Chapter 1112: All the Way Awake
June 1997
"—first African-American superhero picture, first splatter picture to be one, first kung-fu picture to be one. Forty million, two weeks out from a ninety-million-dollar comedy. And it's good, man. I'll say it on this channel with my name under it!"
"Director Lee, you're aware Will Smith's Men in Black opens on the second of July."
Spike Lee knew the picture's grosses to the dollar and didn't need a card for them. "Yeah, I'm aware. I can read a calendar, man."
Spike had made Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, and he sat courtside at the Knicks and said whatever he thought about Hollywood to anybody with a microphone. When he liked a Black picture out loud, people listened, because he usually didn't.
"Same demographic. Twice the effects budget. Does Will Smith take him apart next week?"
"I don't like the Men in Black story. It's the same old Black guy cracking jokes next to the white guy. I've seen it. I'm tired of it."
The host had the question printed on a card in front of him, and another one under it that he wasn't going to need. "So that's a no?"
Spike said it to the camera, not to the host. He'd been doing this long enough to know where to look. "That's a vote for Blade."
"Quincy?"
Quincy Jones, in the other chair, put a thumb up at the camera. Quincy hadn't said Alex's name out loud since Christmas, when he'd chased Rashida through the house at Highland Park and ended the night in a cardiac ward. But he knew a number when he saw one.
"There you have it, folks. Two votes for a man in a wheelchair. Now, Universal insiders tell us the German rollout has gone to three hundred screens, which raises the question of whether APLUS's people are spending the second week before they've—"
Alex turned it off.
Friday, before any of that, they'd driven him to a single-screen art house on the North Side, which Universal had rented for the night because the star of the picture couldn't fly.
That left only the leading lady, Halle, at the satellite end here with him. They met behind the big screen. Halle, in the short-haired scientist's costume from the film, came at him hard and burst into tears on him.
"All right, all right, don't— don't squeeze my arms so tight, my body can't— don't be like this— ow!"
Her arms didn't come off his neck, and the costume department had begged her that morning not to crease the collar.
"Shut up. Shut up, you're alive, let me squeeze," she said.
Two weeks of rehab were enough to get his hand up onto Halle's back, and he patted it gently to calm her down, and didn't stop her when she bit his ear. Not hard. Hard enough.
"Devil! Bah!"
Halle's face changed all at once and she slapped his shoulder with the flat of her hand. "Awake two weeks and you don't answer one phone call, you jerk?!"
"I'm very busy and I don't have the strength."
She'd worn him out already. He smiled thinly.
"You're going on like that? You look like Ray Charles right now." Halle wiped the corners of her eyes with her wrist and dished it right back.
A June day in Chicago, and Alex was wrapped in a damn trench coat with a blanket on his knees. "Do I? Really?" He pushed the sunglasses Halle had knocked crooked back up his nose.
Ray Charles. Come to think of it, the outfit wasn't far off. There was nothing he could do about it — his eyes still couldn't take flashbulbs.
"Sloane called you back," he said.
"Sloane said Friday, the house, dinner like she was booking me a dentist." Halle looked at the trench coat, the sunglasses, the blanket. "It's June, honey. Why the blanket?"
The blanket had been Sloane's idea and the trench coat had been his, and neither of them had said why out loud. "It's for the camera."
"Mm-hm. Poor sick baby in a blanket. You're working it."
"I want the box office, Halle. Men in Black opens in two weeks. Every sad face I make tonight is another screen in Kansas City."
"You're a terrible person." She kissed his forehead. "Make the face."
"Mr. APLUS, Ms. Berry, we're about to start." A Universal publicist put her head round the flat. "Ninety seconds."
The satellite crew had given Muffler a camera, because they needed a man on the Chicago end who wouldn't drop it. He stepped in beside Alex's chair, put the eyepiece to his face.
The screen came up. Los Angeles: a red carpet on Westwood Boulevard, a crowd behind ropes, the cast standing under a television screen the size of a truck.
Charlize, too tall for anybody's frame, one hand on her hip. Traci Lords beside her. Arly and Taraji in front.
"Charlize, when does your devil's-advocate picture—"
"October! You all have to come—"
Every lens on the carpet swung off her at once. The screen behind them had lit up with a man in sunglasses in a wheelchair, and on the Chicago end the fans in the little auditorium let out a noise that came up through the floor.
"Hey, APLUS!" Snyder said into the microphone.
