Preface to The Pelican Inn 

I’ve adapted these sample episodes from a spoof mystery tale that takes place in Northern California. The story line is partly fan fiction and includes a select cast of familiar Hollywood characters (a director, two actors, an animated third) and two scientists (one fictional, one actual), all of whom appear for the first time together in an unraveling plot on the little screen of the novel’s pages. I should add that each of these characters are fictional reincarnations of their originals. This is entirely in keeping with the 1960’s-era old guard zeitgeist of Marin County, where reincarnations are plentiful and where most of the story occurs.

The hub of the story is the actual Pelican Inn by Muir Beach, where you, dear reader, can actually drink, eat and sleep amid faux British decor on Marin time.

A short ways up the road from the Inn, you’ll find the renowned Green Gulch Ranch Zen Center, where with the monks’ permission you can meditate in and out of any time zone you choose.

These episodes feature two of the leads, Father Max (Von Sydow, aka Father Merrin) from the film, The Exorcist, and George Wheelwright, who in an earlier life co-founded Polaroid Corporation with Edward Land, and who later bought and eventually deeded the ranch in the lovely coastal valley where Green Gulch thrives today.

This is only the beginning. Enjoy. — PK

Part I: Max

Dial M 

Father Max kept replaying the wordless message on his answering machine. 

At first Max thought it was a problem with the line or an uninvited busy signal, but the thin, reedy drone seemed eerily human, not mechanical, and the intonation oddly familiar.

Father Max kept listening. A crank call? Max used to get these every now and then, especially in his heyday, and he still remembered the calls that were not cranks but real, but no one, he mused, bothered with him anymore.

Decades now in the peaceful retirement home at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Point Reyes, Father Max was disturbed only by occasional tremors deep in the earth nearby and certain of his memories and thoughts.

He used to joke to anyone and to no one in particular that he had no earthly need for a phone, except to get that one call from his Maker.

This was not that call, Father Max ruminated, but it sounded damn close to it. It was a chant, yes, but not Gregorian. Father Max listened again.

Then he got it. It was Zen. It was the Zen meditation mantra recorded with a twist. And the voice, the attenuated but familiar voice, could he believe it, was George Wheelwright's, his very old friend, much older than he was and still alive!

Max missed George and their ongoing conversations in George's room at Green Gulch. In their youth the two of them were worlds apart -- George, the secular scientist turned secular monk; Max, a man of the Jesuit cloth and collar. Both made their mark in their professions and in due time moved on into the realm of the elderly, but curiously discovered affinities together at that late stage.

Both saw evil at work in the world and witnessed the struggle for souls. Both felt the world's peril as an ongoing thing, extending beyond the realm of the living, and mulling all this over together, they discovered how two once radically different perspectives intersected.

”We are in trouble," George said over and over, and Max could only agree. Max often thought this recognition between them kept them both alive.

Max kept listening to the message.

Then he understood the sound and its meaning. He got all of it. He did not want to get all of it. Like George Wheelwright, he was too old for this, but there it was.

Father Max knew he had something to do. Years ago, when he and George last sat together, George gave him a sealed letter. 

"I hope you never need to open this envelope," George said, "but if you ever hear of my demise, I need to know that you will follow its instructions, if you can." 

Father Max put on his coat and went to his dresser and took out the envelope. He put the envelope in his coat pocket and found the keys to his car -- for which he long ago ceased to be licensed to drive.

Max paused, holding his keys in his right hand and stared into that space, neither here nor there, that freezes your gaze when your brain tells you that you’ve forgotten something. Then it came to him sluggishly out of the ether — the surgical face mask hanging by the door. Who among the retired priests left it for him the other day?

He was not sure who exactly, but the message was adamant. “If you should interact closely with anyone out there, wear this to protect yourself.” There was a new virus sweeping the land. It had a name like a Mexican beer. Max was not at all sure how a Mexican beer sprouted a killer virus; maybe it had something to do with the farm workers that poured north every year to work the fields, but without a radio or TV Max was out of touch with the news.

He reached for the mask, stared at its shape and ear coils, and put it in his pocket next to George’s unopened letter.

He listened one more time to the wordless message. There it was, the ascending chant with its clue for him. He carried its sound outside toward his car and into heavy weather.

OWW. OWWWW. OWWWWW.

George Wheelwright had dialed up OM and flipped the consonant -- for murder.

The Fault Line

The weather was still bad, and the two-lane winding road from Inverness was fogged in and slick with rain. As he drove, Father Max squinted over the wheel into the fog, trying to keep his old green Volvo in the right-hand lane. His lights were on, casting their beams into the murk for signs of the twisting faded median line and the right-hand shoulder. 

The stunning landscape of this section of Route 1 was this late afternoon a phantasmagoric blur of gnarled tree trunks, disappearing fence lines and the lower grassy slopes of rolling hills. About 50 yards to his right and below out of sight was a long cut of the San Andreas Fault, running north from Bolinas Bay into Tomales Bay.

Now and then Father Max came out this way at night along the cut, looking and listening for what he knew not exactly. But Max had proven instincts and a venerable nose for a world out of joint, and this forgotten gully along the San Andreas fault was one place his nose kept leading him.

But not today. This afternoon Max was driving past the gully toward the source of George’s coded Zen mantra and into whatever dire trouble had just befallen George.  

