1 1967 Sudden Lake It takes hours to find, as he knew it would. Smooth highway asphalt yields to blacktop cracked into snakeskin scales by a caustic sun, which in turn yields to powder-dry dirt track. Paul Conway''s Rambler makes its dust-cloud-waked way across an ocean of scorched earth navigated by no other cars, unbroken by any truck stop, gas station, or island of habitation where he can pause to ask directions. The only other vehicle he encounters is the rusting wreck of a truck on the side of the road, forsaken, flaked, and faded, slowly being comminuted into the desert by twenty years of excoriating abandonment. Other than that, all there is, is the vast, pale, hot-as-hell desert stretching gray and white, yellow and rust, all the way to where the mountains rumble dark on the horizon. Conway remembers someone once saying there was a special beauty to the desert. But he can''t recall who said it, or even if it had been a real person or just a character in a movie. It wouldn''t be the first time he''s gotten the two universes confused.
Maybe they hadn''t even been talking about a real desert, but a set: a cinematographer''s idea of a desert. Whoever said it, Conway doesn''t see any unique beauty. For him, the desert is empty of beauty. Empty of anything. Dead space. Then again, Conway knows he doesn''t see or experience the world the way others do. He never has, and it led him to the profession he now pursues, now excels in. Part of that innate otherness means scenes from movies--whole and flawlessly recalled--play out continuously in his head, holding up confected celluloid realities against the harsh mundanity of daily life.
Now, unbidden, as he drives across the desert, the final scene of von Stroheim''s Greed is projected onto the screen of his mind. For Conway, no other scene in movie history so confuses the real and the unreal. He knows that von Stroheim, in his near-insane drive for authenticity, filmed and refilmed the scene in Death Valley in midsummer, at midday. Actors and crew returned from the months-long shoot blistered and burned; one died, many were hospitalized, almost dead from heat exhaustion; co-star Jean Hersholt began vomiting blood when his insides ruptured in the heat. But shit, thinks Conway, what a scene: the character McTeague under a blazing sun, keylessly handcuffed to the man he has just killed, the money he has schemed and murdered for lying just beyond his reach, the last of his water spilled and evaporating from his bullet-punctured canteen. Tantalus in Death Valley. Maybe that was the truth of the desert. The desert as death, as desolate judgment and arid purgatory.
Conway pushes the scene from his mind. He scans the road ahead for any landmark to indicate he''s getting closer to his goal. After several dust-fumed stops to check a map that refuses to yield to folding, he has all but given up when he finds the turnoff he''s searched for, little more than a dirt trail opening like a dry, dead mouth at the side of the road. An ancient wooden sign, long separated from its post, lies on the ground, half propped up against a rock. The sign is so sun-faded and grit-scoured that if Conway didn''t know the name he''s looking for, he wouldn''t be able to make it out. But he does know the name, and he mentally traces its faint outline on the sign. SUDDEN LAKE The desert growls and crackles beneath the Rambler''s tires as he turns up the even rougher track. He sees it almost immediately, and it is a bizarre and intimidating sight: black and jagged, like some dark malignancy growing on the bleached skin of the desert.
As he comes nearer, he gradually makes sense of it: a huge old house, tall and stark, with a jumble of mock-Victorian gables and mansard roofs stabbing the sterile pale-blue shield of sky. The house backs onto a long, wide depression, like a vast shallow crater, a mile wide and two long, paler than the desert beyond it and almost white in patches. The skeleton ribs of other buildings lie scattered around the depression''s rim as if they have died of thirst at its waterless edge. He slows as he approaches the house and sees that the wood of the roof shingles, the deep eaves and clapboard siding has been stained dark and restained darker over the years, until the house has become an impossible black silhouette in the desert, impervious to the scalpel-sharp sunlight. Christ, he thinks, it''s like a movie set. He gives a small laugh at the weird appropriateness of the thought, but at the same time it sits uneasily with him, as if he struggles to decide to which of his universes the scene should belong. He now realizes that the building is too big for a house. A hotel? Out here in the middle of nowhere? Whatever it is, nothing could look more out of place in this setting.