There was a lag on the satellite. Alex let it run a second longer than it really was, turned his head like a staffer had asked him something, and then caught up. Muffler, behind the eyepiece, watched him do it.
"Hey, Zack."
The carpet screamed. "You're looking good, man!"
He let his voice go soft, and Halle's hand tightened on his shoulder where the camera couldn't see it. "Yeah. Yes. It's a bit— I get tired pretty easy."
On the Chicago end the auditorium had gone quiet enough to hear the projector cooling behind the screen.
"Anything you want to say to the fans?"
"Thank you for— thank you for caring about me while I was lying in that bed. I know you did. I love you."
He got a hand up. It shook. He let it drop.
"Wow. So this is what a superstar is?" Charlize said on the carpet, to nobody, watching women in the crowd come apart.
"Liar," Traci Lords said under her breath, and the microphone caught it.
"Do you remember—"
"Of course I remember. All those months, Zack. Tim. Kris. I miss it. We all wanted to give the audience a real picture, and we—"
He went down the cast by name, slower and quieter as he went, until Halle sniffed, put on a strained smile and said, "Okay. Let's stop there," and the feed cut.
Taraji P. Henson stood two feet to Charlize's left in a well-cut black dress. She played Blade's mother and had nine minutes in the picture, and it was the first red carpet of her life.
At the party afterward a Universal publicist asked her how she knew APLUS. "I ran his life for six years," Taraji said. "Now I play his mother. Don't write that down." Then she went to find the car.
Muffler lowered the camera and looked at Alex.
"What? Say it, man, you're making a face."
"The hand. Too fast."
He'd rehearsed the hand in a mirror in the rehab room with Deneen watching and rolling her eyes. "I did mean to. That's all the hand does on its own."
"Hold it longer. Let it shake."
"Since when are you a director?"
"Since February." Muffler put the eyepiece back up. "Channel Seven. Taped it."
Inside, the auditorium stood up for him. He raised the shaking hand again and they wheeled him down front. Halle came back from the interviews, sat down beside him in the dark, took his hand under the armrest and kept her eyes on the screen for the first hour.
The Universal logo. KM Films. A+ Film Studio. Marvel's panels cut against close-ups. Then himself on the screen, and the room cheering.
[Scene: Blade — the blood-rave opening]
Then the plot did what it did.
[scene: Blade — the scientist gives Blade her blood]
The room went up.
Halle went still. They'd shot that scene the autumn before, months before anybody shot him: Blade left for dead, and a woman's blood bringing him back. Now half the room was crying at it, and they weren't crying about the picture. Halle looked at him, leaned over and said into his good ear, very quietly, "They think it's you up there."
"My blood," said the man on the screen, and Alex said it with him, at the same moment, in the same voice, "still runs cold."
Halle put her forehead down on his shoulder and shook, without a sound, through the whole last reel.
Tony carried him down the guest-room hallway past midnight, set him on the edge of the bed and went back down. Halle shut the door.
She didn't get on the bed. She sat on the dressing-table stool in one of Tony's T-shirts with her knees together and her hands flat on them. "I need to talk to you about Toni Braxton, and you're not going to like it."
"If this is about her being in love with me—"
"God, your ego. She's been in the hotel next to Amy's people for two weeks and she cries all day long. Amy thinks she's crying over you. She's crying over Netscape."
"Netscape? What's Toni Braxton doing in Netscape?"
"That's the part you won't like. Last year, at the Ivy, you were on the phone talking about Netscape going up. I was sitting right there with my salad. And I told her about it at lunch the next week. As a favor, because she had the biggest record in the country and LaFace was paying her pennies on it, and I wanted to give her something." Halle's mouth had gone flat. "She told her manager. And he put everything she had into it. On margin."
He got his arm across the blanket to the lamp switch and left it there without using it. "At what price?"
"Eighty-something. All at once, one account, against everything she owned. About two and a half million dollars, every cent she'd saved off two platinum albums. Then the stock went down, they called the margin, and he sold the whole lot at forty. She's got nothing, she still owes the broker, and Babyface's people are just sitting there waiting to offer her an advance on her next record on worse terms."
Buying on margin meant buying stock with money borrowed from the broker, with the stock itself as the security. When the price fell far enough, the broker made a margin call: put up more cash that day or he sold you out at whatever the market paid.
"And she thinks it's your fault."
"It is my fault. So fix it."
Halle had worked the whole thing out in the car from the airport and had it all in order. "Pay off what she owes the broker. Lend her enough to live on, and put somebody in charge of her money who isn't her manager's cousin. One call from you and it's done before Friday."
