The lost expert, p.18
The Lost Expert, page 18
Chris picked up his water glass and brought it to his lips. It was empty. His hand was shaking.
He knows! He knows I’m a fake! But he doesn’t care!
Berinstain extracted a large sheaf of documents. Sign here, Chris thought, feeling as if he were sinking. Harry Houdini, the Hungarian rabbi’s son, wrapped in chains and manacles and dropped mercilessly into murky water, only to emerge as a free man. The Lost Expert, pulling the smoky, murky casino air into his lungs, struggling to breathe. And here. Chris sucking at the perfectly tempered air through his big white teeth. And here. And here. And here. His heart pumped, but his chest smouldered.
“And just this last one, here, please.”
Berinstain gathered the papers and secured them in an attaché case.
“Very good,” he said. “Do you have any further questions, Thomson?”
Script 12
EXT. THE DESERT — DAY
The late afternoon sun is intense.
THE LOST EXPERT arrives at the partial shade created by the cresting dune. He lowers himself to the shadowed sand. A vulture circles overhead, dark against the burning orb in the sky, its shadow tracing the Lost Expert’s supine body before moving slowly on across the vast empty skies. The Lost Expert’s eyes flicker, and we can see he’s somewhere else.
INT. HOTEL (montage)
The DUCHESS in the elevator. In a tight dress, cloche hat pulled tight over her brown curls, she is the flapper ingenue, her hazel eyes wide and innocent, open to every possibility. But her jaw is set, her expression wary and weary, her face a makeup mask.
CUT TO
The duchess making her way to the casino floor.
CUT TO
A crowd of revelers, a stag party, twenty drunk men chanting someone’s name. They move past the duchess, and she is lost in the crowd. In slow motion, the faintest glimpse of half a man’s face in the group of chanting men. He is tall, blond, his expression vacant, hidden. He leans in, stopping the duchess as she passes, whispering something in her ear.
CUT TO
Her heavily mascaraed eyes widen.
CUT TO
The man disappears into the crowd.
EXT. DESERT
THE LOST EXPERT opens his eyes suddenly, looks around as if seeing the surroundings for the first time.
BOY LOST EXPERT’S MOTHER (V.O.)
Where are you? Where’d you go? Mommy’s looking for you …
INT. HOTEL (montage)
Slow motion: the same again, the key second prolonged, the scene dissolving into grainy inscrutability.
EXT. DESERT — SUNSET
The red desert sun sinks beneath the endless sand.
INT. HOTEL
Paused still image: The face of the man, shadowed, blurred, his lips barely open.
EXT. DESERT — SUNSET
THE LOST EXPERT
(voice cracking, barely audible)
Beaoman
THE DUCHESS (V.O.)
(mocking laughter)
Well! And did you ever find her?
EXT. THE DESERT — NIGHT
A gusting wind blows. THE LOST EXPERT pushes through the swirling sand and dust in a stagger. Silt sticks to his eyes and crusts the tight press of his lips. The sky coruscates, cloud and moon intersecting to make chiaroscuro patterns of shadow on shadow, an ominous painting on the low-pressing sky. The Lost Expert stops, sways in the wind under the muted light show. Hands shaking, he brings his canteen to his lips. A few remaining drops decrescendo into his mouth. He lets the canteen slip from his hands. It immediately disappears under blowing sand. The Lost Expert takes a few more steps, then falls to his knees. He struggles, seems unable to get up.
THE DUCHESS (V.O.)
(laughing drunkenly with feigned bravado)
Choose a number! Choose a number!
The Lost Expert manages to rise. He squints through the blowing sand. He appears to see something up ahead, a glimmer of white against the impenetrable black. He staggers forward into the howling wind of the maelstrom.
BOY LOST EXPERT’S MOTHER (V.O.)
It’s just you and me now, baby. That’s all right. Isn’t that all right?
EXT. THE DESERT — NIGHT
THE LOST EXPERT laboriously trudges up a large sand slope, slipping and falling, clawing forward and upward on his hands and knees. His face is blistered, his eyes almost completely crusted shut. He crawls with excruciating slowness. At a cautious distance a coyote keeps pace, shuffling and keening through the night. The Lost Expert crawls.