Outside the house itself, an old Packard of indeterminate vintage stands rusting on rotted tires; a newer Airstream trailer blade-gleams in the sun. An even newer sedan is parked in the shade of a lean-to port. She is waiting for him. As he pulls up outside, she stands at the top of the steps in the main doorway, her shoulder holding the screen door open, her face in the shadow of the dark-tanned blade of hand she uses to sun-shield her eyes. He guesses that she must have followed the cloud of dust the Rambler kicked up all the way along the half-mile access road to the house. Why, he thinks, would a woman of her age choose to live so far away from anything, with no neighbor or help for miles? Then again, he pretty much knows the answer to that. Conway steps out from the air-conditioned cocoon of the car, and the heat hits him instantly: dry and sharp and relentless. He takes a step toward her, and a dog--a huge, dark beast of a dog--emerges from doorway shadow and sniffs the air as if it has caught the odor of fresh meat.
"It''s okay," she says. She makes the slightest of hand gestures, and the dog sits. "He''s harmless." "Hello, boy," Conway says nervously as he approaches the foot of the steps. The dog sits unresponsive, looking down at him impassively. "What''s his name?" he asks. "Golly." "Golly?" "Short for Golem.
" "Oh, I see. He''s your protector." "Of sorts. I named him for an old friend." "A friend from back then?" Conway asks. "Come in." She ignores his question. Another hand gesture: the dog follows her, and both are swallowed by the black mouth of the doorway.
Conway, like the dog, follows her command. He slips his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his shirt, and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the inner gloom. When they do, a large lobby is revealed. It''s now clear that this is a hotel, or at least it has been at some long time past. There''s a pervading sense of desuetude in the lobby, but it is nonetheless scrupulously clean. He imagines it must be swept daily to remain free from the constant, importunate probing of the desert''s dusty fingers. "This is quite a place," Conway says at last. "It was built in the early Twenties," she explains dully.
She has her back to him as she leads the way across the lobby. "The big salt pan out back was Sudden Lake back then." "So there was a lake?" "For about thirty years. It was called Sudden Lake because it sprung up out there over a few months in 1910." "A lake just appeared?" he asks. Her back is still to him and she shrugs. "A river changed course after freak heavy rainfall. They say the basin was ready-made, from some prehistoric lake, waiting to be refilled.
I guess it''s waiting to be filled again in another million years." "And the hotel was built because of the lake?" She stops and turns to him. He sees her features clearly for the first time, and a thrill of recognition runs through him. There remains a faded magnificence to her. Her hair is bright white against the dark tan of her face, but he realizes that, were she to dye it, she could pass for a woman twenty years her junior. What fascinates him most is that hers is a face he knows so well--not aged, as it is now, but in bygone, camera-captured flawless youth. Looking at her now, he can see the fundaments of the beauty that had distinguished her younger self. It is, he thinks, like looking at some classical monument--like the Acropolis, or the Sphinx of Giza--where hints of the original, long-distant splendor shine through the ravages of time.
"It became quite the attraction back then," she answers his question; her tone is detached, as if discussing some distant place she''d read about, rather than the architecture around them, the home she occupies. "A New York financier moved his family out here about ''20 or ''21 and built this hotel and a whole lot of lodges around the lake. He was sure Sudden Lake was going to be the next big thing--that and the movies--so he built the hotel with a movie theater." "What happened to the lake?" "A small earthquake up north redirected the river''s course again. The lake became landlocked and started to evaporate. It got saltier and saltier, until anything living near was poisoned. The last brine pool dried up sometime during World War II. Come on, I''ve set everything up in the parlor," she says, turning once more from him and leading the way across the lobby.
"What about the financier?" Powell asks her back. "The ''29 Crash and the lake drying up bankrupted him. He went out i.