At 11:51 p.m. Pacific time, in a rented house on Carver Street in Burbank, California, Edward Arthur Vale, 49, died after calling from the converted garage behind the house to say he could not breathe.

His wife, Ruth Vale, heard the telephone ring in the kitchen.

It was the yellow wall phone with the stretched cord, the one that had been pulled too many times around the corner toward the stove. Ruth was at the sink, rinsing a coffee mug with the handle broken off. She let the phone ring three times because it often rang for Ed and because Ed often knew she was there and because, in a marriage, a ringing phone can become part of an argument before anyone touches it.

When she answered, Ed said, “Ruth.”

Then he coughed.

Then he said, “No, really.”

That was the phrase.

We will come back to it.

Edward Vale was born in Kansas City in 1939 and moved west with his mother in 1952 after his father left for a refrigeration job in Phoenix and sent one postcard showing a palm tree, then no forwarding address. Ed’s mother, Lucille, worked at a fabric counter and later in the returns department of a department store where she became skilled at telling women that worn dresses were not defective because a party had ended badly.

As a boy, Ed loved monster pictures, magic kits, funeral homes, parade floats, military uniforms, and anything that looked more official than it was. He made a radio out of cardboard and tinfoil and sat behind it announcing imaginary weather emergencies into a toothbrush. He staged a flood in the backyard using a hose, a cake pan, and three plastic soldiers, then cried when Lucille made him turn the hose off because the laundry was getting muddy.

At sixteen, he wrote and directed a twenty-three-minute film called The Moon Ate Cleveland, using a borrowed camera, bedsheets, flour, a hubcap, and his friend Perry in a papier-mâché helmet. The moon, as constructed, did not look hungry. Cleveland was represented by shoeboxes. A neighbor’s collie walked through the destruction twice. Ed kept both takes because, as he later told people, “A city under cosmic attack would absolutely have dogs.”

This was the kind of statement that made people laugh before they understood he was serious.

Ed did not mind laughter at first.

He thought laughter was one of the doors into wonder. If people laughed, they were awake. If they were awake, they might yet see the thing he had meant instead of the thing he had made. This generous misunderstanding protected him through his twenties.

He moved to Los Angeles at twenty-one with two shirts, a suitcase of scripts, and a black cape he had bought from a magician’s widow in Independence, Missouri. He worked as an extra, a night clerk, a shipping assistant, a prop runner, a film processor, a ticket taker at a revival house, and, for six weeks, a telephone solicitor selling storm windows in a city where storms did not require that much window.

He married Ruth Berman in 1968.

Ruth was a bookkeeper for a costume rental company on Magnolia Boulevard. She had narrow handwriting, a good singing voice she used only while alone, and an ability to find missing invoices in piles of paper that had defeated louder people. She met Ed when he came in looking for police uniforms, a bridal veil, two monk robes, and “something a scientist would wear after losing credibility.”

Ruth asked whether he had a purchase order.

Ed said, “I have a vision.”

Ruth said, “That’s not the same column.”

He told that story at parties for years. Ruth said he told it because it made her sound like a door that had opened after pretending to be locked. She did not object.

Not then.

Ed’s films, if we can call them films, were acts of attempted rescue performed on very little money. He rescued monsters from being merely monsters by giving them speeches. He rescued ghosts from silence by giving them grievances. He rescued mad scientists from madness by giving them mothers. He rescued himself, repeatedly, by writing scenes in which a man in a cape entered too late and declared that everything which had seemed foolish was in fact part of a larger plan.

The plans were not larger.

They were taped together.

He shot in garages, alleys, basements, unused offices, borrowed living rooms, and once in the back room of a plumbing supply warehouse after convincing the owner that exposure would be “tremendous for pipe.” His crews were friends, debtors, drunks, magicians, clerks, dental assistants, one actual actor, several people who said they were actual actors, and Ruth, who handled money, food, phone calls, costumes, continuity, and apology.

The fake blood was corn syrup and red dye until the ants came. Then it was stage blood borrowed from a theater, then ketchup in emergencies, then a mixture Ed invented and refused to identify because he said every director deserved secrets.

In The Bride of the Burned Planet, a spaceship wall was a refrigerator box painted silver. In The Velvet Apparition, the apparition’s veil caught fire briefly during a cemetery scene and Ed shouted, “Keep rolling,” though the camera had jammed eight minutes earlier. In Emergency at Midnight, the hospital set was Ruth’s kitchen with a paper sign taped over the spice rack reading OPERATING WARD.

Ed loved that sign.

Ruth hated tape on cabinets.

This is not a small detail.

Marriage is where small details become long weather.

Ed had a gift for calling urgently.

He called Ruth from pay phones, motel lobbies, editing rooms, bars, back offices, sets, and once from a laundromat where he claimed to have discovered “the perfect sound of dread” in a broken dryer. He called to say a producer was coming and she needed to bring the good shirt. He called to say the police had arrived, though it was only a security guard. He called to say an actor was dead, though the actor was drunk. He called to say he was dead, which he meant metaphorically, then theatrically, then, sometimes, not at all.

Ruth came the first times.

She brought cash. She brought aspirin. She brought shoes. She brought the right wig. She brought the wrong wig and was told it was now better. She brought sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and watched men dressed as astronauts eat them under a freeway overpass while Ed explained that poverty was a visual style if you lit it correctly.

She loved him.

This is important.

She loved him when he was ridiculous. She loved the energy with which he misread defeat as atmosphere. She loved the way he believed a cape could change a room. She loved that he took private sorrow and covered it in lightning bolts, then asked everyone to look up.

She did not love everything that came with him.

