Nameless Things

Richard A. Becker

October 2005

"Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently."
–Clark Ashton Smith, "To the Daemon: An Invocation"

The orange trees lent their fragrance to the warm breeze. A car kicked up dust as it passed mine, and I drove further into the heart of Los Angeles. Up on the hills of Griffith Park, crews struggled the concrete troughs into place for the new observatory the city was building. I have always been fascinated with the stars, yet I’ve never been very good at astronomy. I have always needed someone to point out to me the shape of the swan and the dragon and the hunter in the sky.

In the backseat of my Ford, a little soapstone figure clunked now and again against the case of my portable typewriter. I was satisfied that the dead woman who had inspired my current job had had no family in the area, despite the rumor that she’d lost everything in the St. Francis flood five years ago. Hundreds had died that night in 1928 to propitiate a dark god which no Californian could name yet which it was their perceived duty to deny: the god of earthquakes, flash floods and next month’s bills. Within my limitations, I had followed every possible lead on the suicide short of visiting the scene of her death. The local paper, the Examiner, had punched up the dull little story of her suicide as ACTRESS SLAYS SELF IN OCCULT SHRINE.

I am not a private investigator, nor even a public one. I was at one time a journalist, having ducked shrapnel in the Ardennes whilst hunched over a notepad. Now I am a scribbler of garbage, pounding furiously on a portable keyboard so that other men may put their names over my words and pay me quietly to disappear in a haze of half-truth and supposition.

My employer’s name is Barker, a former military man, now a publisher of young ladies’ hygiene books and boys’ adventures and Phantastic: A Journal of the Impossible. The title, I believe, refers to the magazine’s hopes for paying subscribers. But I digress. It was on behalf of this last that I was sent to California from Chicago. Barker and his chief editor, a fellow named Mannwahring, had been sent a lead from one of their clipping services – an article about a starlet’s suicide, from a local newspaper, mere days old. The yellow journalist who’d written it for the Hearst papers had claimed the girl had killed herself for occult reasons, and Barker had never been able to believe in a vain sacrifice of any sort. He wanted to know more, and I was his tool.

On the automobile radio, a man with a strong Midwestern accent recited a bit of doggerel:

" -- the Red New Deal with a Soviet seal, endorsed by a Moscow hand
the strange result of an alien cult in a liberty loving land --"

I have never had much interest in politics, having avoided joining the boys in the union rallies back home. I tuned the radio elsewhere and listened to a half-decent soprano in a ballroom somewhere singing "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" accompanied by so-and-so’s world-famous orchestra. Having passed the great white elephant of the Memorial Coliseum, never knowing what it memorialized, I drove down Wilshire Boulevard with the plain view and aroma of the oil derricks to its north and the lumbering bovine facade of Bullock’s Department Store. I seldom intentionally take the scenic route in my travels; I am plainly frequently lost and rarely in a hurry.

Once, when I was assigned to go to Maine, I instead took a train to a pleasant rural area of New York and holed myself up with my typewriter and a few good books. I intended to simply create my work from the fabric of my imagination. I was surprised after three days to find that a man hired by Barker had found me, reported my activity to him, and had returned to tell me I would be fired if I didn’t legitimately perform my job within 24 hours. I acquiesced. It’s hard to get a job these days. There had been a report of a poltergeist, an angry and violent ghost. Most of the available story was the usual I-heard-what-someone-told-me and I-was-just-a-minute-too-late-to-actually-see-it, and I hadn’t been sure if my boss had really wanted all of that nonsense in the piece. I placed a person-to-person call, and he made his terms clear. "Yes, yes, write it all," Barker hissed. "Everything. Leave nothing out." I have not questioned the nature of my job since then, but follow every tiny crumb-trail left in a story. The crumbs, after all, are not for me.

Driving, I let my mind drift back into imagined memories of the Angelino and the Chumash, cooking jackrabbits in the chapparal, hiding from the Spanish monks and their soldiers. No one now knew what they had placed their faith in, only that it had made no difference to the universe. I believe it is Jung who theorizes that we, all of us, share an unconscious mind. Our symbols and our dreams make concrete the shared mythology of our souls, if we have souls. Our joys and our despairs move in tides, drawn up in our blood by some hidden moon and pouring out of our bodies by that same invisible whim. That old Hun Hegel had it all backwards: It is not the spirit of the age which moves the hand of mankind, but the great shared psyche which dreams the spirit of the age into being. A mirage in a desolation.

