O, Africa! Read online

  “Go on,” she says, her six-year-old face in her smile as her lover scans the scene for an appropriate spot to relieve himself, settling on a stack of rotting kindling. “It was a good day, Micah. You earned it.”

  Izzy approaches with trepidation the giant red-and-yellow construction. A 150-foot-tall colossus that dominates for miles the Coney Island skyline, the Wonder Wheel looks in Izzy’s imagination like an enormous clockwork gear from the camera’s innards. Apart from its prodigious height, the ride is unique in design, with stationary Ferris-wheel cars suspended from its outer frame and bolted into place alternating with suspended carriages that freely swing back and forth over curved interior tracks. Hence the man costumed in a black cap and red-and-white-striped gondolier’s shirt who asks ticket holders, “Still or swing?” like a server at the carving table inquiring if you’d prefer juice or gravy. Izzy doesn’t have time to answer, however, for in the next moment the mogul descends, wedged into the front seat of one of the ride’s undulating compartments.

  “Get in, Itz,” Arthur Marblestone intones, extending his carnival cane and hooking Izzy into the cab, affectionately but not without suggestive force, a mother bear swatting her cub.

  From toes to crown: Marblestone’s delicate feet are squeezed into a tiny pair of spats, his folds of flesh draped not in anything one could realistically call a suit but a bifurcated tent adorned with meaningless buttons, pockets, and epaulets. Huge, gnarled fingers grip the bars of the cage—fingers that had known potato peelers, broom handles, steins of beer, the pussies of prostitutes, the contents of babies’ diapers, awls, axes, and vises, piano keys, strips of celluloid, movie projectors, fountain pens, checkbooks, and bricks of cash. A corona of dandruff ringed his sweating shoulders, and atop his head—a Rodin bust of a thing with a nose that could only be described as heroic—sat an enormous, crooked, vaguely sinister panama hat. Under it, only slightly obscured in shadow, an unforgettable face, a face that recounted the immensity of the immigrant project, a face that held Thoreauvian composure mixed with Rasputin-like dementia, a face marked by the unblinking eyes of an archer that could, the next moment, thicken with clouds of rheumy blindness. Simply, Marblestone possessed the most prodigious physical presence of anyone Izzy had ever met—movie stars and ballplayers included—and it made sense that the man should take up space. Marblestone was both Ahab and whale—he was the whale after swallowing Ahab—and his incredible bulk caused the carnival ride to quake wildly.

  “I didn’t know you were coming east, Mr. Marblestone,” Izzy fumbles, cramming himself into the front seat beside the boss, attempting to look relaxed as he is forced to rest an elbow on the man’s extraordinary girth, recognizing about Marblestone an animal smell redolent of the circus tent and the abattoir.

  “This is because,” the mogul says, lifting an oyster from the shimmering heap of shellfish piled high on a greasy plate resting on his lap, “your brother is a disreputable, thieving liar and a world-class son of a bitch who cannot be trusted to relay even a simple message.”

  The carriage rocks as it rises. One-third the way up its charted course, the cab dips and then speeds forward with a terrifying rumble, sliding along curved tracks, swinging out over the wheel’s outer frame, the force of the forward motion convincing the camerman that the pair of them are about to be catapulted into the Atlantic.

  “Well, despite reports of delays, today has been a rousing success,” Izzy says, handing Marblestone the hot dog Micah had given him as the carriage regains its equilibrium and continues skyward, nearly grazing concession-stand rooftops as the squeaking bolts of the mechanism voice their distress. “Not only did we finish the day ahead of schedule, but Mr. Ruth proved himself wholly cooperative and, in fact, something of a natural.”

  The cab rises higher. As heights were near the top of Izzy’s list of phobias, he screws up his courage and looks Marblestone in the face, promising to keep his eyes locked on the man so long as they remain aloft.

  “Look who you’re talking to, Izzy. Are you suggesting I need to slink into town under cover of night to check up on one of my own productions?” Chewing now. “Are you suggesting that Arthur Marblestone—whom no less of an authority than Moving Picture World referred to as, quote, ‘One of the motion pictures’ pioneers and great entrepreneurs,’ end quote—needs to hear these things from a little pischer of a cameraman? Not to worry, boychick, I have informers, supplicants, underlings for that sort of thing. I know Quicktime is behind schedule. But, much as I disapprove of your brother, he’s a talented shooter. He’ll bring the picture in. No, I’m here on other business.”

