THE VIRG N QWEEN
STRRING PE ENTWISTLE
PURE CHANCE, HE SUPPOSED.
He’d been driving aimlessly around the city, trying to settle his thoughts, when he noticed the letters hanging askew above the columns of some grubby little theater at the edge of Watts. Ignoring the blare of horns and the hey buddy curses, he cut in at the nearest space.
“Stalls or balcony?”
He bought his ticket in the dank foyer out of the fifty from his cash advance, and found a seat high, at the back, away from the stink of the restrooms. The lights, which had been pretty dim in the first place, dimmed some more. Then a projector began to clatter, shooting a bright finger through the fug of cigarette smoke toward the curtains, which twitched like something alive, then jerked apart.
That silver screen. The pure anticipation of its emptiness. Yeah, he remembered—the sacred possibility that those wavering shadows would draw you in and wring you out and leave you feeling things you’d forgotten how to feel.
But newsreels first—just plain old sound and picture like in the old days, the Bechmeir field not yet on. Joe DiMaggio’s seemingly endless streak, and the Red Sox and the Dodgers, and Hitler surveying Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arriving at Lakehurst Fields in the Hindenburg to give a series of speeches on the theme of Peace Between Two Continents despite Roosevelt’s attempts to ban him. All this to a breezy soundtrack and Harry von Zell’s cheery voiceover.
The adverts were something else. Now, with a fizzing humming and their characteristic sea-salt smell of charged plasm, the powered-up generators began to pour their energies across the fine metal grid behind the screen. Even before the field itself was actually visible, the tired air within the theater began to change, and there was an extra glow, an indefinable presence, to Jo-Ann Corkish as she rode toward you from across the plains of her prairie ranch. Not that Clark had ever really liked this sensation, or felt comfortable with it, but by the time she’d dismounted, taken out her pack of Luckies from her straining denim breast, lit one up and inhaled, something cool and deep and profound seemed to enter your lungs. When she smiled, you felt a warmth as if the summer sun had suddenly fallen upon your face.
With the feelies, you didn’t just see, or hear. You felt—and by the time the last Wrigley’s Doublemint advert had filled Clark’s mouth with useless saliva, he was ready to take the Matson Line to Hawaii wearing Arrow Shirts, drinking Ron Marito rum and smoking several different brands of cigarette. He really could do with a new Chevy. And, he thought, as the first swell of the soundtrack of The Virgin Queen washed over him, he might even be able to afford one with the money April Lamotte was paying.
The late afternoon daylight felt thin and pale when he re-emerged from the theater.
April Lamotte had been right. The Virgin Queen was some feelie. Even the creeps and itches hadn’t been as bad as he’d expected. It was almost enough to convince him that the whole medium wasn’t some twobit trick. Not that Clark—for all he knew about English history, which he could have written on the back of a very small postage stamp—was convinced that the real Queen Elizabeth would have been quite so flirtatious in those scenes with the Spanish monarch, or that a European monarch would ever have gotten as involved in fighting back the Armada as she had on the deck of her ship. But none of that mattered—not even watching some old and scratchy print with a muffled soundtrack and blurry feelie reel which caused washes of out-of-phase plasm to jitter at the edges of the dirty curtains like emerald flames.
Everything had seemed so real. The way the color-changing aura of Elizabeth’s joy danced in the gray beam of the projector above as she played in the gardens of the palace in those early scenes. Her rank fear as she crouched in that grimy cell. The sly arrogance that oozed from Hank Gunn’s aura in his brilliant performance as her wily spymaster Walsingham. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots was a masterstroke. The way the music quietened and all the braying voices faded, until all you were left with was the crowd’s horrible need running on the feelie track like some sickness burning in the back of your throat, and the sound of Mary’s footsteps as she climbed the steps toward the block, and the cold squeeze around your heart of her uncomprehending dread… Then the cut to Elizabeth in tears. Clark was crying as well—of course he was; he couldn’t help it. So was the whole audience. It was a brilliant sequence, and he wondered whether it had been written that way in Daniel Lamotte’s script. If it had been, the guy was a genius. If it hadn’t, he was still pretty good.
Then there was Peg Entwistle. To see her face once again, but looming out from a huge screen, bigger and more distant than the moon yet close enough to touch, and equally lovely. Those big gray eyes. The tilt of her head. The curve of her lips. You couldn’t doubt for one moment that this was exactly what the real living, breathing, Elizabeth would have been like. And to think that people used to say that all Peg could play was best-friend supporting roles and kooky comedy. With her classy British accent, with her pale good looks and that hint of sadness and steel, she’d been born to play Elizabeth.
Yes, he’d done a good job of forgetting what it was like to watch a feelie, just as he’d forgotten many things, and the colors of the everyday world seemed pale as he pulled out into the thickening evening traffic and drove west toward Venice, occasionally checking the rearview to see if he was being followed.