>BOY LOST EXPERT’S MOTHER (V.O.)
(desperate)
Hey! Come out! I give up, okay? I give up!
MAN (V.O.)
(despairing)
I can work. I’m strong. I wanna work!
If someone would just …
The Lost Expert crests the hill and manages to get to his feet. He sees the duchess in her white, flouncy dress. She is face down, unconscious, several coyotes warily eyeing her. He steps quickly toward her, and the animals slink away. He rolls the duchess over. Her eyes flutter.
CUT TO
Beaoman’s hovering, shadowed face.
CUT TO
The pale, delicate fist of the duchess, clutching a single black chip.
CUT TO
The Lost Expert pulls something out of his rucksack. He fumbles, his hands shaking.
CROUPIER (V.O.)
(expressionless)
Red seventeen. Red seventeen.
THE DUCHESS
(coughing, spitting sand)
Did he …? Did he win?
The duchess faints. A bright red flare ignites in the dark sky high over the desert, the Lost Expert’s face bathed in the bloody glow.
Section 13
CHRIS WAITED IN A brand-new double-wide. The trailer was almost empty, save a lavishly soft leather La-Z-Boy. Chris pulled the lever and the chair reclined gently, footrest extending. He closed his eyes. That’s not what we agreed to. Liquidity zero. Sign here. And here. The length and emptiness of this mobile home on the edge of the faux mini-desert was disconcerting. Why was it here? Why was it so empty? It’s a reality check, Laurie liked to say, discussing her response to the outsized retirement plans of her clients — cruises, European villas, Freedom 55. A white scar cut into a taut cheek. Sunken lips and uncashed cheques. Inside was new car smell and stretched-out emptiness, like a cube had been dragged into a new shape — had that been a Max Ernst hanging on the wall of the recreated 1920s casino boardroom? “Oh, you’re so surreal!” Krunk had shouted drunkenly to an empty street. “You’re like the matrix without the ones and zeros!” Inside was the air-conditioned hum-whine. Outside, the distant crackle of walkie-talkies, murmuring voices getting louder.
“Use John!”
Alison, Chris realized, suddenly attentive to the contours, if not the substance, of the conversation.
Reed, dismissive. “He’s tougher than he looks, your little man.”
That set her off. They went back and forth. Alison was worried. The role was getting to him. He’d been overworked up north. She wanted Reed to use John instead. The stunt guy/body double. John was the stunt guy. Alison. He’d slept with her. He’d gone too far. Or not far enough.
Anyway, the show would go on. Reed didn’t care about people, even himself. That’s what made him what he was. Total focus. A will to move mountains. Fitzcarraldo, moving a 320-ton steamship up and over the Andes to the Amazon on the other side, and if the occasional extra ended up with one less leg, well, that’s what insurance was for. “What do you want to do?” Reed yelled at Alison. “Sit around here for a month waiting for him to feel better? We don’t exactly have forever, you know!”
Two people fighting over him. The last time that happened was back in the divorce days. Fourteen-year-old Chris, quiet, unassuming; Krunk, his only pal, advising him — how to shave, how to catch your cum in a wad of Kleenex, how to skip school and spend a day at the movies.
In the year that followed, his father checked out, moved almost two hours down the highway for an insurance job in Waterloo and a new life. He remarried and lived childless with his perfectly acceptable second wife. The few times Chris had visited, they’d spent the evenings sitting primly in a room they called the parlour. His dad’s new wife sipped white wine over ice cubes. Some kind of classic lite played on the radio. Despite the soporific music, it was the familiar silence trapped in his dad’s tight grin that stayed with Chris. He took the early bus home.
The argument had faded out of earshot. The trailer was huge, flimsy, the La-Z-Boy a ridiculous island. Eyes still closed, Chris tried to envision the upcoming scenes. The desert. Lost in the desert. But his thoughts went in another direction. Berinstain. The new Thomson Holmes. Alison. The surrounding Mojave moving in, piling up, spilling through the high-set slat windows. The burning sand surging through the trailer, consuming the floor, the chair’s legs, the footrest, until he was in sand up to his neck, up to his chin — his mouth crusting over; all that was left were his lips — a white scar.
