longer, then came over to stand beside us. All three of us looked down at the other man. An escaped crab scuttled past our feet, under the car.

“Which one of you was driving?” the cop asked. He scratched the back of his neck and belched softly.

“I was,” Eden sighed.

The cop shook his head. “You’d be the one in a world of trouble then.” He took out his notepad and started writing.

“Shouldn’t you be doing something?” I asked him, pointing at the man on the ground.

“Somebody will be along shortly,” he said.

Eden sat on the ground and tore off his cavalry hat. I saw his whole head was covered in that rash. “Why is this always happening to me?” he asked, starting to cry.

What could I do? I went over and sat beside him, put my arm around his shoulder. Together we watched the other man. He wasn’t blinking any more, and he only took a breath every now and then. I turned off the camera and put it on the ground.

I was never going to see my hundred dollars again.

Later, when the ambulance had arrived, the cop made Eden get into the back seat of his cruiser.

“Do you think he’s going to be all right?” Eden asked, still looking at the fallen man.

“Oh yeah,” the cop laughed, just before he shut the door. “He’ll live forever.”

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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