CHAPTER 1-1

Matt was showing his class his favorite 1944 film noir, Laura, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. He was lost in the best scene, when Laura appears to have come back from the dead.

In this scene homicide detective Mark McPherson, assigned to the shooting death of Laura Hunt in her apartment, wanders through the crime scene. He reads her diary, touches the silky underwear in her drawer, sits beneath her portrait in the living room drinking her scotch. Her face had been unrecognizable, blown away at close range with a shotgun. The more he learns about Laura Hunt, the more fascinated, obsessed he becomes. McPherson is falling in love with a dead woman.

The sound of a key in the lock. And then, standing before him, is Laura Hunt, living, breathing, wearing a trench coat and a hat with soft flaps that fall over her ears.

Laura: What are you doing here? 

McPherson: You're alive.

Laura: If you don't get out at once, I'm going to call the police.

McPherson: You are Laura Hunt, aren't you? Aren't you?

Laura: I'm going to call the police.

McPherson: I am the police.

Gene Tierney’s cool, suspicious voice. “What are you doing here?”

Matt was brought back to reality, wrenched from the tense scene by something annoying in the dark classroom. Between him and the screen with Gene Tierney’s image, little boxes of light gleamed like fireflies.

Matt flicked on the lights and caught half the class staring at their phones. The most egregious felon: a young woman attached to an iPhone by ear buds was watching a smirking Mel Gibson. One of the remakes of Lethal Weapon. As the scene turned to a red and gold explosion, Matt felt a similar eruption in his brain. He imagined throwing the iPhone to the ground and stomping on it. Or smashing it over her pink-tinted head.  

Get a grip! said Matt’s internal voice of reason. Breathe! But he only half inhaled before he let his breath out in an exasperated whoosh. The young woman looked up. Was that insolence?

Matt slammed his laptop shut and watched his gorgeous goddess Gene Tierney fade to black on the full-sized screen. 

To hell with them!

In his most disgusted tone, he spit out: “Class dismissed!”

The students filed out, some still texting.

In the front row a young man Matt didn't recognize remained sitting. With round glasses he looked like Daniel Ratcliffe, Harry Potter grown up.

He stood up and put his hand out for Matt to shake. A formal gesture for a student.

"I'm Curt, Professor McFee. I just transferred."

"Matt. First names here."

"I wonder if you have time for a cup of coffee. I'd like to get the list of films and papers so that I can catch up. And I'd like to get permission for a final paper topic."

"You already have an idea?"

"Yes, I'd like to write about Vera Caspary's place in the development of the psychological thriller. In particular her play Laura and Gene Tierney as the star of the movie version.”

Matt imagined the drawer of the desk in his office and in it his partially-written manuscript, a biography of Gene Tierney, his work of the last ten years. A biography that he hoped would stand on the shoulders of all the others, summarizing everything that was known about Gene Tierney’s life, as well as her film career. Eventually. Right now he had piles of unincorporated notes. He couldn’t keep up with the new webpages and debates about her on the Internet. And would he have to write about all the other Hollywood stars of her time that she knew? Where would it end? He did have a fat, juicy chapter on her greatest success, Laura. Well, Leave her to Heaven the following year was the one that got her an Academy Award nomination, but Laura was really her signature film, her own haughty personality caught on film. Arrogant, aloof, elegant, yes--sexy. His chapter could be so useful to Curt. Or would it? If Curt read his chapter, what would be left for him to find out? 

The publishers he sent a query to said he needed an agent and the agents said it was too big a project, publishers wanted smaller books now, and besides there was nothing new in it. It was just a summary. One stinging rejection: you really don’t bring Gene Tierney to life.

No, this manuscript was a painful reminder of academic failure and sad obsession. Better for Curt to go his own route.

“Matt?” 

“Yes, sure, Curt. Why not? Write about Laura.”

CHAPTER 1-2

Matt and Curt went out for coffee. And the next day and the next.

Matt found the new student to be polite, almost deferential. Refreshing.

Although a biology major, Curt said his real interest was film noir. He showed Matt a ragged marked-up copy of Caspary’s play. For his final project he now planned to make a short documentary about her and the making of the film Laura.

