night before the shoot, Julian dreamed of Big Ben again. He stood, looking up at the Great Clock, trying to see the time. He turned his head to see if he was alone in the street. But no, a crowd of people, familiar and strange, had gathered around him. The armless man, the fingerless man, tall men and dwarfs, prostitutes, thieves, men with Bibles and manuscripts, in suits and bandages, albinos and giants, they all stood, and, like him, everyone was looking up at the Tower. The bell kept tolling. He heard someone say, start over, Swedish. He wasn’t Swedish. Why did he think that was meant for him? The bell stopped tolling. They stood in the silence. No one spoke. Then it began again. This time Julian counted.
The bell tolled 49 times.
When Julian woke up, around four in the morning, he couldn’t get back to sleep. He began the day with a feeling of dread so heavy he could barely get out of bed. He tried to chalk it up to exhaustion, wishing he could take four sleeping pills and pass out until the day was over.
But it wasn’t exhaustion. When Mia woke up, she looked pale. She wasn’t her bubbly self. She was dragging and running late. She added cream and sugar to his normally black coffee. She called to him from the bedroom. “Jules,” she said, “how much time do I have?”
He stood in the door. “What did you say?” He spoke in a shaken voice. Why did he remember her saying that to him?
“How much time do I have? When is the absolute last second we can leave so I’m not late?”
Why did so many things with her—things they said, they felt, they did, they looked at—fill him with such a relentless sense of déjà vu?
His anxiety would not abate. He drove them to Warner’s, braking for every yellow light. When another driver cut him off, Julian actually jumped out of the car and started screaming at the guy. “Hey, buddy, what the hell is your problem? Watch where you’re going! You nearly crashed into us!”
Inside the car, Mia was staring at him. “Is the bloom off the rose?” she said. “Was that the real you you’ve been hiding? Or is there something else going on?”
Julian wouldn’t answer her. Both options condemned him. Either he was a jerk, or there was something else going on.
He was glad he was on set with her today, because, boy, did she need to be watched over. As she got out of the car, her silk scarf got caught in the door. “Just like Isadora Duncan,” she said as a joke, but it wasn’t funny. She tripped going up the stairs to her trailer and hit her shin on the metal step. As she was walking across the soundstage, she didn’t see a thick wire coiled in her way. She would’ve fallen had Julian not caught her. She took a sip of coffee, scalded her tongue, and dropped the cup, spilling it over her wrist and hand. She got a small burn. A corner of a desk ripped her stockings and left a bruise. With mounting unease, Julian watched it all.
Just when things couldn’t get any worse, the AD sent Julian home. They couldn’t shoot today after all, despite the promises. The weather was terrible. Miserable windy gray clouds swirled overhead. There were even a few drops of rain. In Los Angeles. No one knew what to do. If there was one thing you could count on in L.A., it was clear skies. It’s why the film industry moved out west in the first place instead of to a rain hub like Florida. Yet today, when they needed full sun to shoot, there was this.
As they said goodbye, Julian begged Mia to be careful.
“Of course, but what an odd thing to say. Why wouldn’t I be careful?”
“Odd, really? You’ve been spilling, burning, tripping, falling the whole morning.” He brushed the hair strands away from her eyes.
“Jules, nothing bad can happen to me today.” Mirabelle gave him a marital hug and a mistress kiss. “Don’t you know that today is my lucky day?”
“Why is that?”
“Today is exactly 49 days since we met! Remember I told you 49 is my lucky number?”
“No, and I didn’t know you were counting.”
She smiled at him full of love, but Julian didn’t think it was possible to feel worse. Big Ben tolling 49 times in his dream was as vivid as she was in his arms.