3

She took the videocassette from me and, sliding it into the machine, pressed all the right buttons to get it going. Phil appeared on the television screen.

"Hi, Weber. I'm glad you got this far. I thought you would, but there's always the possibility of being wrong about people you love. That's the worst mistake you can make. But I wasn't wrong about you.

"Obviously you want to know about Pinsleepe. And 'Mr. Fiddlehead.' What has she said so far? It doesn't matter; I'll tell you what I can, and if you have other questions she'll answer them."

What followed was unexpected. I assumed Phil would tell the story in the concise, lucid sentences I was so accustomed to from him. Instead, for the next quarter of an hour he showed home movies, the same kind I'd seen of my mother's last minutes.

Only Strayhorn's were of a lonely child talking to an imaginary, invisible friend named Pinsleepe. But there was no real friend in his films. Certainly not the mysterious little beauty who sat next to me.

Phil (and Pinsleepe) climbed trees, built a fort, had a sword fight. Throughout, he did a voice-over about their time together: how he'd originally invented her to fill his forlorn eight-year-old life, what other purposes she served, when she went away.

"I fell in love with Kitty Wheeler when I was ten. Since there was suddenly a real girl in my life, I didn't need Pin anymore. After Kitty came Debby Sullivan and then Karen Enoch. I just stopped . . . needing her. I had real girlfriends.

"Remember them, Weber? Fourth-grade girlfriends? Who'd we ever love more?"

Pinsleepe sat next to me, watching. The only time she moved was to bang her feet back against the bottom of the couch when something bored her.

When he was done reminiscing about their early history together, the film faded expertly and came up again on Phil sitting on his living room couch.

"The first time I'd really thought of her in years was when I talked to a guy recently about having imaginary childhood friends. That's where the idea for 'Mr. Fiddlehead' came from.

"While we were in Yugoslavia filming, I wrote a few pages of dialogue. Rough-draft stuff, nothing polished or even good. I thought I'd get back to it when Midnight Kills was done. But when I looked at it again, a short story'd already been written. A finished story."

Some of this I knew from Finky Linky; some of it was new. The child continued to kick the couch until I put my hand on her knee and squeezed it to make her stop.

I wanted to ask questions, straighten out things that were confusing me. You can't ask a television set questions.

When he began talking specifically about her, I felt her grow tense and still beside me.

"What people don't really know, Weber, is we make up our own guardian angels. People picture angels as New Yorker cartoons – muses with harps, looking over the shoulders of writers having trouble.

"But it's more complicated than that. They're there, all right, but they come custom-made to our specifications.

"Pinsleepe wasn't there when I was a kid; I just cooked up a picture of the perfect friend I needed. I obviously didn't know I needed a real-life Kitty Wheeler more. Because as soon as Kitty arrived – zoop! No more Pinsleepe.

"My guardian angel, or perfect friend, came when I did need her most.

"We were in this shitty rundown church in Watts filming one of the first scenes of Midnight Kills. I looked up and there she was." He snapped his fingers and smiled wryly. "I could say she appeared out of nowhere, but that's silly. She appeared out of my own fucking head!

"Remember, I'd already started working on the idea of Mr. Fiddlehead, so, unconsciously, I wasn't completely shocked to see her.

"That, combined with the fact I knew her face from way back in my own youth. Like looking at an old school yearbook and seeing the face of someone you haven't thought about in twenty years? 'Oh, yeah. I remember that kid!' That was my first reaction.

"Only it was closer, under the skin. I didn't recognize her immediately, but I sure as hell knew that face had been important somewhere in my life.

"The first thing she said was –"

The television went black.

"I want to tell it." She turned to me with the remote control in her hand. "He was really in trouble! He was making those gross movies that made everybody sick and scared. You know what happens when you do that? You know what they do to you? A lot! They get you! Really bad!"

"Who are you talking about?"

"God, stupid! When God gets mad at you, you'd better do what he says or else you're in big trouble!"

"God didn't want Phil to make his movies?"

"That's right." She nodded her head exaggeratedly and handed me the remote control. The discussion was over. She'd said what she wanted.

It was another hour before Sasha woke up and came looking for me. Most of that time I listened to Pinsleepe and then, after she left, to the rest of this newest segment of my Strayhorn tape. I also spent a good while staring at the black screen trying to sort the many tangles out in my head. It wasn't easy. It was impossible.

An angel, she came to earth to warn him to stop making Midnight Kills. It had gone too far; he'd gone sniffing around in corners of the human and cosmic psyche that weren't his to know. Bloodstone was too close to some important truth. Strayhorn was too close to him.

It is simpler to combine and distill their separate monologues into a kind of split-screen dialogue. Listen.

"I don't know where or when it turned, Weber: where I tapped into some unconscious mother lode and started mining the real stuff. She wouldn't tell what was just good gore and what was the devil's lands."

"He kept making them worse and worse! They said, 'Go and tell him to stop. People are scared and killing each other."

"But all the Midnight films were like that. What was I doing different with this one? Why didn't Pinsleepe come before?"

"They let you do what you want till it gets dangerous."

"'Dangerous for who?' I asked her twice: no answer. She only said, Stop making this film. Just like that. Can you imagine? – and a half million dollars budgeted, forty people working busily away at their jobs, and I'm supposed to stop?

"I had this interesting plot, but I didn't think it was art or particularly . . . transcendent. So why should I stop? Horror films don't shake the world. If they're good, they scare you. You walk out of the theater feeling a little better about your own unthreatened life. That's it."

"He didn't stop! He didn't listen to me. You know how bad that is? You know what kind of trouble that gets you?"

"Remember when Moses had to prove to Pharaoh he was there on God's business? The miracles he performed for the Egyptians? Changing water into blood, his staff into a snake?

"I asked Pin to show me a miracle. I assume you did it too. No doubt she's the real thing, is there? You know what she did for me? Turned me into you for an afternoon.

"Remember the time you were getting out of the taxi in New York and the girl from across the street who walks around naked wanted it? You said, 'Do you want this breast?' A wonderful line. I used it in the film. Hope you don't mind.

"I was even aware of what day it was, Weber. The day you heard Phil Strayhorn shot himself."

"But he still didn't stop! He knew he was going to kill himself and knew everything but he didn't stop!"

"I didn't stop because it was too intriguing. What had I done? What was I so near that it even scared them?

"Prometheus, man! Maybe I'd stolen some of the big fire! Maybe I was close to figuring out their fucking Rubik's Cube!

"Would you stop if you were there? Uh-uh, too exciting. Even the fear is golden adrenaline, believe me. The more Pinsleepe said to cut it out, the more alluring it became."