Chris jerked up, a surge of something like electricity shooting through him.
THE SUN BLAZED, AND the members of the crew were almost unrecognizable, shrouded in baseball cap-kaffiyeh get-ups that protected the lower halves of their faces from the blowing sand. Reed barked orders, the German quietly but furiously conveyed his own plans, and the components of the shoot gradually assembled into a complex orchestral arrangement. Under the artificial shade of an erected canopy protecting them from a not-particularly-hot sun, Chris stared out into the desert, trying to focus on the mountains in the near distance. The landscape was at once sparse and luxuriant. His gaze wavered between the parallel lines of sky and sand before settling on the optical illusion of their meeting at the base of the hills. It was beautiful and disruptive, before and after. What came next? Everything he’d known and been. Alison fidgeted and paced next to him, unable to stay still, her breaths in short, anxious bursts, mini exhalations of heated indignation. Chris tried to catch her eye, wanting to reassure her. Really, it’s okay. I’m fine. She was avoiding him. His sense of exhaustion and anticipation had diminished to a dull, somehow comforting haze. Guess what, he wanted to tell her. I’m selling it. The DeLorean. It’s fine, he’d assure her. I don’t need it anymore. He could see through the haze that what had seemed so terrible and real was something else entirely. It was the Just Beyond, the cinematic totality awaiting capture. The desert — a British Columbian oasis standing in for the Nevadan real deal — was nothing, could be anything: some shimmering mirage softening into cerulean sky.
It was time. At Reed’s signal, Chris tromped forward, nose low, sniffing for a scent. That’s what Reed had told him to do. Plunge ahead with abandon; go on the hunt the way only the Lost Expert could. “This is what he lives for,” Reed had hissed to him. “This is who he is.” There would be someone else in the scene, someone he was looking for. Chris had nodded, not really listening as Reed went on: a hotel detective, a faceless man, a missing princess. “In a way it works. This fake desert. It’s not perfect, but nothing is!” Chris strode through the arid emptiness. Specks of sand blasted his cheeks, carried by an incongruously cold wind. He kept his head on a swivel, his posture stiff, trying to convey a Lost Expert aura of meticulous, yet somehow confused, persistence.
Reed barked orders, gesticulated, pointed. Hearing and not hearing, Chris experimented with a ponderous gaze, peered over his shoulder at the director and his array of cameras and mics. Reed shook his head in something that looked like disgust. Chris felt himself flush. He had a headache. It was the same one he’d had after waking up in the camp director’s cabin in a puddle on the splintering floor. It had returned. It was making a kind of whooshing sound in his ears. Or it might have been the natural sound of the desert, the empty quiet of a place as loud and all-encompassing as a Hollywood sound effect.
He jogged down the bowl of a long valley. The sand sucked at him as he piled into its soft middle. For a time, he didn’t seem to be moving at all, everything around him growing larger without getting any nearer. He looked back only once. Reed’s mouth, an empty oval. No sound reached him. That was fine. Chris didn’t need direction; his limbs, unleashed, struck out on their own.
His legs churned, and he sank into a slow memory. Saturday morning cartoons: alone in front of the basement television picking sodden Froot Loops from a plastic cereal bowl. On the small, fuzzy screen, Wile E. Coyote’s purgatorial antics stretching the hours through a generic background of box canyons and washed-out gorges — a world Chris had never imagined might actually exist somewhere. Déjà vu. Here he was. Haunting himself. The farther you get, the closer you are.
Shadows crossing his path snapped him back to awareness. Chris skidded to a stop, barely avoiding crashing into three scraggly, overlapping trees. Joshua trees, Chris thought or imagined. Could they be? Here? Or were they trucked in from California? He’d done a report on desert habitats in eleventh grade. How different those low, bare trees were from the hearty forest denizens he and Krunk had grown up wandering under. In the pictures on the library computer, the Joshua trees seemed more like beasts than anything that grew, desert gargoyles waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to disappear behind sudden clouds. In real life they looked stunted and mistreated. Branches, twisted in defiance, reached toward the unforgiving sun. The malnourished Y-shaped limbs seemed weighed down by the greyish fluff wrapped haphazardly around them. Upon closer inspection, the soft-looking fuzz was made up of sharp clusters of needles, the desert tree’s harsher version of leaves.