Matt felt a gauge in his brain notching up from despair. One enthusiastic student, it appeared, was enough. He found himself confessing, shyly, that indeed he wished to write a psychological thriller himself. “A noir love story. But with the twist of including something from current scientific research, a bit of sci-fi as it were. And a bit comic picaresque, too.”  He heard how crazy that sounded. A picaresque comic noir psychological sci-fi thriller?  Really? Seriously, Professor McFee, get a grip. He stopped before admitting to Curt that in his mind Gene Tierney starred in his novel made into a movie, and, not yet having decided on a male star (though comic actor Matthew Perry kept popping up), he visualized himself as her co-star. Never mind that he was quite chubby, partly bald, and yes—too old. Matthew Perry: sweet, funny straight man.

But Curt didn't laugh. He only said that his studies had to do with a cutting edge of scientific research, in particular DNA replication. But that was boring. Film noir and sci-fi novels were much more enticing. Perhaps he could help?

Matt complained that he had no time to write, what with a heavy class load, being a dissertation advisor, administrative duties and so forth.

"Have you ever considered a sabbatical?" Matt had not.

"Go to Paris, then, or Bali, or California." A pause. “God, Matt, you could go anywhere.”

Another pause. Had he let this student too much into his private life? The word “anywhere” reverberated.

"My family took a vacation last year at a spooky knock-off English inn in California. Go there. You would be near the epicenter of stem cell research in Palo Alto, the stuff of which science fiction is made. Go there, Matt. Go go go." He thumped rhythm on the table.

And that was how, as the summer began, Matt found himself driving his Prius from Pennsylvania to California where he had reservations to begin a sabbatical at the Pelican Inn, Muir Beach, California. He packed his laptop, his iPad, jeans and tee-shirts, bright yellow rain gear, and, in a whimsical moment not knowing what adventures California might offer--a tuxedo. At the last moment he threw in his draft biography of Gene Tierney.

CHAPTER 1-3

Brutal– that’s how Matt described the last five miles of the drive from Pennsylvania, which Mapquest counted as 2,572 miles, plus side trips and three days in San Francisco at the Film Noir festival. Not being a bold driver, Matt would have found the narrow, windy coast road high above the ocean a challenge in daylight. But at night during a torrential rainstorm, he feared for his life. He imagined a headline in the Muir Beach newspaper: Film Noir Professor Plunges to Death on Coast Road. He knew he was almost there when he saw the sign on the left that said “Green Gulch Zen Center.” Then he overshot the left turn, identified by a bank of mailboxes on the right, and had to drive several miles until he found a widening in the road where he dared to turn around.

The clock on his dash rolled to 9:00 as he turned into the parking lot of the Pelican Inn. Just then lightning slashed the sky followed by a boom of thunder. It is indeed a dark and stormy night, Matt thought, enjoying the cliche. And then aloud to the voice-activated recorder on the seat beside him, the machine that had kept track of all his musings, the poems he made up and the songs he sang to himself on the trip, he said, “It was a dark and stormy night when Lance arrived at the Pelican Inn.” Lance Slaughter would not be the final name for his hero but it served to hold a place in his text until Matt figured out what name to use, and of course “dark and stormy night,” the symbol for bad writing, would have to go. He could play: this was just a first draft.

Matt wanted to continue sitting in his warm car but he had called to say he would be there by nine. What if they locked the door right at nine? They wouldn’t do that. But what if they did? A torrent, a flash flood from the sky, did a rat-a-tat on the roof of the Prius. Nice, flash flood from the sky. I’ll have to capture that, Matt thought, but not now. His umbrella and raincoat were not within easy reach. He stepped out into a deep puddle, wrestled his suitcase from the back seat and sprinted for the door of the inn just as a new bombardment of water dropped from the sky.

Finally Matt was standing where he had imagined being: in the dusky interior of the Pelican Inn. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dim light. He noted the reception area to the right where a young woman dressed in black greeted him. Good: the inn felt like 19th century Europe, but the receptionist had tattoos and piercings and was wearing quantities of silver and turquoise jewelry. Behind her a brilliant blue and gray image of Stonehenge gleamed on her monitor.  He would describe this tableau later.

