satire & pathos in geoff nicholson

from Geoff Nicolson, The Hollywood Dodo:

1
HURRY SUNDOWN

The movement is westward, racing along the swarming freeway, chasing the sun, accelerating towards the sea, in your painted wagon, in your rental car, further, west of here, west of your life, towards some old dream, some new darkness, away from the old world.

It's a race we always lose. We move too slowly. We can't outrun the gathering dusk. The sky turns carotene orange. The palm trees turn into cartoon silhouettes. You settle for the next best thing. You find somewhere to park, you briefly stand in line, buy your ticket, step inside.

You're glad you made it, but it's not quite as you imagined. You were deceived. You believed the word of mouth. The scenes you saw in the trailer had other, lesser meanings when seen in context. There was less than you expected, less of everything, fewer explosions and car chases and sex scenes. The exposition was clumsy. The dialogue was flat, the performances wooden. You got restless and thought of walking out before the end.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the light from the projector. Someone a few rows back seems to call your name, so you turn your head. You're staring into the source, but what do you see? Motes, beams, shapeless light. The images are now behind you, being thrown over your shoulder. The light's nothing till it hits the screen. And perhaps it's nothing much even then; ghosts, shades, chemical traces, digital enhancements, special effects that aren't so special.

You move through the museum, steady as a Steadicam, through the waxworks and the hall of fame. You preserve memories that may or may not be your own, memories of big names and has-beens, shooting and falling stars, the holy and the wholly corrupt. It all decays; the body, the film stock, the remembrances. In the theatre and the VIP room and the pet cemetery, the operations of nature continue: a constant fading, a simplification, the crumbling of structure.

In the cinema of your imagination you run the only movies you own. You are the lone viewer here, the only customer and one who's not easy to please. You watch the pterodactyls and the winged dragons, the mutant slime, the things from the lab, the girls in the fur bikinis. You watch the cartoons and the newsreels, the shorts and documentaries and stag films. It all passes before your eyes like a life, yours, and it all looks so old hat, so last season. Was this really the blockbuster you awaited so eagerly? Was this the hot ticket you'd have killed for?

The house lights are always dimmed, the aperture is always contracted. There's always a twist in the final reel. You settle down, kick back. You close your eyes and wait for the next movie to start.

2
DOC HOLLYWOOD

William Draper walks through the stew and babble of London's Alsatia; a place named after a war zone, the quarter for squatters, criminals, cutters of purses and throats, for whores of various hues, for fencing masters, for writers and artists (the less pecunious sort). And, above all, Alsatia is the place for mountebanks, for those who profess an arcane knowledge of physic and surgery, for charlatan alchemists, for the hawkers of astrological tracts and prophetical almanacs: a home to all manner of natural philosophers and Empericks, of seventh sons and circulators; in a word - quacks. The year is 1647.

William Draper is a student of physic at Oxford University, where he should be now, but he has come here instead, supposedly visiting his recently widowed father in Holborn. For all his belief in science and good sense, he is nevertheless drawn to the exotic, disreputable men he sees about him; the Italian physician in his gold-braided livery, the oculist from Silesia in his ink black suit, these would-be serious men of science with their capes and their bone-handled canes, their black cats and their monkey skeletons.

The air is full of smells and noise; camphor and mint, tobacco and bad eggs, a drum being beaten, a badly played flute, and then there are the voices; persuasive and arresting, crying for attention, making competing and contradictory claims, promising good health and long life, potency and fecundity. Some make comparatively modest promises of clear skin and white teeth, the revelation of mysterious yet frivolous beauty secrets. (Or perhaps beauty is not so frivolous). Others claim infallible cures for ulcers and scurvy, for dropsy and ague, for the stone and gout and distemper and plague; anything and everything that might ail a body. Others yet, speak of salvation and hint at immortality.

It might be a contest for the sweetest lies or the glibbest tongues, and sometimes the voices break into song or Latin or what sound like invented languages. But these voices are not raised in spontaneous celebration: they are here to sell. They speak only in the service of their owners' merchandise; pills and powders and potions, noble medicines, tinctures and cordials, elixirs and volatile spirits, Balsamick Essences, fumigants, cure-alls.

And young William Draper is bewitched. He can see that there is a swirl of brimstone about this place, that many of its inhabitants are fearsome and corrupt, and yet he does not fear them. He feels protected and charmed. Even though he does not trust any of these people who surround him, he can not bring himself to despise them. Somewhere in this coming together of science and art, of common sense and nonsense, of gullibility, scepticism and eternal optimism, he can imagine a possible future for himself, though the form it might take is utterly mysterious to him, and that is not why he is here in Alsatia today. He is there for what seems to him a much higher purpose.

He is on his way to a tavern, the Three Cranes, but he is not seeking admission to the tavern itself. Above a side door is suspended a painted sign showing a gigantic footprint, the sort that might be made by a monstrous, mythical thing; a griffin, a basilisk, something unheard of or unimagined or simply unspeakable; and below the image are written the words, 'The world's most disgusting bird.'

The man tending the tavern's side door, a sickly, white-bearded character of vaguely naval or perhaps piratical appearance, calls to everyone who passes, telling them that the great, hideous female fowl that can make such a terrifying footprint is to be seen in a private upper room of the tavern, if anyone has the nerve and stomach to set eyes on it, and is also willing to pay, what he assures them is the very reasonable price of admission. He also tells them they must hurry. He is a traveling man. He will soon be gone and it will be a long time before he comes this way again.

William has heard all this patter before, many times. He has become something of a regular there. He has tried to reason with this man, the bird's keeper, whose name he has discovered to be Moxon, a good Yorkshire name, saying that he is misrepresenting the poor creature. William has told Moxon that the fowl which dwells within is far more curious and wonderful, much more of a marvel than his lurid description allows. She is quite a sweet creature he insists, and Moxon has displayed an extravagant lack of attention.

