The film was finished, despite the death of Matthew Portland (and ten other people) on one of the last days of shooting. Part of the crew went to the opening of a new shopping center in the San Fernando Valley to film the festivities for one minor scene in M.K.

The architects had designed the building so that all parking was up on the roof. Halfway through the local mayor's speech, one of the giant support beams twisted and gave. The roof collapsed. Six automobiles dropped instantly through the ceiling: dropped like bombs through the ceiling into the middle of everything. I saw it on the news in New York and remembered thinking, If you showed that in a film no one would believe it. There was an especially memorable picture of a green station wagon lying on its back in a large, still-flowing fountain.

The day of Matthew's funeral, the last rushes of his film came back from the lab. When Phil was able to look at them, he realized two things: Midnight Kills was utterly mediocre, and the most important scene was missing.

The lab said they'd returned everything but would check anyway. Sasha went down to oversee their checking but came back empty-handed.

"I closed the set for that shot. It was just Matthew, me, and the camera and sound men. Bloodstone spoke for the first and last time in any of the films. Probably the only piece of inspired writing I'd ever done. The whole series spun on that soliloquy.

"Wanna guess what happened next? Matthew and Alex Karsandi, the cameraman, were up at that shopping center when the roof fell in. That left only the sound man, Rainer Artus, and me alive to know what'd gone on in the scene.

"Pinsleepe didn't steal it. I believe that because when I told her about its disappearance, she got hysterical. Said that's why Matthew and the others died: The scene, once it was shot and came to life, was as fast and virulent as nerve gas.

"It was okay when it was only on paper, but once it was filmed, something bad in it was born and started spreading the bad all over. The only way to stop it was destroy the scene or, I later thought, the person who created it. So I very gallantly and guiltily killed myself. Ha-ha on me. It did no good.

"However hyperbolic and melodramatic it sounds, it's all true. That's why Pinsleepe came – to stop me from bringing that one scene to life. Seeing I wouldn't, she stayed around, hoping to convince me to dump it later.

"You've seen what's happened to Sasha and Pinsleepe. Neither of them had control over that, either. Sasha and I hadn't even slept together for a long time. But she's still pregnant. It happened the day after we shot the scene. And she's got cancer.

"Pinsleepe can't do anything to help, not as long as that film sequence is around.

"I can't tell you where it is, believe it or not, not even here. You find out some amazing things after you die, but just as amazing is what they won't tell you.

"But here's a funny thing. You know how you're allowed one phone call from jail after they take you in? Well, here too – they give someone who's still living a chance to clear you. One chance to fix something important you messed up. It's an interesting test of love, when you think about it.

"So I chose you, Weber. I asked if it would be all right if you searched for the film.

"You've got to find it before everything goes down. The first thing they showed me when I got here was what is going to happen if you can't find and destroy it. It's vile and cruel. As bad as you could ever imagine."

He stared straight into the camera.

"All my life I wanted to be a big shot and make some real art. One time I did it. Exactly one time I really brought something to life.

"Result? The worst thing a person could have done. I made some art, but it made so much noise being born that it woke up all the trolls in the cave. They're coming out now, and they're mad. Jesus, are they mad!"

4

I was staring at a lilac bush when Finky Linky drove up. Lilacs smell like they look. They could have no other scent or color. The flower simply smells mauve, that haunting naive purple, mysterious and sweet, just this side of decay. When you think about it, the combination of hue and scent is first correct, then perfect.

Wyatt was driving Phil's XKE. Sasha had insisted we take it instead of renting a car to drive out to the valley to see Rainer Artus.

We'd been in Los Angeles four days before I got through to Artus. He had a telephone answering machine that gave the "not here" message in Peter Lorre's voice. At first it was macabre, then annoying, to call a number fifteen times and hear that German weasel say, "Heh heh. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, but 933-5819 isn't in right now. . . ."

I asked Wyatt to go along because he knew the whole story; Sasha didn't. Why didn't I tell her? Because she had enough problems at the moment, and I wanted to find out much more before saying anything to her. That made sense.

Wyatt knew because he'd been the first to mention Pinsleepe to me. Besides, I knew from discussions in our theater group that he believed very deeply in the occult and "other worlds."

Sasha didn't. To her, life and death were good and bad enough: anything more was either unproven theory, a crutch for the weak, or straight-out silliness. If I'd told her she was pregnant with an angel who, in turn, was pregnant with her (not to mention the rest of the story), Sasha would probably have put her head down and wept in despair. Maybe something worse. The first night I spent at her house she came into my room at – A.M. and crawled into bed with me. "I'm afraid. Please let me lie with you."

Every day she looked worse. Since the funeral she'd been going regularly to UCLA hospital for tests. The people, the place, the tests scared her and made our being there even more important.

Although she knew he'd planned to stay with a friend, Sasha asked Wyatt the second day if he would stay with her too. That did some good, because they quickly got down to talking about what it was like to be grievously, finitely ill. I told her about my experiences with people in our Cancer Theater Group; Wyatt said what it was like to wake up every morning and remember two seconds after consciousness raised its curtain that today could easily be it.

Sometimes they wanted me with them, sometimes not. Sometimes from another room I'd listen hard to the murmurs and bursts of their voices and think they were telling secrets only they could know or fathom. Death, or imminent death, must have a language of its own, a specific grammar and vocabulary that's understood only on that side of the fence.

Theater is a positive art. At the very least, it tries to add life to words. If the words are already alive and beautiful, good drama helps lift them off the earth. I have seen that happen in the theater, more than once even with our cancer group in New York. The actors I worked with there brought enthusiasm and fear and final energy to whatever we were doing. I could direct them, but whatever talent or inspiration they had was enhanced more by the enormous threat of their ticking clocks than anything I said. I saw myself as giving them only what could fit through a small hole in a glass window or chain-link fence. For me the experience was invaluable because their energy and efforts were instructive and elemental: Everything was motivated by the clearest, healthiest greed I'd ever seen – the greed that demands another day of life.

When I heard Wyatt and Sasha talking, I thought of that fence and how unclimbable it was until you found yourself suddenly, horribly, on the other side at some unexpected time in your life.

In his best Finky Linky voice, Wyatt called out from the car, "Are we going, or are you scanning the lilacs?"