Water from Matt’s saturated woolen sweater ran down his legs and pooled on the floor. He knew he should go to his room (but hello--it was just water dripping on the floor--not blood!) yet he wanted to savor his first impression of the inn just a little longer. In the dining room to his right, a fire blazed in the walk-in fireplace. To his left on the wall were pictures of Prince Charles and his mum. Something in the atmosphere was asking for his attention—a sound, music softly played. It took him a moment. There was a piano. He took a few steps into the dining room and saw an upright piano with a man fingering a melody and singing, almost whispering. The man winked at him.

With a shock, Matt recognized that the fragment was from the famous theme of Laura.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIdleI2SwPc

CHAPTER 1-4

 Tapestry in Room 5

Matt checked in and took his laptop and bag to Room 5, the least expensive one, which was as he had imagined it from the inn’s website, except that the peach-colored curtains that enclosed the four-poster bed had been replaced by a darker floral tapestry design. He took a hot shower, changed into dry clothes and went down to the pub where he had two Pelican ales and a shepherd's pie. The barkeep showed him the room beyond the bar that was a lounge for guests called the Snug. In old English inns, he told Matt, the room was called the Snuggery. It had books, couches, a fireplace and WIFI.

Matt spent most of the next day in the Snug transcribing notes from the recordings he had made on the drive cross-country. Late in the afternoon he decided to check out Tennessee Valley Beach, which was back the way he had come the night before. Maybe it would rain, so Matt dressed in his yellow rain gear. The coast road was less threatening without rain, though in the light he could see what a terrifyingly steep drop it was to the ocean. He left the Prius in the parking lot and jogged the almost two miles to Tennessee Valley Beach on a narrow dirt path that led through a splendid valley. When he got to the beach, it was almost dark. The surf was crashing. A light cold rain made him glad to have his rain gear.

Matt stood still, feeling the elements, and then on impulse, he ran to the edge of the ocean, screaming happily. There was something about being a few footsteps from the Pacific Ocean, breathing the cold, moist ocean air, watching the darkness descend that made him feel like he was finally really here--eons away from the classroom that flashed in front of his eyes like an annoying memory. The wind picked up. Maybe it was negative ions, maybe just being here, being somewhere other than the rat’s maze of his daily life at home: Matt felt alive in every cell of his body. He jogged back and forth by the ocean’s edge toward the cliff on a portion of beach that sloped downward. A wave of icy coastal water rolled off the legs of his slick rain pants. He sang at top volume snippets from songs as they came into his mind: old rock things, Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone. And that was how he misjudged the surf. As the full moon dipped behind a cloud, a crashing wave grabbed him and claimed him for her own. Tumbling headfirst into the icy water, Matt learned first-hand the meaning of the word undertow. Everything turned to slow motion as the loud water closed over his head. His mind created another screaming headline: Tennessee Valley Surf Kills Film Noir Professor.

What seemed an eternity later while Matt thought about swimming with the fishes and wondered why his life was not flashing before his eyes, he found himself spit up on the coarse sand, gasping and coughing and clutching a floating box. A second headline intruded: Rescued Professor Dies of Hypothermia. Matt struggled to his feet. The moon, back on duty, glared down on his rescuer-- some sort of flotation device. Attached to it was a wooden box about two feet long, one foot wide and one foot deep. By moonlight Matt could make out block letters on the box: Property of the U.S. Government, Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

Curiosity battled with survival instinct and won: Matt unhooked the metal clasps and freed the box. Shivering, he struggled to his feet and jogged back to the parking lot, carrying the box. He panicked when his car keys were not in his pocket. Were they rattling around like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of the silent sea? What would he do?—but then a wash of gratitude (thank you thank you thank you) flooded over him when he found them in his other pocket. He put the box in his trunk and drove back to the inn with his heater on full-blast. 