And as he drove, Max once again ruminated on his old conversations with George. Together they sat, mulling over many things, and felt the tremors, not merely from the fractured California geology along its San Andreas fault line, but of the combined pressures of civilization, all of it; its burgeoning industries, equally burgeoning weapons systems, endless wars, over population, vast wasting of natural resources, shaky political institutions and way too often narrow, blinkered and politicized leadership. It was a disturbed earth they shared; its climate and its foundations made perilous by human interventions.

And more.

—<>—

Despite his former profession, or perhaps because of it, Father Max was not a conventional believer, but he knew intimately that the surfaces of this world were not alike, that behind benign appearances primal forces and malignancies lurked — and at times leapt — that could not be explained away by either science or conventional religion.

Without another adequate name for it, Max saw these perverse irruptions, when they occurred, as the Devil’s work, defying the natural order of things; irruptions that lay behind the timing of natural disasters of weather and geology, of outbreaks of viral-based diseases, of cancers in human bodies, of untreatable mental illnesses and also appearing throughout history in the guise of mass persecutions and wars.

Max knew whereof he thought. These were not the symptoms of a world evolving well naturally. He was an old man, raised in Europe in the throes of two world wars and well traveled in the Mid-East and Africa. He’d witnessed more than any reasonable share of suffering, brutality, and carnage, and notably seen bodies and souls possessed. Max, you see, was not only a retired Jesuit but a known exorcist, and in this line of work was for years a marked man, a man who had hunted and been hunted by the demonic. In his own psyche he carried the scars of it.

And out there in the fog along the highway, where the Pacific plate groaned and shifted against the Continental plate, was a portal between worlds where someone with a nose for it, Father Max felt, needed to be looking and listening.

He was not alone in this feeling.

—<>—

An oncoming pair of headlights broke out of the fog and seared Max's astigmatic eyes. Max swerved away wildly from the median, then corrected himself, but he was still wobbly and out of synch with the road. If only he owned a pair of those night-vision glasses his old friend George specialized in. His reverie shifted again back to George -- George who laughed gently at Max's ruminations about things perilous.

"All true," George said, elfishly, "but oh so ponderous. The Devil is many things, but, Max, I suspect he is not ponderous."

Max knew that the Devil, that shape shifter, was anything but ponderous, but with George he was always reticent about the details. He did not want George's scientific bent of mind to see him as foolish, and also did not want to risk upsetting George further. George was a valuable ally to Max as well as a dear friend, and Max needed to keep George's amazing instincts aligned with his own.

—<>—

One moonless night Max took George into the ravine and bent his ear as they climbed down and about. George finally shushed Max and asked to sit down quietly at the bottom of the gully. A strange ghostly light that Max saw from time to time seemed again to emanate from the gully and linger by the stunted trees. George sat there cross-legged with Max for an hour with his strange night glasses on and said nothing.

Finally, Max stirred next to George. Max was troubled by an odd white pod-like thing hanging from a bush 50 feet ahead of the two men. "George," Max said, "do we need to examine that?"

"No," George said quietly, "I don't think we do."

"What is it?"

"Max," George said almost sweetly, "it is a condom."

 "Oh," Max said. His blush nearly illuminated the gully.

"Yes," George said, "it seems we are not the only ones to visit here."

"Why here?" Max said. "This place is so inhospitable."

"Well," George said, "it appears that some folks will do anything to be on the fault line when the earth moves." George cracked himself up and was bent over laughing.

Then George got up and looked at Max. He was very serious now.

"Max," he said, "it is very important that you keep coming here. This is a place where you should be looking and listening out. Never mind the condom people. I need your eyes and ears here."

And with that, George was done.
—<>—

Max kept driving urgently. The winding highway by the gully was behind him now, and ahead the road straightened out along the shore of Bolinas Bay. He was shaky at the wheel, and here below the hills there was almost zero visibility. Even so, he continued on, passing by the Stinson Beach community with its warren of beachside streets and stores and ramshackle houses and carefully negotiated the series of precipitous rising and descending turns that led finally to Shoreline Drive. He turned right and wound his way down through more switchbacks toward Green Gulch.

As he approached the entrance to the Zen community where George lived in his retirement, Max saw a single car parked outside the gate. He pulled in next to it. He got out into the weather, stepped away from his car and stopped in his tracks. He had parked next to another old green Volvo, exactly like his own.
                                               

Max Finds George

Father Max stared in disbelief at the two nearly identical green Volvos parked side by side outside the gate to Green Gulch. The one on the left was his, surely it was, because he had just stepped away from it, and its tire tracks were still fresh in the mud. Also, his car carried the long-lapsed California luxury plate, PERSIA, engraved in block letters, that he drove with for years.

The other Volvo, a rental, carried another luxury California plate from a dealership in Livermore with the letters SHADE on it.

Father Max paused, observing the two plates side by side. Something in their proximity to each other disturbed him. PERSIA was his code word for his encounter on an archeological dig in Northern Iraq with that nasty little jinn, Pazuzu, the objectification of evil embedded in an ugly ashen-green relic with a severed nose and venomous infernal eyes.

Someone on the dig found the jinn deep in a cavern, showed it to Max and carried it back to Woodstock, New York, where he was rendered promptly into a bloody pulp while watching reruns of Howard Stern.

Pazuzu went missing until all hell broke loose among a film company in Washington, D.C., that had the misfortune of carrying around the vile mega demon in a large camera case, and the rest was cinema history -- the beginning and the end, Max thought, of his terrifying pilgrimage with the demonic.

SHADE was altogether too coincidental with PERSIA. Moreover, his choice of PERSIA, was an acrostic with a counter message; if he unscrambled it, it read PRAISE.

An instinct made Father Max look again at the other plate: it rearranged itself before his eyes to read HADES.