The wind blew, stirring up sand. Chris squinted, wiped at his face with the shoulder of his shirt. He was losing it. Losing himself. So what? Let it happen. Thomson Holmes. Lost Expert.
The sand slowly resettled around him. It was bright. Too bright. Then: a near-distant rock formation, emerging from the distance. The cliffs jutted out of the desert at sharpened angles. Chris imagined cairns lurching together to form a surreal obstacle course. He raised his gaze from the bottom of the cliff to where its flat pinnacle pushed into the blue sky.
From behind, he heard Reed. The crew. Alison, he thought. Or said. He never should have —
It was what Thomson Holmes might have done. But not him. Not him? Déjà vu redux. The sequel always rings twice. He plunged ahead, swelled with determination. To reach his destination. To somehow cleanse himself, wash away the stink of that perverted oasis, stardom. “Stop!” Reed yelled. “Cut!”
The wind again. A surge from the west, the whoosh inside his skull crashing into the gale bellowing around his ears. Chris shook his head like a horse trying to free himself of the bridle. Don’t think. Closer to the rocky tower, the terrain was haphazard with boulders. He leapt from rock to rock, propelling his imbalance into the next wild bounce.
And then he was there, face-to-face with the high, red tower. He panted, air, sulphur, and dried sage filling his lungs.
Noises behind him. He stretched his neck to gaze at the top of the wavering cliff. Where was he? Wile E., setting a dynamite trap. Had he always been like that? Alone and sad? He shook his head, trying to banish the image.
He began the ascent. Porous, craggy rocks offered grips and holds but ripped at his fingertips and palms. Grit collected in his wind-tousled hair, sliding down his neck and back. Despite the air’s chill, he was perspiring. Good. Verisimilitude. The higher he got, the more he felt his pale skin glowing. Before the shoot, Alison had offered to put sunscreen on him. He’d declined.
He rose, proceeding mainly by feel, grabbing with his hands, scrabbling with his authentically worked-in moccasin toe work boots. At times, he felt his grip loosening, his body in danger of slipping to the rock beds that were six, then ten, then twenty feet below. So what? What did it matter? When he slipped, he let himself go slack, willed himself to fall even as he regained position and pulled himself upward, urged on by the shouts and yells from below.
Thirty-five feet up, he half-crawled over the crumbling lip of the clifftop. He lay on the flat, weathered, rock, desperately catching his breath. His skin cooled then peeled off like eggshell. Raw now, flesh exposed to the world, he forced himself to his feet. On rubber legs stretched ten times their size, he stood towering over the edge of the world. The blazing sun hung in the ceiling of the sky, so big he felt like he could almost touch it. Sure, why not? He could do that. He could do anything. He revolved slowly, his own mini-planetoid, billionth rock from the sun. A great emptiness, filled only by the sound of his own beating brain.
Down below, small and faceless, the crew were scarab-like, scurrying to and fro, yelling things, their distant voices indecipherable. Chris flared his nostrils and let out twin blasts of sour air that he pictured as shooting flames.
Script 13
INT. HOSPITAL — DAY
THE LOST EXPERT blinks awake. He sees Esther sitting in a chair next to his bed. She is looking at him, eyes large with concern.
THE LOST EXPERT
(surprised, clearly trying to suppress his pain)
Esther! What are you doing here?
ESTHER
(icily)
You have a visitor.
We see that JOEL MCCANN is in the room, standing near the door. Esther gets up.
ESTHER (CONT’D)
I’ll leave you two alone.
Esther leaves the room.
JOEL MCCANN
Friendly girl.
THE LOST EXPERT
She’s protective.
Joel McCann drops a newspaper on the Lost Expert’s chest.
JOEL MCCANN
This ought to cheer her up.
He taps the headline. The Lost Expert grimaces in pain.
