Free Shadows & Tall Trees by Michael Kelly Page B

bottom . . . L O V E.
    “Love! It said ‘sex’ the other day. That’s not usual, is it? I mean the letters don’t normally spell anything?”
    “I’ll change the card.”
    Once again, the auteur begins to read from the top. Everything is much clearer now. He is even able to make out the second to last line without too much difficulty:
    “D. . . .A. . . .no, E . . . A . . .T . . . 
Sex,
Love
&
Death
. That’s the title of one of my films! What’s going on here?”
    The test card vanishes. He can hear a faint rustling as the optician comes round to the front of the chair. The auteur tries to raise his head so he can see the man’s face, but even the slightest movement is impossible. A white shirt and the bottom of a tie come into view.
    “I hope my glasses will be ready by tomorrow. Half-past eleven at the latest. I have an urgent meeting with my son before I fly back to Paris. At six in the evening.”
    How pressing is an engagement with a son who has been dead for thirty years? A son, briefly famous as the co-star of
Desir, l’amour et la mort,
who was supposed have taken his life in the state of Illinois nine months after he had made it plain that he would never speak to his father again. The auteur still has the private detective’s report in the bottom drawer of an
escritoire
in Paris. But now his niece has been saying that this was all lies: his son had bribed the detective.
    “You can be quite sure that everything will be arranged. Now can you see my middle finger?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell me what you notice as I move it slowly towards you.”
    “There’s no nail facing me and the remaining three fingers and the thumb have been tucked into the palm of . . .”
    A silver crescent in the flesh, an old wound’s emblem. “I think I’ll leave now, if you don’t mind.”
    “If you could stay for a little longer, I’d be grateful. There are a few things I may need to attend to.”
    The man has moved round to the back of the chair. A cabinet rolling open followed by the reassuringly professional rustle of paper. The auteur sighs and tries to relax. To panic would be unbecoming. Even at the most difficult times on set, he always remained utterly unruffled. The scar could be anybody’s scar. As a writer he should know how the alert mind is always ready to find hidden words, however the alphabet is presented. And anyway his film had a French title.
    But now there is no sound from behind him. Although he has not heard the creak of the door, he knows the man is no longer in the room. Indeed, he can hear noises coming from the reception area. Furniture is being shifted. He is quite sure the display stands and the uncomfortable chairs are being manoeuvred onto the street. Voices; bottles are being opened. The murmur sounds civilized. Like the opening of an exhibition or a book launch. Then, very faintly, there’s a series of gentle chinks. At first he thinks it’s merely celebratory: glass glancing convivial glass. But soon the chink changes to a clink and a scrape. Then another clink and scrape. Something is being built. He remembers the bricks and the skip outside. He begins to struggle, and shout and scream, but he is being held fast in the treatment chair. He has never heard himself beg before.
    A bright light in the mirror; the test card reappears. For a moment, every vowel and consonant is quite still and he half expects a voice from behind asking him to read, but then the letters whirl and swirl around before finally reassembling themselves:
Desir, l’amour
et la mort
. The screen is too narrow for his film, his greatest attempt to fix the permanence of his longings. There will be no images: it is his script. The opening scene is scrolling down. He can no longer see anything in the room except the mirror and its message. Only language moves in the dark. He will fade, walled in with his words.

D EATH’S D OOR C AFÉ
K AARON W ARREN
    T heo thought of the pain in his veins as the