Читать книгу A Train through Time - Elizabeth Farnsworth - Страница 10

Several years ago, at Skywalker Ranch in northern California, the child I used to be appeared out of nowhere and asked a haunting question that I couldn’t answer and can’t forget.

It happened in the Technical Building among old movie posters and other treasures from George Lucas’s collection. I was overseeing the audio mix of a documentary film I had codirected. We had already labored for three ten-hour days, and I was tired and worried that we’d miss the deadline for the San Francisco Film Festival. Editor Blair Gershkow and sound mixer Pete Horner were making most of the decisions. I didn’t trust my judgment anymore.

Pete cleaned up the audio of an exhumation on a farm in southern Chile. I heard grains of dirt shaken through a sieve. On screen, Judge Juan Guzmán, the subject of the film, watched as a forensic anthropologist looked for pieces of bone and other evidence of violent murder thirty years earlier.

She picked something small and dirty out of the sieve and exclaimed, “Mira! Look! It’s part of a cheekbone.”

Guzmán said, “Could you pass it to me?”

“It’s the lower part of the bone.”

“So the cranium must be here?”

“Yes, these are human remains.”

The judge held the bone gently in his hand. In 1973 he had toasted General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup with champagne. Now he was investigating Pinochet’s crimes.

A door opened nearby, and I heard laughter. They were mixing a comedy.

Lucky them.

Pete replayed the exhumation scene over and over, sweetening the sound.

I bolted from the dark room and ran down the stairs, past a poster for Paths of Glory, to a large atrium where a copper-colored man stood among ficus and ferns. I had seen him many times before and knew who he was, but now he stood in a pool of radiance streaming from the skylight above, which caught my eye. I stopped to look at him more closely.

He was about three feet tall and had a fat belly, big mustache, and eyes the color of emeralds. He was Tik-tok, Dorothy Gale’s mechanical friend from Walter Murch’s 1985 film, Return to Oz.