—<>—

Max recoiled. "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrante," he muttered under his breath.  Max knew his Dante. He had been through the gates of Hell before. He wondered what had conspired to bring him here.

He wondered whether he was in another damned movie.

The gate to the center was closed. The unusual sign said "No Visitors Today".

But today was Sunday. Green Gulch was always open on Sunday for visitors.

And if the center was closed, where were the occupants of the other Volvo? 

Max tried the gate and it swung in. He felt the gate swing open slowly along his fingertips, but he did not hear it move.

Father Max lived in a world of partial silence. A combination of age and years of hearing the howls of souls trapped in other bodies or sliding into perdition, had rendered him partially deaf.  In his early dotage the comforts of subtle sounds escaped Max, but the inner chambers of his memory reverberated with echoes of harsher kinds.

To Max utter silence reigned under the eucalyptus trees. The heavy fog had cleared finally, and his head and shoulders were wet from water dripping off the leaves. He could not hear the little explosions of the drops in the leaves, or the slithering movement of tiny geckos under the carefully arranged stones. Nobody lingered in the gardens. No one moved along the paths toward the Zendo. No sound of meditations came to Max's ears. Yet Max felt not alone.

Max was not going to be deterred getting up to George's room.

He stood in George's doorway. His thin shadow fell into the room.

At the end of his shadow in the dark room was a small, blurred, very white and withered image of George, sitting rigidly cross-legged, facing out and west, as had been his custom, overlooking the Green Gulch gardens and Muir Beach beyond. George's eyes were closed shut; his hands out of sight under his robe.

Max had not seen George for how long? Five years? Ten? Longer?

George's 100th birthday was back when?

Max did hear a rumor of George’s demise in a nursing home, but as quickly he heard that George had returned to Green Gulch. Max was reassured. He did not want to think of George’s soul sliding away from their shared time together.

For Max time was a looking glass of kaleidoscopic bits that formed and reformed, shucked and jived, with Max always squinting through the narrow end, trying to navigate from what he saw in the fat end of the glass.

Max called out to George softly, but George did not respond. Max moved closer and spoke again, but George seemed so deep into his meditation that he was beyond reach. Normally, Max would not disturb George or anyone else in prayer or meditation unless there was a compelling reason to do so.

Max blushed again thinking of the only time he actually interrupted one of George's trances -- George sitting in the bottom of the gully near Inverness that was the San Andreas Fault.

"George," Max said. "It's Max. I'm terribly sorry to disturb you, but I'm sure it was you who left me a most upsetting message. I have come right away."  Nothing. George seemed to have no respiration at all.

Only when Max moved his face close to George's closed eyes did Max feel the deeper chill surrounding George. George was not only cold; George was colder than cold itself. George was emanating cold and something more. George was vibrating -- his withered frame was shaking all over with a chilling force of Zero way beneath the bone.

Max sensed what was happening to George. Max remembered.

The Exorcism

Max reached for George's wrist under his robe to take his pulse. George's hand was all rigor mortis except for the eerie vibration.

As Max pulled George's hand out of his robe, a cell phone fell out of George's hand. George had no respiration and no pulse, yet Max's hand on George's arm felt as if something was playing them both like a huge cello without sound. 

When Max reached up to touch George's eyelids, Max's hand shook terribly.

As he gently peeled one eyelid back, George's forehead erupted in smoke, and Max's hand recoiled and fell away as if shot through with dry ice. 

George's eye was blank, empty, no retina, no pupil, no viscosity, no vascularity -- nothing.

George was not himself. George was something else and that something else was also in the room. And that something else knew who Max was and was expecting him here.

Max reached inside his jacket and took out the letter from George. He found the forgotten surgical mask in his left hand with the letter. He opened the letter and read:

Dear Max, I am slightly over my head in all of this, but if you should find me not alive, you must do one thing for me and for us all. You must secure my night glasses. Use them with the utmost discretion, and you will know why I need you to keep them. I am sorry to put you in the middle of this. Be careful, Max, be very careful."  -- George.

Max looked about. The night glasses were nowhere to be found.

"So Max, you fucking Jesuit, have you found what you are looking for?"

The voice was a storm around Max's ears. It came from George, it came out of his cold unmoving lips, but it came unleashed from a place George never knew. 

It was guttural and bestial and mocking; it was the sound of eternal malevolence roaring like a brace of wounded lions caught in a snare.

Max knew what he had to do. He had done it before. His crucifix was in his right hand, and he thrust it shaking before George's face; his Bible was out and open, the pages fluttering in the roar.  Max was now making signs of the cross with the cross in front of George.

"Get out, you infidel," Max shouted back. Leave this poor dead man and return to where you came from!"

The bestial roar turned to laughter, waves of it. The voice turned soft and slithery.

"You silly priest," it cooed. "You stupid collar. Just where do you think I come from?"

"Hell," Max shouted back. "Where else would they have you?"

"Not so fast, Max dearie," the voice now crooned, a woman's voice.

It was Max's mother. Max got dangerously apoplectic. His heart was never that robust, even in his prime. He stuttered and shook. He made incoherent sounds back that could have been the envy of the nastiest jinn in the joint.

"Max, honey," George said. It was the voice of some actress Max could not identify. "Hell is so passé, so totally yesterday."

Then the voice changed. A deep smoker's catarrh, something grizzled and worldly with a trace of a Boston Brahmin accent.

"We don't need no stinking hell anymore, sweet cheeks. We have the industry."

"What the hell, you say?  I'll show you again what the hell you are!"