William reaches into his pocket for a coin to pay the entrance fee once again, but this time he is waved inside for free. This is a new development. Until now Moxon has groaned and cursed at each of William's arrivals, and then willingly taken his money, treating him like a simpleton or dupe. Now at least he has learned tolerance or perhaps he has simply learned how to be amused by him, as if William has become part of the sideshow rather than merely a member of the audience. William hopes this bodes well for his plans.

He goes in through the doorway, then up a familiar splintered staircase to a small, low-ceilinged room. There is sawdust deep on the floor, hessian drawn across the windows, some candlelight for mysterious, theatrical effect, and at one end of the room, on a low, raised platform, there sits a rough but sturdy bamboo cage, strewn with half-eaten apples, and inside it is a creature to which William has already grown strongly, incomprehensibly, attached.

It is a bird, a great fowl indeed, though clearly rather a young one, and neither hideous nor disgusting in William's opinion, nor in fact nearly so large as Moxon has implied, in no way capable of making the huge footprint on the sign, and more than one customer has complained of dishonest aggrandizement.

The bird is about the size of a young swan, but whereas a swan is white and regal, this creature has a clumsy, ash-gray lump of a body, darkening to black along its flightless, flap-like wings. The legs are short, braided with yellowish scale. The tail consists of nothing more than a few trifling, curled grey plumes.

But it is the face - naked and without feathers - that draws and fixes William's attention. It seems to poke out timidly from under a cowl of folded skin. The beak is large and dangerous-looking, a horned, hooked thing. And then, set high and far back, are two tiny circular eyes, dim, distracted, proud yet confused.

The bird is flightless, charmless to most tastes, songless, habitually taciturn, though not quite voiceless. From time to time she emits a low, pigeon-like sound, a sort of cooing, two repeated syllables, doo-doo, which no doubt has inspired the name: the dodo.

William stares at the creature, not with the vacant curiosity of most of the visitors and gawpers who come there, but with scientific fascination and what he takes to be a superior sort of compassion. The dodo looks out of place here, out of joint, and in itself misconstructed, as though made out of the left over parts from other, more elegant birds, an abandoned piece of apprentice work from God's workshop. But William finds this very inelegance appealing too, and brave and noble in its way. He responds to something in the bird's ruffled demeanor, in its melancholy, its earthbound plight.

William has heard all Moxon's stories regarding the provenance of the bird, a set of intermeshing yarns involving shipwrecked sailors, some of them Dutch, some Portuguese, assertions of the bird's stupidity, its uselessness, the repellent taste of its flesh, its failure to find a place in the schemes of either God or man.

Even in his innocence and willingness to believe, William is unsure how much, if any, of this information is to be trusted, but he has nevertheless learned it all verbatim, understudied Moxon, and he has been known to repeat the stories to willing, or less than willing, listeners. But today he is alone, the only visitor to the upper room. This too seems propitious. Having viewed the bird again for just a few minutes, having assured himself that she is in good health, if not noticeably good spirits, he goes down the stairs, finds Moxon and takes him aside.

'Mr. Moxon,' William says, in a voice that sounds sombre and business-like, at least to his own ears, 'I should like to make you a monetary proposition. I should like to purchase your dodo.'

Moxon laughs. Why would he not? 'And how much would you be offering, sir?' he asks.

It seems to William that the bird is worth a fortune, a king's ransom. Nevertheless, modestly, a man beginning a negotiation and not wishing to reveal the true depth of his desire, he says, 'Two guineas.'

Moxon laughs again. He obviously considers his bird to be worth much more than that, as indeed does William. He had imagined he might have to go as high as five, and would have done so, but Moxon is not about to haggle.

'You are what, young man, seventeen years old?'

'Indeed,' William says, impressed by the accuracy of Moxon's guess.

'And what do you imagine you will be doing with your life?'

'I am training to become a physician,' William says, with some pride.

'Then come back, sir,' Moxon says, 'when you have made your physician's fortune. The price of the bird may have increased by then but your means will no doubt have increased moreso.'

It is a most insulting and unsatisfactory answer, not least because William has little idea how long it might take him to make his fortune, and even less idea of how long a dodo might live. He suddenly feels very green, and humiliated by the coarse mysteries of the world.

'Will you still be here?' William asks.

'Not precisely here, no,' says Moxon. 'As you can see, I am a man who makes his living by dealing in small wonders, and it is in the nature of things that that which is wondrous in a certain place may be common as muck in another. And there is nothing in the world so wondrous that it will not lose its lustre through overfamiliarity. In short, I find it pays to keep moving.'

William feels his own hopes departing with this mention of Moxon's departure.

'In the meantime,' Moxon adds, 'here's a feather to put in your cap.'

From inside the sweaty, leather folds of his jerkin Moxon produces a short, grey tail feather that had once belonged to the dodo. William hopes it moulted naturally and that Moxon has not plucked it painfully from the poor bird's rump. If it were the latter he would be most reluctant to take it, so he thinks it best not to inquire. He accepts the feather and says he will prize it always. Moxon laughs at him once more.

As William leaves the Three Cranes, achingly disappointed yet somehow undefeated, he still imagines a future in which, perhaps after the death of Moxon (something violently bloody and not without poetic justice, he envisages), the bird will become his.

And he says to himself, aloud yet barely audibly, though in the clamour of Alsatia nobody would hear even if he were to shout it at the top of his lungs, he says, 'One day I will have a bird such as this, my very own dodo, perhaps a breeding pair, perhaps many of them, a flock, a colony. I will populate an estate, a kingdom. I swear, solemnly, that I will fill the world with dodos.'