Once again he found himself soaking wet in the foyer. The receptionist looked at him with concern. Charles, the Innkeeper, stood nearby with his arms folded on his chest, as he had, Matt recalled, on his first dripping entry to the Pelican the night before. He smiled at the receptionist and Charles and ran up to Room 5. He turned on the shower, peeled off his wet clothes and hopped in, waiting for steamy water to melt the ice crystals in his blood. But Matt then learned a lesson about old inns: hot water is not always available. When the spray did not progress from barely warm, he hopped back out, rubbed himself vigorously with a towel and dressed in dry clothes from his suitcase. Running back downstairs, he found a fire in the roomy walk-in fireplace in the empty dining room. Like a desert oasis to a man dying of thirst. Oh, bad metaphor, Matt's editorial mind threw in. More like Dante's inferno. Or Frost: some say the world will end by fire. He thrust his hands close to the heat, then his chest, then his backside, then back to front, tousling his wet hair. He jumped up and down, dancing wildly in sync with the flashing spears of red and gold light. A mad genius in his own house, dancing until he was warm. He stopped when he saw Charles was observing him.

He went to the Pub where he had another shepherd’s pie and two Pelican ales. After a brief debate--open the box, wait--he decided to wait until morning to see what gift the ocean had given him from Plum Island, the government, the animal disease center.

CHAPTER 1-5

The next morning Matt awoke at dawn. He dressed, went to his car, and using his penknife, slit the layers of shiny tape that waterproofed the box. Inside was a wrapped package that felt like some kind of statue. Matt cut the bubble wrap and revealed an odd statue of a chicken, wrapped in paper mache. A kind of mummified chicken. He tucked the chicken in his jacket and returned to his room.

The chicken weighed about two pounds and had intense rhinestone blue eyes, the lifelike kind that are used on dolls. He fiddled with the left eye and unscrewed it to reveal a tube. When he turned the chicken upside down and shook it, reddish brown threads of something that looked like saffron fell out. He took a glass from the bathroom and shook out some more of the threads. What was the sweet yet pungent smell? A spice? Some kind of drug? The sharp aroma reminded him of something earthy that would thrive beneath a warm pillow of green moss. He put it in a drawer in the bureau.

Matt spent the next day in the Snug writing but he couldn’t stop thinking about the saffron threads. What were they? Some bioterrorism substance that would lead to a grotesque painful death?

He returned to his room before dinner. While packing for his trip he had found a small pipe he had used for smoking marijuana on a few occasions when he was a student. He had thrown it in his suitcase.

Now he took the pipe, climbed into bed and closed the tapestry curtains of the four-poster. He put a pinch of the red substance in the pipe. On the table beside him were several candles and a box of matches. Immediately the devils of debate that inhabited his brain woke from their slumber. Do it! Do it! said one. Are you a bloody lunatic? screamed the other. An unknown substance from a government facility??? Live! Smoke! Go! said the mischievous devil.

Although the cautious voice won with no contest--he would be crazy to do this!--Matt’s fingers somehow on their own opened the match box, lit the pipe and raised it so that he could inhale a big puff of the burning golden substance. The opposition retired down a long, long hall, shuffling his feet and muttering about Plum Island being an animal disease research center. Never mind me. I’m just your voice of reason. Go face your midlife crisis on your own, Asshole. And with that he disappeared behind a heavy iron door that clanked with the cosmic reverberations of all the prison doors on earth.

Matt waited to die. Nothing happened for some time and then he noticed the weave on the tapestry. It vibrated with golds and pinks and greens and browns and pictures of lush flowers. He stroked the fabric, feeling the nubbly surface. He noticed that instead of his usual flesh-colored hand, he could see beneath his skin blood flowing rapidly in his veins.

How fast it ran! Where was it going, all that blood on a mission? He looked even more closely and saw red platelets clumped together like breath mints with rounded corners in a roll and crystalline shapes floating in the stream.

Matt felt euphoria enter his toes and work its way in tiny increments through his body to the tips of his hair to escape into the air above his head. He saw little droplets of euphoria gather in the enclosed space of the four-poster bed in Room 5 of the Pelican Inn in Muir Beach, California, Planet Earth, universes and galaxies and black holes and so forth and then he let it rain down on his face, seeping into layers of rosy pink epidermis, warm and comforting. Blissfully in charge of his destiny, Matt put the rest of the saffron that he had removed from the chicken in the plastic bag with his pipe and put the bag in the inside pocket of his coat.