  From their great height, the trifecta of coasters—the Thunderbolt, the Tornado, the Cyclone—resemble dinosaur fossils, skeletal frames of beasts that once ruled the earth before collapsing to the sand. The famous seaside resort had been razed over and over again since its founding, entire worlds erected and destroyed—consumed by terrible blazes that felled the Elephant Colossus and reduced Dreamland’s tower to a shaft of flame. Rising, rising higher still, swinging, this wonderland, this palace of amusements, this arcadia haunted with ghosts and mummies and sarcophagi, seemed to Izzy a necropolis.

  “The sea air is good for me,” Marblestone says once they reach the top, inhaling and expanding his torso like a hot-air balloon. “Izzy, look here.” Lifting a massive arm, stretching and pulling taut the fabric of his straw-colored suit like the sail of a ship bound for the New World. “Down there, on Surf Avenue, I ran my first nickelodeon theater twenty-five years ago. Played a different one-reeler every day.… Then, from that one little stand, I opened the Lyric, the Majestic, the Jewel, the Bijou Dream—places you’ve never heard of, all over town. Twenty years before that, Coney Island was the very first thing I saw when we entered New York Harbor,” he recounts. “All of which is to say I don’t need a reason for a visit, Izzy. This place is as much home to me as anywhere.”

  And here the man begins to weep. Thick, gelatinous tears stream over the filthy steamship pores, pocked cheeks, and Gibraltar-like nose, are swept up in the bristles fanning out from the nostrils like a broom, and retire themselves in a dustbin of mustache. Getting caught in the downpour of Marblestone’s emotional weather system was nothing new to Izzy. Marblestone would let loose the waterworks at the sight of puppies, flowers, Katzenjammer Kids, little old ladies crossing the street, the cut of a really fine suit, and prepackaged loaves of bread. He was known during screen tests to explode into wet at the sight of a beautiful girl. (“That face!” Marblestone would proclaim in wonderment, Adam encountering a fawn in the Garden of Eden. “Can you believe such a punim!?”)

  “Pass me a napkin, Itz,” the mogul commands, hocking phlegm and gathering sobs in cartoon balloons.

  At the ride’s pinnacle, Marblestone reaches for Izzy’s hands—wrapping his fists around Izzy’s pianist’s fingers—gripping them for support as powerful wails rack his gargantuan frame, causing the cab to rock to and fro. Izzy could not help but love the man. Even while terrified of Marblestone—the power he held over the brothers, his mass and mood swings, his expansiveness and vulgarity, his bullying compassion and Old Testament wrathfulness—Izzy admired the reins the man held over his own nervous system. Synapse to thought to action—the smashed monster’s fist on the table, the room-shaking fits of belly laughter, the hot, coruscating tears—emotional formation and deployment occurred faster and more honestly in Marblestone than in smaller, lesser men. Marblestone was nothing if not a prime human specimen. He oozed humanity. And it was this—the saltiness of Marblestone’s sweaty, flawed humanity yoked to an intuitive sense of story that flowed from him as freely as water pouring off a man at a schvitz—that qualified him as a supreme arbiter of audience taste.

  Born in 1873 in Liozna, Belarus, taking for his birthday July Fourth (and adopting his marmoreal name as a monument to himself) after emigrating to the United States in the centennial year of 1900, following a hodgepodge history of employment, Marblestone found himself working in the kineog
raph department of the Edison Manufacturing Company. There, as part of a plant that manufactured batteries, X-ray machines, and dental equipment, he came to see how motion pictures in America were an industrial story, similar to railroads or oil or the garment industry.

  But it was more than economics that took Marblestone from butter-and-egg man to scrap metal, from fairground operator to nickelodeon-arcade proprietor, more than dollars and cents that marked his strange but inevitable trajectory from immigrant to merchant to image weaver. It was a moral imperative, a sense of public responsibility for this foreigner’s son to stamp his particular brand of pathos on the American character.

  For what were motion pictures—this dream parade of stunningly lit faces—other than a personal rebuke to a century’s worth of terror and poverty and totalitarianism?

