“We need to stop all this,” Chaplin said. “I just want a small, small…” His voice trailed off. “I just want something small,” he whispered.

“Back to the pastoral, then?” Alf asked. “Right-o. What should I do with the angels?”

“Angels? What angels?”

Alf took out his cigar stub and used it as if it were chalk and the sky the board. “Up there.”

Chaplin looked at the dozen or so telephone poles that seemed to have appeared of their own accord, each with its own dangling girl. Some of their burlap harnesses had slipped, and they were fighting to remain upright; others were spinning in the breeze, and one looked unconscious, and young John, a simple boy from the property department, was desperately throwing water from the ground in the direction of her forehead.

“Take them down. Pay them. Keep them here for the day.”

“Send back the orchestra, too?”

“Yes. No, have them play the tune, all the way through.”

Chaplin sat on a bench, drawing his knees to his chest. The baggy trousers pressed against his face; his hands wrapped around the bulbs of the idiot shoes. As the 1812 Overture began again, he thought: Courtship. Obstacle. Rival. Wicked father. A big rock in the middle of the living room. He didn’t care. Life was essentially a scattering of torn ticket stubs on the ground that we found morals in because the emptiness of the universe was too horrific to contemplate.

Still, Chaplin thought, I have to go on. The overture was now at the part that sounded like Icarus slowly being brought to ground, hawks swooping in descent, dark forces gathering for one last raid upon the enemy, the intersection of the French and Russian national anthems, and he wanted to crack the music open like a thighbone and suck out the marrow. For it was the sound of impending triumph. He had not considered until now that, from another perspective, it was also the sound of impending defeat.

A limousine was pulling up at the gate.

The driver was agitated, his brocade cap gleaming in the sunlight, and the rear door opened, and out came two men who had never been to the Chaplin Studios before. In fact, they had never been to America. They made gestures toward the car; the woman at the gate stood from her stool, put down her tea, and walked cautiously toward the smoked glass of the rear door.

When the window rolled down, the woman attendant burst out in a chirp of laughter, and then a second sound, the distilled essence of pure wonder, half drowned by the orchestra. Up went the gate, and the limousine rolled onto the lot, displacing a grumbling crowd of angels, who were rubbing at their chafed sides and underarms.