Max reached for his alb and his purple stole and the Bible. Max was getting down to business.

"You going to read the Bible to me again, Max, you cupcake? Is that all you can do?  The voice was southern, fey, and insouciant. "Where did that ever get you, Maxie? Remember the last time we did this silly Jesuit dance?"

Max nearly choked George with the purple stole. Then he threw the Bible aside.

"Alright, you glistening worm on my heel." Max could not believe he words coming out of his mouth.  "I am going to carve you a new ……."

"A new one?" The voice was singing now. "A newbie?"

George began to elevate. He rose into the air above Max

"Max, my dear friend..." It was George's voice now.  "Don't bother getting your old knickers in a twist. I have got a thousand assholes just for you and your kind."

And with that an enormous foul cloud descended from George over Max, who coughed and gagged and rolled about on the floor.

When Max recovered himself, George was sitting back where he always sat. His face remained still. Then he spoke again.

"Max, old buddy, you are too tired now to try this again with me, and I'm not here to take you with me. That was then, Max, this is now. Today I have something for you. Take it, Max, and go figure.

But, first, you’d better put on that ridiculous mask. Now!” Again, Max has forgotten the mask. It was wrapped around his wrist. He put it on.

‘Welcome again to my world, Maxie.” said George’s head.

And with that George's head turned slowly, grindingly, once around full circle. Then dark exhaust poured out of his lips, covering Max.

When Max's sight cleared, he saw a tiny piece of film issuing out at the edge of George's mouth. It looked for a moment like a shiny black receipt from an ATM.

"Take it, Jesuit," George said. "And let the games continue."

Max reached up and gently pulled at the film. Three inches of it came out of George's mouth. Max pulled again at the film. George vibrated.

Max now held two feet of film in his hand. More of it seemed to be coiled inside George. Max took a very deep breath and pulled hard ….

Max Reels

Father Max sat alone in his Volvo surrounded by coils of old shiny film that covered the front and back seats and curled in the air above his head. His mask was around his chin. The other Volvo was gone, and Max virtually reeled with disturbing thoughts.

What to do about what was left of George sitting there, cross-legged, looking like the ultimate case of rigor mortis in his final lotus position?  He knew George was dead and due a dignified burial and memorial, but he also knew that Death’s design on George’s clearly possessed remains could wreak immediate havoc with the living. 

Somehow the vengeful mega demon Pazuzu or the medieval syndicate that may have held his contract, or some other malign entity, had followed Max in his retirement to George at Green Gulch and continued to plot away.

Why me? Why George? Max thought, but even in his muddled state, he sensed answers.  In The Exorcist, he had tried to exorcise foul-mouthed Pazuzu from that poor whirling dervish girl spewing green bile, and his cinematic heart gave out in the process. In the movie the girl’s mother was also making a movie on evil and, like Max himself, was too close to the subject.

Blame it on the producer or director or the original author for mucking about where they shouldn't be (whatever happened to worldly glam, sex and cigarettes?), but, then again, what beyond shock value and box office revenue ultimately governed what they did?  But the infernal pot they stirred up for Hollywood at the time kept boiling away beyond the screen.

Because of his vocation in The Seventh Seal and in The Exorcist, Max felt perversely chosen to engage whatever remained in this secular world of eternal life and eternal damnation, and like Milton's God with Milton's Satan, forever doomed to be pursued by the Dark Side as long as the film industry lived and anyone remembered him.

In film parlance, Max mused, he was a marked man.

And George was marked too, Max suspected, for taking his and Edward Land's experiments with polarized light, using ido-sulphate of quinine crystals, far beyond the verified boundaries of Plank's Constant, to enable him to see far more than fish under water. With his invention George could see through almost anything and anywhere.

George's missing sunglasses, Max remembered. George was never without them and made a last request of Max to secure them, but Max was not about to ask that thing inside George anything about the glasses.

As Max sat reeling in his Volvo, he knew it was all a colossal set up. He was mute before someone else’s game of perpetual permutation. He had never really made it to retirement; he was just kept in the wings, so to speak, for the next showdown with the Devil.*

What an evil humor lay behind all this, Max thought. Poor, mostly devout Max, a true soldier in his own way for the Lord, was one, two, three times a patsy, but there was nothing he could do but leave George, or whatever he was at the moment, and get himself home to see the movie coiled about him in his Volvo.

It was his role. This he knew. And there was nothing he could do about his role until he saw the script, and he knew that moment was in the script too.

Max slowly backed out from under the eucalyptus trees and headed north, glancing furtively at his rear-view mirror.

* See a note on the screen ontology for Max at the end of Part 1.

Saturday Night Live: the Omni-Max at Point Reyes

Father Max rigged a sheet over the south window in his apartment. An old 16 mm projector sat on a card table facing the window. The sheet moved slightly against the air in the room.

The film began slowly in black and white, panning the Marin Headlands from somewhere out at sea many thousand feet up. There was no title, no opening film credits, only the camera panning slowly and the slight sound of a rooster crowing fitfully at the dawn

Then the camera panned south, revealing a glimpse of San Francisco and the Bay Area, then north again along the coastline, closing in briefly onto Tennessee Valley then up to Muir Beach and down toward the Pelican Inn.

Offshore along the coast long shadows could be seen moving over the waters. In the parking lot of the Pelican Inn several cars came and went and returned - the first actual land movements -- then everything in the film gradually speeded up.