  “I received a fan letter the other day from a farmer in Kansas explaining that since the three-reelers came in, he dreams of movies,” Marblestone once exalted, sitting bare-chested on his throne chair in an office decorated in ancient-Egyptian fashion with lions, scarabs, owls, and dismembered feet. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have launched the most incredible campaign in history. We have invaded people’s dreams!”

  Izzy breathes a sigh of relief as the carriage begins cruising back to earth. “Stay put, sonny boy,” Marblestone says, clamping a hand on the cameraman’s wriggling knee as the gondolier sends them skybound for another orbit.

  “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Marblestone,” Izzy ventures, bracing himself for a second flight, “how long have you been on this thing?”

  “I don’t know, couple hours.”

  “Didn’t you want to meet Ruth?”

  “I appreciate that the man is a national hero, but after you’ve crossed the Atlantic in a coffin ship, these are child’s games. Clam?”

  “No thank you.”

  “I understand. It’s one of the adult C flavors a person has to grow into, like coffee, caviar, and cocksucking.”

  At this last word, Izzy flinches as if stung by an electric eel. With Marblestone’s hand resting on the cameraman’s knee, the memory of Izzy’s maiden voyage on the Wonder Wheel comes sailing back to him. Thirteen, just a month after the disaster of the brothers’ joint bar mitzvah, Izzy and his best childhood friend, Marvin, had finally been allowed to spend a day exploring the wonderland on their own. What a day they had! Shoot-the-Chutes and the Tunnel of Love, the Rocky Road to Dublin and the Oriental Scenic Railway, the Dragon’s Gorge and the Buzzard’s Roost, the Scrambler and the Frolic, Steeplechase horses and then the capper, the topper, the kicker, surmounting the height of heights, rotating around the great clock face of sky on the superbly named Wonder Wheel. It was just as they reached the ride’s apex that Marvin rested a hand on Izzy’s kneecap. And kept it there. Under Marvin’s furtive, persistent fingertips, beneath his thin-wale corduroys, Izzy’s leg remained still, the limb in springtime possession of the secret language of bodies. Secret knowledge, too, was locked in Izzy’s eyes as they rose to meet those of his friend before flicking away to look out onto the seascape. Terrifying sensations. Unknowable, indecipherable. A secret told to himself, kept to himself. It was immediately after this outing—and the exquisite, agonizing invention of nocturnal emissions—that Marvin began ignoring him. Until weeks later in the schoolyard, in front of the other boys, Marvin suddenly demanded to know of Izzy why his helpless hands went flopping “like that.” To the delight of the crowd that had formed around them, Marvin grabbed Izzy’s arm and held it behind his back like a chicken wing as his friend pleaded with him to let go. Then Marvin pried loose Izzy’s fingers from their fist and pulled the first two back until they snapped. A good clear sound, clean and declarative, like biting a carrot or breaking dried branches over a campfire. That night Izzy’s father did not ask what had occurred as he set the small bones in silence. A month later Marvin’s family up and moved west.

  “When my friends and I were young, we dreamed of becoming poets,” Marblestone says in a solemn voice stashed behind the loud, gruff one. “Instead we became accountants and department-store owners and movie producers. Just like you and your brother: You’re the artist, he’s the bookkeeper.”

  “You came all the way from California to tell us that, Mr. Marblestone?”

  “No, I came all the way from California to let you know that when all this fades”—sweeping a hand across the seascape—“the pictures will still be there. That’s the distinction. You keeping up on the talkies?”

  “Yes, of course. We caught Lights of New York the other night at the Rialto.”

  “And?”

  “Well, synchronization’s amazing, but visually they’re terrible.”

  “It’s a gimmick. It’ll pass. Besides, actors talk already. Their faces speak, their eyes are mouths.”

  “Yeah, Hal told me about how they had to keep the camera locked down in a glass booth to muffle the noise and spent half the time figuring out ways to hide the microphone—actors talking to flower arrangements, leaning into piano housing, that sort of thing.”

  “Theater conversion costs a fortune, too.” Marblestone nods. “Exhibitors are still skeptical, taking a wait-and-see approach. Even so, we’re in trouble. Serious trouble.”