It was warm enough to sweat yet not hot enough for shirtsleeves, so I waited out the noontime in the refrigerated air of the Million Dollar Theater downtown. I had wanted to see something with Hepburn or Dietrich, but I settled for mush-mouthed Garbo rattling her costume saber in "Queen Christina." Women were still something of an enigma to me, though I appreciated Garbo’s good looks and the spotty-faced candy girl’s tightnesses of uniform like any other fellow. Edith had left me two years ago in 1931, when I was still on the dole and I couldn’t keep myself from getting a bit rough when we fought over the bills. I think that if she had met me today, with my salary of twenty dollars a week and traveling expenses, that she would never have seen my impotent sulks blossom into pointless rage. But who knows how much of the world lies submerged in what-ifs and could-have-beens? Perhaps someday I would find someone else to share my life, if that is what we do. For now, the dead starlet was woman enough for me.

She had slit her wrists in the bathtub and done the job properly, lengthwise, leaving nothing behind her but a red ring in the tub and a cheap apartment full of poor furnishings and odd personal effects. No family, no real friends, no future unfinished. A Jane Doe grave in a nothing-personal site and four column inches to draw the attention of an old military officer in Chicago and his stooge who proofread "Why Missy Can’t Swim Today" and ordered me to learn all that I could as if I were the Flying Squad and Eliot Ness rolled into one. Learning all that I could about the girl had taken half a day so far, and would likely take another half more to finish. And that would be that.

I took my early dinner under the striped awning at the farmhouse-like Cafe Trocadero in Hollywood, ignoring the imminent arrival of Phil Ohman’s musical interlude. The newspapers were full of Roosevelt and the economy and the League of Nations, column after column of restlessness and broken banks and men with guns and solutions. According to Barker, Chancellor Hitler and his cabinet are members of a German society called the Thule Brotherhood. Amidst their cabalistic proceedings of runes and old gods they had found "strength through joy" and the wherewithal to rebuild their country. Perhaps that was so, but Americans have no Iron Dream to unite them, demanding instead a mutable mirage that can be all things to all people. Each of us seeks their own way to re-ascend the heights from which we leapt in 1929.

People still wished for drink to ease the pain of the fall. I had never been much of a drinker besides a bit of wine and the odd beer or two, so Prohibition had meant little to me. There was talk among the men at the Trocadero about the assembly-line jobs that might still be had at the new Chrysler plant in Maywood, and among the women about the extras needed on the new Clark Gable picture. I, too, kept my mind on my business at hand. They had not had a ribbon for my Smith-Corona at the Sunfax Super Mart or among the ivy-covered columns of the Colonial Drive-In, and so I drove into Westwood Village and amongst the palm trees found the Mecca of all things useful, the Sears-Roebuck outlet. I made my purchase just moments before closing time, and was ready to continue my quest.

The dead starlet had lived in an older hotel on Franklin Avenue. The next-door neighbor was a Negro and his wife, and they had directed me to the landlady down the hall. She had let me into the apartment with her passkey and a few dollars of Barker’s money had convinced her to show me the dead girl’s belongings. There was no family, or if there was, no one knew who they were or where they were. They could as easily be in Oshkosh as Okeefenokee, as far as the landlady was concerned. SUICIDE PACT WITH THE LORD OF DARKNESS, I had visualized. STARLET BLEEDS SCARLET IN BIZARRE LOVE-NEST FOR THE EVIL ONE.

What I had found had been very odd indeed. There had been no images of Satan, no inverted crosses, no pentagrams, nothing of that sort at all. Not even a dime-store edition of that old English pederast Crowley. Instead, I had found bolts of yellow and salmon-colored silk strewn everywhere, cheap incense in cheaper Chinatown pots, a dusty old bottle of absinthe half-drunk, piles of cheaply printed poetry in little pocket editions and a small soapstone figurine. It was the poetry and the figurine, and the letters dispersed haphazardly among the poems, which I knew Barker would have an interest in. Identified variously as CAS, Klarkash-Ton or Clark Ashton Smith, the author of most of the poems had corresponded a bit with the dead girl. I haggled with the landlady, settling on a low price to take the things I needed for my work. I picked up the sheaf of poetry and correspondence, stuffing them into a box with the little statue, and left.

