Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/18

 reality out here. I gaped at a cordon of men who groped with canes against the searing sunlight as I passed the Braille Institute of America. I blinked while the weird figure in the Space Patrol helmet whizzed past on his police motorcycle. After the bus turned onto Sunset I noted the headquarters of the National Judo Association—and tried to picture what went on inside, with little success. No more than I obtained as I attempted to visualize how the TV dreams were being made in the studios at Sunset and Cahuenga.

If anything, that bus-ride was a continuation of flight and fugue. Why, I wondered, had they bothered to build a Disneyland out here, when every street-corner offered its own vista of escape? I turned my head to the left and saw Schwab’s Pharmacy; turned it to the right and saw a Chinese pagoda towering high on the hillside; stared straight ahead at the palms of the Garden of Allah. And here was a midget roaring by, all alone in the enclosed immensity of an outsize imperial. Following him came Irish McCalla—Sheena of the Jungle, one of the tallest women in show business—crouched over the wheel of her tiny copper-colored Volkswagon.

And now I climbed to the west, along the gaudy improbabilities of restaurant row—that Japanese place, and Ciro’s, and the Mocambo and Scandia—all utterly unreal here in the sunlight because they were asleep, their painted faces and neon eyes closed against the glare of the day. Like vampires, they came alive only after dark, and maybe that’s the secret; maybe these Strip restaurants are vampires. Or run for the benefit of vampires who venture forth only at night and who know the password and enter to drink blood from the crimson concealment of crystal goblets. And that would lend a certain sinister significance to the name of the street itself—Sunset Boulevard. Could there be any more appropriate designation for a thoroughfare peopled by the Undead?

I thought of some of the waxy, pallid faces I’d glimpsed in the night along this route; thought of the feral, feverish eyes, the too-bright, too-crimson lips pulled back from the white and gleaming teeth; thought of this army awaiting sunset on Sunset; awaiting it in crypts concealed beneath the big 18