"I could. Two and a half million, plus what she owes, call it three. I've got it in the account. And the same man would still be running her money, and she'd still be signed to a deal that pays her nothing. I'd just be paying off her manager's mistakes."
"So you're just going to let her go under."
"I'll pay for a lawyer. A real one, a bankruptcy lawyer, not her manager's cousin. Tell her not to sign anything of Babyface's until she's sat down with him. Anything he tells her to do after that, she does."
Halle stared at him. "Wow. That," she said slowly, "is a scumbag making up an excuse for himself."
He didn't try to soften it, and he didn't look away from her. "Call it what you want. I'm not paying three million dollars to her manager's broker so her manager can do it again next year. Once she's out from under him and LaFace, she calls me herself, and then we'll talk about real money."
"You're not even going to pretend to feel bad?"
"I feel bad. I also can read a contract." He got his breath. "The lawyer's name goes to her tomorrow. Sloane'll call her."
Halle kept her mouth flat all the way through. Then she got up off the stool, pulled Tony's T-shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor. "You are a cold, cold man," she said. "Move over."
[XXX scene: Alex and Halle — the guest room after the Chicago premiere]
Aunt Susie put the grits down on the iron table by the pool. "Tony went and saw that other one Saturday. The Batman. Says he went to count the house, hmph."
"And?"
"And he says that suit's got nipples on it, and he wants his seven dollars back from you personally! Hahaha!"
Warner's Batman & Robin, the one with George Clooney, had opened the same weekend a couple of million behind it, with terrible reviews.
Aunt Susie had the Star folded under the grits bowl, open to a page she'd already read twice. "And look here. Elvis's girl is back in the paper."
Lisa Marie Presley had inherited her father's whole estate under his will in 1993. Since her divorce from Michael Jackson she'd been complaining in one paper after another that the money wasn't enough to live on, and claiming that Barry Siegel, the Memphis lawyer who ran the trust company, had stolen a great deal of it from her. Siegel hadn't been friendly about it. According to the Star, he'd turned around and blamed her instead: reckless spending, drugs, drinking, mental instability. Put the money in her hands, his side said, and it'd be gone in a few years, and then what?
"Says here he calls her unstable. In the newspaper. His own client!" Aunt Susie tapped the photograph, the girl in sunglasses on some courthouse steps. "And she calls him a thief. Ha! If a lawyer ever talked about me like that in the paper I'd go down to Memphis and snatch him bald. You hear me? Bald!"
"I hear you, Susie. The whole block hears you."
"And her ex went and married the nurse." Aunt Susie turned the page. "Says here that's a business arrangement too. Hmph. Everything's a business arrangement with those people."
Alex didn't need the Star to guess which way the Memphis fight was leaning. Siegel was a big man down there. He gave to politicians, he put people to work, he had money in Graceland and in every business that had grown up around it, and public opinion leaned his way. Whatever the truth was, he wouldn't have bet on Lisa Marie getting the trust company back. And if Alex had stayed under, he knew exactly who would've been telling the papers that the heir couldn't be trusted with his own money. McGill and Hamlin had already started.
"Now eat your grits before I come back out here and feed 'em to you with a shovel, boy!" Aunt Susie said, and took the Star inside for Tony.
Jim Clark called at eight-fifteen Monday morning, and Alex took it on the pool deck with a blanket and the bowl.
"Is that you? APLUS."
"Who else would it be, Jim?"
"Don't play dumb with me, I'm not in the mood. I've got a guy at Northern Trust."
Alex put the spoon down on the edge of the bowl. "Oh? Have you."
"He says the day you left that hospital, on a stretcher, you told your bank not to sell one share of Netscape. Not one, not at any price."
The deck was wet, the filter was going, and a man in Silicon Valley was breathing into a telephone. "That's right."
"Why?"
Alex ate a spoonful of grits.
"You own two percent of my company. That's sixty million dollars of stock at today's price. Your lock-up comes off next month, and every institution on the Street is counting the days until your block prints so they can short into it."
"Then they can wait."
"Barksdale's been on the phone to me since six this morning!"
"Barksdale runs the company, Jim. If he thinks the stock's finished, he can sell his own."
"He knows Microsoft gives the browser away free with the operating system and we charge for ours. He knows the stock's less than half what it was at the top, and he knows what this quarter looks like. It's not a quarter you buy." A breath. "Nobody's holding us, APLUS. Our own people are selling."