At first Max recognized very little of what he saw except the locale. He saw a white sheet moving by itself across the dark beach in the fog, then a black car intercepting the sheet and driving off, then close ups of people he did not know engaged in slow-motion conversations in the inn and at a nearby diner, their mouths opening and closing, making guttural underwater sounds in voices that seemed dubbed in from eons past.

Then seemingly unrelated shots of what looked to be underground crypts with thin laser lights probing in the dark, then a laboratory with long counters, vials of liquids, Petri dishes with tissues changing indeterminately -- someone’s fanciful imagination of cryogenics, Max thought – and several men in black in the background wearing shades.

Then the camera lingered with the slightest hint of tinting over the face of a beautiful woman at the Inn, who looked remarkably like Gene Tierney in Laura. For a second Max’s still-astute cinematic memory unfolded like a rose. Gene, Laura, two marquee names needing no adjectives.

Then Max saw people moving in and out of various rooms in the Inn and close ups of exquisite figurines changing hands.

Then to Max’s amazement he saw tiny George sitting in his room facing west wearing his sunglasses, then a baggy shadow falling over him, a podgy hand reaching for the glasses, then Max’s own Volvo driving along Route 1 by the fault line toward Green Gulch.

Then to Max’s horror, the film showed Max himself sitting before George, as if it had been shot from behind George’s own eyes, and Max’s hand reaching out toward George for something …. 

Scherzo                         

The rest happened very quickly. In the projector the film speeded up as if by its own volition, creating a blur of events and suggestions of special effects.

Packet-switched transmissions flew from offices deep inside the beltway in Washington, D.C. through satellite stealth points in the air and underwater off the Marin coastline. Brisk arrivals took place at San Francisco International airport. Two black cars and one white stretch limo with tinted windows moved quickly in file along the curves and switchbacks of the Shoreline Road toward Muir Beach. Something horrific seemed to happen in a flash in the dining room of the Inn, and a single police car tore out of Mill Valley in the same direction as the caravan.

Around a table at Green Gulch a meeting was taking place involving several men talking heatedly and gesturing rapidly. George was in there with them, propped up at the head of the table, his lips occasionally moving. As the men’s issues came to a head, strange greenish-blue and orange aureoles shifted quirkily in the spaces above their heads, and at the edges of the film a panoply of shapes dipped in and out of the frames.

As the muffled underwater voices of the men rose, strange winged creatures with predatory heads flew along the frames; as one man stood up to speak, something like a swamp ape or yeti in the lower left hand corner turned its head back at the audience; when another man stood to counter, a brief image of a mega-mouthed shark flashed in the lower right hand corner.  The tentacles of a giant squid curled for a moment in the margins; a thunderbird dove through the air in the background. A whole crypto-zoology of imaginary and discredited creatures danced briefly at the edges of the screen.

Crescendo

Max saw the men struggling violently over something on the table. The camera, wherever it was, honed in on the table then suddenly fell away. The ceiling was spinning. A tumult of voices drowned in its own noise. Laura’s face on the big screen spun off into a void. Several exquisite figurines and one ugly nasty relic with burning eyes and a stunted nose (that Max recognized from Father Merrin’s early archeological dig in North Iraq) turned over and over in the air in slow motion with tiny George, a mummified chicken, a body-length bag of ice and a laptop. The skies outside filled with diving pelicans. 

With a snap the film stopped, spun in the projector, its trailer flapping, then dissolved in a puff of acrid smoke in front of Max’s eyes.

Max Again In His Volvo

“With a snap the film stopped, spun in the projector, its trailer flapping, then dissolved in a puff of acrid smoke in front of Max’s eyes.”

Max burst from his front door to his car, but as soon as he turned on the ignition, he became disoriented. The sound of the engine turning over blew him away somewhere, leaving what remained the driver’s seat, trying to figure out what he was doing.

So where did he think he was going and why?  After all, he had just been to Green Gulch, so what did he think he was heading back to?  A film? Of events that had not yet happened, yet had to have happened?  Max shook his head. This was hardly the first time he had become disoriented by a movie. 

There were precedents for this in his life, a lifetime’s worth. “Max, you see too many movies!” his mother, the Baroness, a schoolteacher, had so often chided him. Max was known in every movie house in Lund, where as a boy he would lose himself again and again in cinema, only to find and redefine himself.  In each of 20 Swedish films he later honed the characters he played so closely, he often felt cloned by them.

Then the dark internationally-acclaimed film, The Seventh Seal, where Max played chess with Death in film houses worldwide -- over and over for decades due to the permanence of the medium -- and where Death ever after seemed to be looking for Max, wherever Max was, to keep the match going.

But this indelible cinematic moment became the path into that other blockbuster film, The Exorcist, the Devil’s own five-star chart buster, that transformed Max the actor into Father Merrin on the big screen, and eventually brought him back as Father Max, our character here, to a late life of troubled seclusion at Point Reyes.

Cliff Notes

Max had just been to Green Gulch. Everything about his visit there seemed out of kilter and surreal – especially when 112-year-old George, sitting tiny, wafer-thin and ethereal in his wraps, started talking back to Max in tongues, and Max totally lost his bearings.  It was as if Max the priest had slipped into someone else’s movie, where Max the boy and Max the actor were assigned a role without an advance script, one they could only discover as the film perversely unwound.

By seeing the film that spun out of George’s mouth, Max would now step back into a world utterly changed -- but only after wallowing and thrashing through mounds of the film on the Volvo’s cutting-room floor, so to speak; film that seemed to coil and cling electro-statically to his soul.

There again was the phenomenon of George suddenly talking in tongues, as if possessed by voices from the one movie, The Exorcist, that, above all others, had possessed Max, and then appearing again in this other movie on the sheet before Max’s window.