I returned to my hotel room and pored over the stuff I had acquired. The statuette was crude and grotesque, a squat little idol of something called Tsathoggua which partook equally of the characters of bat, sloth and toad and smiled contentedly with a jack-o-lantern mouth and heavy-lidded eyes over its bloated belly. A real charmer, the statuette was identified as some sort of god that I’d never heard about in Bulfinch and was hand-carved by the poet Smith. The poet’s literary work was a bit more advanced than his solid artwork, though hardly perfect.

I read his poetry. It was hardly the fashionable blank verse of the literati, relying heavily instead on meter and rhyme and two-dollar words. But it had strong imagery, and a perverse insistence on uncertain sexual and mental deviance lurking in its shadows. It spoke of opium visions, languid nights of dreaming decadence, and nameless things. The girl had found it fascinating, apparently, her dog-eared little booklets of the verse being scribbled over with many footnotes and underlining and !!!s. She had taken an especial shine to the hints of Sapphic idylls in the poems, probably cribbed by the author from earlier Frenchmen, and occasionally penciled in the name "Nadine" near those passages. There were a handful of letters between the starlet and the poet as well. She had many questions for him about his inspirations, the source of his occult learning (all invented, he said) and her own interests in Theosophy and orientalia. Polite responses were given, all posted from a little Northern California town called Auburn.

Much had become clear. Young girl comes to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actress, graduates from the harmless fluff of astrology to the costlier silliness of occultism, and comes to a fascination with another young girl. It’s unrequited, she despairs, and she kills herself. This was one possible answer, one conclusion I could obtain from the facts. From another perspective... from another perspective, she had found answers in Smith’s cosmic poetry that made the whole of life something of an afterthought. I read and re-read the verses, seeing nothing there but purple words and faux erudition and the nagging feeling that something inside me had gone missing for a very long time.

In any event, I mused, Barker would not be satisfied with the Sapphic suicide theory. Phantastic was not a detective magazine.

Through the window of my room, the beacon atop City Hall glimmered faintly in the night and I could hear the Fuller Brush salesman down the hall huffing as he got the most for his money from a Mexican girl he had hired downtown. It’s said that in his dying years, the tycoon J. Pierpont Morgan desperately sought the occult secrets of the Ancient Egyptians. His passion for their mysterious wisdom animated his flaccid, decaying body when nothing else might. Perhaps there is something of that urgency in all of us.

I read and re-read the poetry and the letters, wrestling with their hothouse images and sardonic manner. Who would live and die for this pulpy stuff? Was there anything more to this than it seemed?

I only knew that the starlet’s death scene had sparked a wish in me to know more. Not merely facts, but the reasons for the facts. Inside, I knew that she had put the razor to her veins because... because that is what people do when there is nothing else to do. For the same unnamable reason that a man slaps his wife when he has no bread for the table, or he becomes a 'typer' of gibberish for others. But perhaps obscure Tsathoggua, toad and sloth and god at once, was nearer the truth than I was.

Tsathoggua smiled sleepily, wreathed in the votive smoke of my cigarette.

The next morning, the sweet fragrance of wild sage drifted on the wind as I drove across the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena. Dozens had chosen the beautiful span as their jumping-off point to die in the Arroyo Seco; the barbed wire along its sides unspooled past me as I headed for the train station. I boarded the northbound Southern Pacific and watched the suicide bridge disappear behind me in the distance.

"Defeat has been unconsciously the quest of all religions, all philosophies, and all sciences."
– Charles Fort, "Lo"

Barker had already wired me sufficient funds in Los Angeles for all that I might need. Once in Northern California, I found that my rental options for an automobile had been somewhat reduced, for instead of Hollywood I was in the land of ranchers and politicos. My cash deposit won me the right to drive an aging Packard along the bad roads north and east of Sacramento into Smith country. Chugging up the Sacramento Valley, I found the county seat of Auburn and its several hundred inhabitants.

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