"I'm holding you."
He knew exactly how this company ended. Valley of the Boom had shown him every hour of it, Barksdale and Clark and Andreessen and the browser war, all the way down to AOL's check. But he couldn't tell Jim Clark that on a pool deck with a mouthful of grits.
"Then either your head's not right or you've gone sentimental on me, and I've never known you to be either one."
"Jim. I've got six bullet holes in me and five months I can't account for. Don't sell my block, and don't call Barksdale back tonight."
Another silence. Then, half off the mouthpiece, to somebody in the room: "That kid is all the way awake."
The line went dead. Alex picked the spoon back up. The grits had gone cold. He ate them anyway.
Sloane brought the phone out with the other line already blinking. "Beverly Hills. The Peninsula. She's been on hold since the Netscape call started, and she says she can hear you eating."
"I can hear you eating," Amy said.
Sloane went back inside and shut the door on the two of them.
"Yeah, I'm eating."
"Halle's there? Hayden says Halle went home with you on Friday. In the car. With a bag!"
"She's in the picture, Amy. It was the premiere."
"The premiere was Friday. It's Monday! Is she still in the picture on Monday?"
"She's in the guest room."
A squeak on the line.
"I have been in this hotel for almost three weeks," Amy said, with enormous control. "I watched you get off a plane. I watched you cry in Japan!"
"Amy—"
"I watched Halle Berry bite you on a satellite feed. In slow motion, on Entertainment Tonight! And then Sloane calls me up to say August the twenty-second like she's booking me a root canal. Hmph!"
Nearly three weeks in a hotel in Beverly Hills had produced a closet full of dresses, a hairdresser on call and no appointment at all. "You get the twenty-second."
"Why the twenty-second? What's so special about the twenty-second? Is Halle busy on the twenty-second?"
"Because I want to be standing up when you walk in, and I can't right now, and I'm not doing it in front of you on my ass. Okay? Vanity. Happy?"
She'd seen the wire photographs of the stretcher and the ambulance and the four vans. "You want to stand up? Really? For me?"
"On a cane. Badly. I'll probably fall on you."
"Hmph. Halle got the wheelchair."
"Halle got carried down a hallway. You get me walking down the stairs."
A long breath in Beverly Hills. "Fine," Amy Adams said. "The twenty-second. What time?"
He worked out the hallway and the stairs and the cane in his head before he answered her. "Come in the morning."
"I'm bringing a dress you're going to hate."
"Bring it," he said, and she hung up laughing.
Sloane came back out and took the phone. "The twenty-second's a Friday. Halle's in the guest room, Amy gets a Friday, and I get the magazines and Barry Diller at eight in the morning. Diller's going to offer me forty cents on the dollar and tell me it's a favor."
"Get sixty."
"Hh! I'll get fifty-five and you'll say thank you." She flicked his ear, not gently, and went off to hear an offer for the magazines.
Three in the morning, Tuesday. The guest-room hallway.
Halle was asleep. He got himself into the chair, out the door, and twenty feet down the corridor on his own arms before the arms quit.
They didn't hurt. They just quit. He sat in the dark hall with his hands in his lap, the guest room's door open behind him and the rehab room's door forty feet in front.
The house made its night noises. The filter pump. Sansa, once, far off, then Sherilyn's voice, then nothing.
A little after three a door opened at the far end. Sloane came through it from the war room over the garage, folder under her arm, hair down, on her way to the coffee machine and a car and an eight o'clock in the Loop about a magazine group.
She came down the hall at her working pace and stopped dead. The man in the wheelchair was stuck in the middle of it, outside Halle's open door, in a T-shirt, at three in the morning.
"What are you doing out here? Are you running away from her? Did she wear you out?" She put the folder on the floor, came round behind the chair and put her hands on his shoulders. They were cold. "Your arms gave out, didn't they. Idiot."
"I wanted to see if I could get to the rehab room by myself."
"At three in the morning. In your underwear. With Halle Berry snoring in there." She was laughing at him, quietly, so she wouldn't wake anybody. "You want me to push you back to her or to the gym?"
"The gym."
"Good answer." She pushed him the forty feet, got him onto the mat with her arms under his, and knelt there getting her breath with her forehead against his temple for a second. "You scare me when you do this stuff, you know that? Next time you want to go for a drive at three in the morning, you call me. I'm up anyway."
"You're always up."
"Somebody has to run your life while you're bus