Max’s Two Minds

Max was of at least two minds about what he had seen on the sheet at his window.  It was just a movie, albeit gripping and altogether too familiar, of where he had just been on the coast road and with George -- all of it confabulated with wildly improbable images and vatic ephemera, but still the kind of treatment that could skew audiences’ preconceptions in independent movie houses and then fade to black in the morning light.

But this rational reaction to this film as a kind of experimental homegrown documentary left too much unexplained and unaccounted for. How was the film taken?  Were cameras everywhere?  Had he also been filmed in his room watching the film? Was he being filmed now?  Was he dreaming all this? 

Had he, God forbid, actually died and been consigned to some director’s hellish, recursively looping program, where Max would forever dash about without moving on a screen that would never shut down in a theater nobody would ever enter?

Max recognized all this as a bout of stress-related anxiety, but at the same time, given the events of the last 24 hours, there was no reason not to believe that somebody was out to manipulate him. Under his collar, deep in his old bones Max knew that somehow he had been chosen as a live subject for another diabolical end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it film in progress, and who must watch that film to its end. What was that about?

It was perverse. Was there something in Max’s career that had stirred this up from some unspeakable place? Max had to acknowledge that a supreme level of directorial intelligence was at work here, contemplating the selections of George and himself and who knows whom else? – And diabolically mixing their lives with fictional lives into some kind of satanic brew. 

It was as if someone was systematically engineering Max’s most unwanted career move.

Max Keeps Thinking

Max’s characters lived for years between the studio and the screen; he was an actor specializing in dark and quasi-religious roles (even including the lead in The Greatest Story Ever Told) before he was a priest. Then he was a priest come out of retirement in The Exorcist, acknowledged widely at the time as the most universally terrifying movie distributed to mass audiences, then the same priest in a flashback role for its thud of a sequel, then a true working priest off screen for decades, and now a retired priest, caught up unwittingly in another disturbing film without knowing he was participating. 

Why had Max, so long in seclusion, been chosen to act again as a priest, this time involuntarily? And who in almighty hell was the director?  Who or what was behind that shadowy figure that fell over George?  And why had that demonic voice, that possessed that poor girl and tormented Max and everyone else in that blockbuster confrontation between Good and Evil, reappeared now to possess George’s tenacious spirit?

Max put his Volvo in reverse and backed away from his house and headed away from Point Reyes across the half-buried San Andreas Fault and toward the mainland.  He was heading back to Green Gulch, but he knew he badly needed to stop for a drink first. The Olema Inn in Inverness was the spot, right on his way at the junction of Route 1 and Sir Francis Drake.

Max at the Olema Inn

Max sat at the bar sipping another sherry. He was trying to dull the edges of his predicament and collect his thoughts around the warm glow the sherry gave him.  He thought he might be hungry, but a glance at the exquisitely trendy menu at the Olema with its frou-frou come-ons and specialty North Coast designer dishes put him off.

Max wanted a plate of something still howling for its parents or with wurst in its name on which he could chew and ruminate and leave to his arteries, not this pretentious fare. No, tonight he would have sherry for starters, sherry for the main course, and sherry for chasers too.

Max noticed a threesome sitting at a table overflowing with large plates and tiny portions. Two men, very different looking from each other, were attending to a striking young woman who momentarily banished Max’s menu ruminations from his mind.  Max knew that face. He knew instantly that he’d seen her in the movies when he was in his teens and on this bizarre day on his movie curtain at home, which of course made no sense at all.

The woman Max saw in her films had become famous in Europe for her beauty on screen and for the famous men in her life that were attracted to her. Long before Max himself came to Hollywood, he knew of Gene Tierney.  He had seen her debut in Tobacco Road, and China Girl, Heaven Can Wait, and The Razor’s Edge, but like most other film connoisseurs, he came to know her as Laura.

Later he had heard more about her personal life than he wanted to know, but at the moment, sitting at the bar gazing at her, Max heard one word in his head, one name: Laura.

Even Bergman cut his teeth on film noir.  It redefined classic Hollywood but with such style and dark edges and elegant direction that Europeans could only admire it. The film Laura and its title role was its apex, but film people like Max followed Gene Tierney’s career through all of her films

Imitators were possible, but this girl was something else. The physical fitness guy at her table, who looked wired into everything global, watched her too. The rumpled portly guy, who had glanced at Max looking at the table, seemed to be privately overacting something out of Jules and Jim for the benefit of his companions. The fellow was obviously smitten, and why not?  This left Max, in his transfixed state, both amused and disturbed at the local confabulation of two iconic films playing out before him.     

                     — <> —

What was going on?  Was this the actress or an impersonator or what?  Only someone such as Max, who lived in movies so deeply that he found his real world transformed by them, could ask whether this stunning young woman could actually be the actress. Max was drawn to the idea and terrified by it.

Of course, she couldn’t be Gene Tierney. Max knew how and where Gene Tierney had died after a hellish period and retirement following her hard-working rise to stardom. Yet, the young woman was certainly not an impersonator, or if she was, she was utterly brilliant at it in body language and looks.  She was flawless.

When Max overheard the young woman mention Howard Hughes, he was not only impressed, but he thought for a weird moment that she might be a clone. But this was ridiculous. Cloning humans was nearly an aborted enterprise, except for a few scientific fanatics in hideaway laboratories, who just had to follow the possibilities because they were there.  And, moreover, Max noted tersely, you can only attempt to clone genes, not a Gene, nor a personal history, nor a human memory, and this breathless creature at the table was obviously mimicking Gene Tierney’s memory for the entertainment of her companions.