  “Mr. Marblestone, I assure you today’s shoot—”

  “Forget about Quicktime, that’s the least of my worries. I’m being squeezed, Izzy. Like a testicle in a bar fight I’m being squeezed!”

  “By whom?”

  “Creditors, auditors, exhibitors … You’re a smart boy, you know what a bank note is? We’re overextended, Izzy. Your Till pictures have been the only thing keeping us afloat these past few years. Every other picture—Tit for Tat, The Eggroll Adventures of Chow Mein Charlie, Shooting in the Dark with Uncle Johnson—has gone bust.”

  “I’ve talked to you before about those titles …”

  “Forget the titles, Izzy! Quicktime could be the biggest picture of the year, it wouldn’t matter. I’ve got to turn things around or it’s back to the junk business for me.”

  “That’s why you came to New York? To see Abernathy?”

  “In part, yes. Look, I’ve seen the talkies, and I’m against them. We didn’t work thirty years making movies into something new only to turn them back into stage plays. Sound’s a fad—it’ll play itself out. Leave the voices to radio; I’m willing to stake my legacy on that belief. No, for Imperial to survive, we have to go in the opposite direction. If sound pictures lock the camera down, Imperial needs to liberate it from the lot, like we did here, today, in Coney Island.”

  “Huh.”

  “You know Wallace over at Poseidon Pictures? Last time I saw him he mentioned how they’d loaned out three minutes of underwater footage from The Call of Pirate Booty to Robertson-Cole Pictures for South Sea Love. Far as I can tell, no one else is doing this. Now, here’s my plan. We’re going to create a vault of imagery, stock footage of the great sights of the world—the Pantheon, ancient Roman ruins, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, the Belgian Congo—that we’ll license out to other studios to use in their pictures and get paid five, six times over. If it works, it’ll relieve our debt within a year. I’ve got prospective buyers all lined up—the Technicolor Corporation needs footage for Cleopatra, Numa Pictures needs insert shots for the Tarzan serials—the list goes on and on.”

  “I’m not certain I follow.” Swallowing a spoonful of bile as they lift higher.

  “I need you and your brother to take a trip.”

  “You want to take us off pictures?”

  “No, the contrary, Isidor. I want your stuff stamped across all the studios’ product. You’ll bring Till, too. Henry’s still under a two-picture contract, so you can shoot your next one while you’re over there as insurance to help underwrite the trip.”

  “Over where, Mr. Marblestone?”

  “You and your brother are going to have the privilege of making the first films in Africa.”

  “Africa? With all due respect, Mr. Marblest
one, this amusement ride is proving difficult for me.”

  “Nonsense, Izzy. I have faith in your powers of resolve. That’s why I’ve chosen you and your brother for this assignment—to make like Magellan with a movie camera. Bubbeleh, I’ve got it all lined up. The world will be our backdrop, this I promise.”

  From the Wonder Wheel’s high, bright peak, Izzy forces himself to look out onto the vibrating horizon, the blue-and-white Scotch-plaid sky beyond. Great fingers of the Atlantic feathered out in green and gold filaments beyond the shore, merchant coins of the sea, spangles of the New World. Could it be done? Could it be captured, all of it, the pieces of the world gathered up and put back in Pandora’s box? Turning again to the boss, the cameraman surveys Marblestone from head to toe, magnificent clay sculpted by force of will. Then Izzy leans forward, surrenders his vision to the foggy reflection of himself swimming in the man’s polished shoes, inhales deeply, and delivers across the boss’s feet a colorful plume of vomit.

  ONE

  As Micah trawls between sleep and wakefulness, belly to back, legs bent spoonwise, his halfway-limp schmegegge still inside her, somewhere in the world the sun turns up its lampshade. Here in her bedroom, against the day, he’s able to make out some markers: the too-short vase of lilies by the window, a collection of secondhand hats sprouting on the wall like midnight mushrooms, stacks of broken-spined books and outdated periodicals fanned out atop a wobbly wooden desk, lime-green Coca-Cola bottles lining the floor like bowling pins, just enough latent luminescence to connect the constellation of moles across her back. Even when he isn’t here, this secret room uptown, the honest half of his life. “It’s nice getting touched,” she’d said once, revealing the simple secret of the great game, “in places that don’t often get touched.”