She did not love unpaid rent. She did not love being awakened at 2:10 a.m. because Ed needed her to hear a line of dialogue before he forgot it. She did not love collection notices under magnets shaped like fruit. She did not love men sleeping on their sofa because they had missed the last bus after playing corpses. She did not love that Ed could spend twenty-three dollars on rubber bats and then tell the gas company that art was a temporary emergency.

There were many emergencies.

Some were real. Some were made real by being treated as emergencies. Some were performances that leaned too heavily on Ruth’s mercy and became a kind of theft.

In 1972, Ed called from a motel in Reseda and said, “Ruth, I’ve been shot.” He had not been shot. A prop pistol had discharged a blank too close to his sleeve and burned a hole in his jacket. He wanted her to hear how convincing the panic sounded on tape.

In 1974, he called from the garage and gasped for thirty seconds before saying, “Too much?” He was rehearsing the death of Professor Valdek in The Corpse That Remembered. Ruth threw a dishrag at him and did not speak for the rest of the night.

In 1975, he called the house from the house, using the extension in the garage, and said in a strangled voice, “Tell my story.” Ruth found him lying across a cardboard coffin while Perry operated a flashlight through green cellophane.

In 1977, when he actually cut his hand badly on a broken floodlight, Ruth drove him to urgent care in silence while he held a towel around his palm and kept saying, “This time I mean it,” until she pulled over and told him that sentence had become useless.

He looked wounded by this.

Then, because he was Ed, he wrote it down.

The notebook was found after his death.

It was labeled EMERGENCIES / REAL AND OTHERWISE.

Inside were scene ideas, phone numbers, unpaid bills, sketches of monsters, alternate titles, and a list of phrases under the heading THINGS RUTH NO LONGER BELIEVES.

The list included:

I’m dying.

I mean it.

This is the big one.

Come quick.

No, really.

You have to see this.

It’s different this time.

Under the list, in smaller handwriting, Ed had written:

Need new language.

He never found it.

The final years were smaller than his ambitions and larger than he could bear. He drank more. He worked less. He sold costumes he later needed and borrowed them back from people who had bought them out of pity. Ruth took extra bookkeeping work. The house on Carver Street belonged to a woman in Pasadena who did not allow pets, subletting, alterations, outdoor storage, or, as she eventually added by letter, “motion picture activities of any scale.”

Ed kept the garage.

It had rafters, one workbench, two clamp lights, a cracked mirror, a trunk of costumes, reel cans, poster boards, coffee cans of screws, wigs on foam heads, a prop tombstone reading BELOVED UNKNOWN, and a telephone extension connected by a line Ruth had asked him not to run under the kitchen window.

On the night of his death, Ed had been working on what he called a “personal picture.”

There is no evidence it had financing, cast, distributor, or coherent plot. The title appears in several places as The Last False Alarm, The Man Who Cried Midnight, Signal 9, and Ruth, Pick Up. The pages found on the workbench include a scene in which a man calls his wife from another room to tell her the house is full of smoke, but there is no smoke. Then there is smoke, but by then the wife has put water on for tea.

Ed had crossed out the tea.

Beside it he wrote:

Too cruel?

At 10:58 p.m., Ruth spoke with her sister, Elaine, in Pasadena. Elaine later told police Ruth sounded tired but ordinary. Ruth said Ed was in the garage “killing himself for the picture,” a phrase Elaine understood as marital weather, not report.

At 11:23, Ed called Ruth from the garage and asked whether they still had the small tape recorder.

Ruth said no.

Ed said this was impossible.

Ruth said, “Then find it.”

At 11:31, he called again and asked her to come listen to something.

She said she was balancing the rent.

He said it would take one minute.

She said one minute had never taken one minute with him.

At 11:44, Ruth heard a crash from the garage.

She did not go out.

This is the sentence that will punish her, though it should not be allowed to do so alone.

She had heard many crashes from the garage. Cardboard fell. Clamp lights fell. Men fell while pretending to be shot. Shelves fell because Ed believed brackets were mostly decorative. Once, an entire castle wall collapsed and revealed the washing machine behind it.

At 11:45, Ed called again.

Ruth answered.

He was breathing hard.

She said, “I’m not doing this.”

He said, “Ruth.”

She said, “No.”

He said, “No, really.”

She closed her eyes.

There are phrases that die before the people who need them.

Ruth told him to stop using that line.

He tried to speak.

On the kitchen counter were the rent ledger, a blue pencil, the broken mug, two envelopes, and a jar of instant coffee with the label peeled halfway off. Ruth looked at these things while listening to the receiver. People look at ordinary things when deciding whether to enter the rest of their lives.

Ed made a sound she later described as “too much like Ed.”

Not too much like pain.

Too much like Ed.

She hung up.

At 11:51, according to the coroner’s report, Edward Arthur Vale died of cardiac arrest brought on by a combination of heart disease, alcohol-related complications, and exertion. He was found at 12:08 by Perry Lask, who had come by to return a rubber octopus and saw the garage light on.

Ed was on the floor beside the workbench. One clamp light had fallen. A reel can had opened. The telephone receiver hung down, turning slowly at the end of its cord.

Near his hand was a script page.

The scene heading read:

INT. GARAGE — NIGHT

Below it, in Ed’s handwriting:

The man realizes the alarm is real because no one comes.

Edward Vale is survived by Ruth; by his mother, Lucille, now in a care home in Van Nuys; by Perry Lask; by Elaine Berman, who never liked him and cried anyway; by seventeen unfinished scripts; by the foam heads; by a black cape with a torn lining; by four cans of film that may or may not contain usable images; and by a garage full of objects that had once been waiting for their cue.

Ruth has not yet decided what to keep.

She has placed the phone extension in a cardboard box.

On top of it she wrote, in pencil:

DO NOT THROW AWAY YET.