On the bureau was a menu from the restaurant. He contemplated all the various flavors: liver and onions, chilled Loch Duart Salmon, plum strudel for dessert. Everything looked unbelievably delicious. His taste buds seemed to bounce up and down on his tongue. He saw himself as the hero of his own movie, with spinning reels recording his flickering image in vibrant color on a screen two stories high.

This must be a mixture of the best of all drugs--hallucinogens, narcotics, neuron-stimulators, maybe even antidepressants--each doing its best to make him feel clear and smart, connected to everything on a cellular level, connected with the universe, all his neurons firing in happy harmony, every cell of his body vibrating with perfect health.

He thought of his tuxedo. What did he expect from this trip? Why had he brought a tuxedo? Perhaps for just such an evening. With molecules of saffron flowing in his veins, he went down to the Prius, got the tuxedo, returned to his room and dressed. Then he went down to dinner, making what felt like a grand entrance.

CHAPTER 1-6

The dining room of the Pelican was lit by candles. The light from the walk-in fireplace in the corner reminded him of a volcano. Would hot lava flow across the room to his feet? The soft candle-light made the wooden furniture appear to be part of a sepia-toned photograph, but no--more intense—sepia, hand-colored with walnut ink. There were three couples in the dining room and a single woman sitting near the fireplace. The light played on her skin and hair.

His mouth was watering as he thought of a wild salmon full of vibrant energy swimming in fresh clean water, donating its life for his dinner, as he would someday give his molecules back to the universe to keep the chain of existence going.

The single woman, sitting at a table for two, wore a red velvet floor length dress the color of a pool of blood at dusk, the faint touch of her eye makeup the concentrated indigo of a thousand peacocks. She wore a delicate gold chain around her neck. The firelight danced on her shoulder-length hair curled under in a forties style. He felt her vibrant colors pinging on the cones and rods in the back of his eyeballs as her image swam though the aqueous and vitreous humors of his eyes. She had a martini glass in front of her and another across from her. He wondered who her fortunate partner would turn out to be.

Then she pointed to the chair and motioned him to sit down. Me? She nodded. The drug gave him courage. It was then he noticed that she looked very much like Gene Tierney. No— exactly like Gene Tierney. She smiled. His attention swept across the room and settled on her front teeth. They were slightly crossed, exactly as Gene Tierney's had been. Whatever part of his brain was manufacturing this fantasy, the best he had ever experienced, was really good at detail. In the background the piano player was again playing the theme from Laura and quietly singing the words. The entire tableau felt like a real movie set, or rather a set of a real movie, or even a movie being filmed as he saw himself walk toward her.

The piano player sang:

Those eyes, how familiar they seem.

She gave her very first kiss to you.

That was Laura . . . but she's only a dream.

What a drug!

He sat down in slow motion, very few frames per second.

“I ordered you a Tanqueray martini with two olives which I know you like to drink, but only when you’re formally dressed.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know many things about you.”

“Gene Tierney is my favorite actress.”

“I know.”

He wondered what he should tell her. Probably nothing. But he said:

“I found a box on the beach, or rather floating in the water. Actually the box seemed to find me since I was drowning at the time and in it was a chicken, a paper statue really, not a real chicken, and it was full of this thread-like stuff and I smoked some. And came down to dinner. And now I think you, whoever you are, look like Gene Tierney. So much like Gene Tierney that I must be making you up.”

His foolish rambling somehow seemed acceptable, his voice that of an actor from the forties.

She smiled.

“I‘m telling you all this to explain why you look so much like Gene Tierney to me that you could be Gene Tierney as she was when she made Laura, that is. Not as she was later. I mean, it’s really uncanny. “

Was he making sense?  Did it matter?

“Yes, I do look like her.”

They ordered dinner--two orders of wild salmon--from Charles who seemed to do everything at the inn. They ate and chatted. He stopped babbling and began to construct elegant sentences for her amusement. He was the most charming man. He was Errol Flynn, Cary Grant --yes, Dana Andrews.

Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews

For dessert she ordered plum strudel.  Me too, he said. But she told Charles to bring him bread pudding. No strudel tonight for my friend. Charles nodded.

“What’s your name?”

 “Matt.” 

“What’s yours?”

 “Laura.” 

Of course.