So where did this leave Max?  Pretty much in his cups is where it left him with an uneasy feeling about what this iconic image from the 1940s was doing loose in this part of the world.  And just when Max began to have that chilling sensation again that cameras might be whirring somewhere around him and now involving the girl, a tall waiter with angular features, coal black hair, and insolent eyes interrupted his thoughts at the bar.

—<>— 

“Father, would you reconsider our menu?”  Max sensed a glint of recognition from the waiter and buried his gaze again into the exquisite menu.   Snot food, he thought, dribbles on plates

“Thank you, no. I was just leaving.”

“No problem at all, Father. Where are you headed, if I may ask?”

Max stares up at the waiter’s drop-dead eyes. Insolent cretin, he thinks. Max wonders whether he hears a whirring sound. But maybe the waiter is just concerned for Max’s safety after his several sherries.

“Eventually south toward Muir Woods.” Max slightly slurs his words. This was a mistake. Thinking about the girl, Max is not sure where’s he’s going at the moment, but he doesn’t want to point anyone back to his place at Point Reyes.

“Interesting.  Sir, you look like a man who would enjoy strudel.”

“And why do you think that?” Max continues to hold the waiter’s stare.

“Well, sir, you look as if you were originally from Europe.”

“True enough, young man, and, yes, I do like strudel. But why is strudel a concern of yours?”

“Oh, no reason Father, except that if you’re heading toward Muir, I can truly recommend The Pelican Inn at Muir Beach.”

“The British pub? I wasn’t aware that they served strudel.”

“Trust me, Father, they now have strudel there to die for.”

The waiter cocked an eye and presented Max his bill.

Max and Laura

Max was having his dream again, but this time all the white pieces he moved on the chessboard had the young woman’s face on them. And the black pieces moved by the long pale hand across from him had his own face on them.

Max woke up suddenly in a sweat. He looked at the ceiling and then around the room. He remembered where he was. He was in Room #2 at the Olema Inn.  

At noon he had left the bar and gotten into his car to drive south, but sitting behind the wheel he realized he was in no shape to drive anywhere.

Max went back to the front desk and took a room for the night. Lying down on the bed, he fell immediately into a half-stupefied slumber. The faces of Gene Tierney from the movie Laura and the young woman from the dining room swam in his head as he faded off ….

Two hours later Max got up groggily and shuffled down the hallway looking for a European-style WC.  Max did not notice the small bathroom adjacent to his own room.

Passing Room 5, Max heard a commotion within. It was the young woman in agitated talk with her companions.  The music from the movie Laura was playing in the room, and the young woman’s voice rose in the air above the sound of the music.

“Is Gene Tierney still alive? Am I her or am I me? Is she, am I, are we, what Joe, what? Joe, am I old, like her, like Laura? She must have died, Joe, did I die?"

Horrified, Max backed away from the door to Room #5 and retreated carefully back down the hallway to his own room. He found his bathroom, and, as he stood above the toilet, his head filled with conflicting instincts he could not name.

Max lay back down on his bed, thinking only that he had to find a way to talk alone with her, as soon as he could clear his head.  Had she been kidnapped and drugged? Should he have called the police? Was he dreaming all this?  Would he wake up back at Point Reyes?  And what if he wasn’t dreaming any of it? 

Max fell asleep again, and the chessboard swam up before his eyes.  

 —<>—

Max could not believe his luck. There she was in the morning sitting by herself in a small tree-lined garden in back of the Inn.  After two cups of incredibly welcome black coffee and -- Max had to admit it – a delicious almond tart, he had gone for a stroll to sort things out and turned a corner by the side of the Inn.

She looked up at Max and smiled, almost as if she had been expecting him.

Max approached her, his old heart racing.

“My name is Max,” he said, “and I hope I am not bothering you.”

The young woman stood up and offered her hand. Max took it gently.

“You can call me Laura,” she said, “and, yes, I‘m sure I know who you are.”

She looked directly at Max and held her gaze, then dropped it modestly.

Max felt short of breath. Her inverted gaze seemed to dance slowly at the back of his retinas.

Max took back his breath.  “How would you know me?”  He paused, then “Laura.”

“Do you want me to answer that?”  Was she coy or was she mocking him?

Max fought for more breath and said nothing. What would she say?

She blinked rapidly. Was this the first time Max had seen her blink at all?

“Of course,” she said. “We’ve never met, but let’s say I know you from your movies.”

Max was startled. He hardly recognized himself these days

She was looking at him intensely now. Her eyes were no longer blinking.

“They told me if things worked out to expect others someday….”

 Max was dumfounded. “Others?”

“Yes, others.”

“Others like…?”

“Others like us, Max. Like you and me.”

The whirring sound filled Max’s head. It felt like dread accelerating confusion.

“What others?” Max asked her. It was lame, Max thought, but it would have to do.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “I know a lot about it, but I really don’t know all of it, but, you know, like, here we are.” She grinned.

“You mean?”

“Well, how do you think we got here, Max?  “Right here. Now. Talking with each other.”

“An accident,” Max said, but he was already getting Laura’s drift.

“I really don’t think so, Max.” Then she paused. “But this is happening too soon and much too fast.”

“Are you trying to tell me that we both are leftovers from film?” Max gazed back at her.

“Or maybe we are in a film, Max,” she said playfully, “right now,” framing one of Max’s deepest premonitions.

“…with some audience watching us on the big screen, as we speak.” Laura’s eyes enlarged in front of Max’s face in mirthful horror.

“Or in the middle of somebody’s outtake,” she laughed, “about to lie together on the cutting room floor.” 

Max stood there before Laura, blushing and thinking: “This girl lives in some parallel universe to mine and has just half-invited me in.”

“How else can I explain it, Max?” she said, drawing closer.  “They don’t tell me much”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who they are, Max.” Her eyes were blinking rapidly again. “They just show up from time to time.”  Then she gazed up at Max straight on. Max’s knees began to tremble.

“Are you cellular or celluloid, Max? Do you know anymore?”

“This is silly,” Max thought. “Laura, or whomever you are, I am quite myself.”

“Max, I need to know. When was the last time you bled?  And does your hair grow?”

“Look at me, my dear,” Max said, bracing himself before her gaze. “You are quite right about the movies.  I was in the movies for a while, but that’s all. Look, I am an old man now.  Still I bleed and grow hair and grow older. Do you not see my white hair and my old chin full of nicks from shaving?”   

She paused, regarding his face. “Max, I don’t have periods, never, not a one, and someone said I’d never have to worry about cellulite, whatever that implies.” Laura smiled only slightly at her own pun.

It implies that you are in a perfect state of suspension, Max thought and then remembered George again, levitating above him.

Just then a muscular, shaven-head fellow with reflective shades and huge arms, who looked like an ex-con, sporting a weird circular green-blue tattoo on his skull, called out sharply to Laura from the arbor way.

“Where the hell have you been?” The man looked upset and moved forward toward them.

“Oops”, Laura said under her breath to Max, “I’ve been found out by my bodyguard.”

“Your what? Max whispered back, staring hard into the image of Laura and Max standing together in the fellow’s approaching sunglasses.

“I’m coming, Rondo.” Laura waved the man back.  The fellow stopped reluctantly and slowly backed away, his hands at his sides.

“Oh, he’s so predictable,” she whispered to Max. “He always uses the same variations of phrasing with me.”  “What the hell! Where the hell! How the hell!” – she mocked the fellow’s voice and briefly moved her shoulders like a gangster.

“Max, I have to go now.” She cut off Max’s protestation with a wave.

“But….” The words stuck in Max’s throat. “You don’t….”

“Yes, I do, Max.” It was a warning between them. She looked earnestly into Max’s eyes and took in his craggy features, as if trying to memorize them. 

“What’s a girl to do, Max? She shrugged again and smiled at the line, a bit wanly, Max thought. “We need to cut away for now.” She gave Max a little wave, put two fingers briefly to her lips and moved off.

She paused and looked back at Max. Her hair swirled around her face and reset itself on her shoulders. “Max,” she called out softly.

“Yes, Laura?”

“Be careful out there. Be very careful.”

Something in Max groaned at the old line. Something else in Max just groaned.

Despite himself, Max had fallen in love.

—End of Part 1—

———————————————————————

A Note on the Screen Ontology for Max

Film, often a frivolous medium, is also a powerful and an occasionally dangerous one, as was The Exorcist during its production and in its after life. But its indelible cinematography and frightening special effects at the time won critical acclaim and earned revenues way beyond expectations, while its dubiously inspired sequels and a prequel kept some audiences mesmerized and some reviewers howling in derision.

Even so, powerful cinematic moments linger on in a perpetual cultural half-life, often surpassing the events that inspire their making.  So it was with The Exorcist at the time and since. Linda Blair’s possession scenes in the movie live on with the great indelible scenes in film history as does the image of Max Von Sydow playing the doomed Father Merrin, even after nearly a hundred subsequent film roles by the actor.

It was the death of Father Merrin that creates our Father Max, even as the popular and indefatigable actor, Von Sydow, kept working on screen until his own recent death in March 2020 at age 91 after 70 years acting in movies. Max is Merrin’s spirit reincarnated in the image of the actor, an iconic image called back here by fans (who know a good thing) for an encore, for another dance with the devil in a fictional priestly retirement his film character never got to enjoy. 

Father Max knows this much of who he is: he shares Von Sydow’s first name and his features, his early life and film history, his iconic roles in The Seventh Seal and as Father Merrin in The Exorcist, and a fictionalized old flame. Max acquired all this for us, because the actor’s image in the film is what lives on; in theater-speak his role is for the ages.

Wholly against Max’s will (if he could say he had any will in these matters), Von Sydow’s movie death turned out to be Max's rebirth in perpetuity.

He is now old Max, trying again to retire from the Devil’s game. And this is another one of his dubiously inspired sequels.            

Addendum

Von Sydow is known to have a brother who allegedly died during the filming of The Exorcist. On the set Linda Blair and Ellyn Burstyn suffered serious back injuries while yanked violently around in harnesses, and their painful screams went right into the film (Burstyn’s against her wishes). After asking Reverend William O'Malley if he trusted him, and telling him Yes, director William Friedkin slapped Reverend O’Malley hard across the face before a take, to generate a deeply solemn reaction used in the film, as O’Malley’s very emotional Father Dyer read last rites to Father Karras. Friedkin also fired a gun on the set without warning to elicit shock from Jason Miller for a take, and reassured Miller falsely that pea soup would hit him in the chest rather than the face in the projectile-vomiting scene, resulting in his disgusted reaction. Lastly, Friedkin had Regan's bedroom set built inside a freezer so that the actors' breaths could be visible on camera, which required the crew to wear parkas and other cold-weather gear. (partly excerpted from Wikipedia)

—<>—

Part II: George

  (On request)