The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  Paul informs Henry by email that four bodies were unearthed on the property—the old man, the young boy, the hanged man, and the girl. But not the woman. Paul informs Henry that the search is ongoing, her body may have been dumped in the woods somewhere, buried or unburied. It may even have been on the way back that the killer crashed and crawled free of the wreck, leaving the tape behind.

  What made her special? Or is she special at all? Perhaps the killer was afraid of burying yet another body so close to his home. Maybe he was planning to dig up the others and move them, too, but he never got the chance. Or maybe, just maybe, he woke in the middle of the night to an insistent cicada’s scream and tried to get the woman’s corpse as far away as he could. As if that would ever make them stop.

  Henry watches the clips one last time, the ones he and Paul shot, the ones corrupted with ghosts. The frames are back to normal, only the footage he and Paul shot of city streets and subway rides—no stark trees, no water-stained ceiling. Henry sees those things nonetheless. He will see them every time he looks at the film. The only thing he can do to save himself is let them go.

  After he watches the clips for the last time, he deletes every last one.

  *

  When Henry finally makes his movie, his great masterpiece, it’s no longer about a boy leaving the country for the city and finding his true home and meeting a boy from the city who grew up in his father’s shadow. The city no longer belongs to the boy Henry used to be, and the boy who grew up in his father’s shadow never belonged to him at all.

  Before he begins work on the movie, Henry moves to a city on the other coast, one smelling of the sea. The trees rising up against the sky there are straight and singular; their branches do not fracture and crack across the sky. That fact goes a little way toward easing his sleep, though he still dreams.

  While working on the movie that is no longer about a boy, Henry meets a very sweet assistant director of photography who smiles in a way Henry can’t help but return. Soon, Henry finds himself smiling constantly.

  Even though the movie Henry makes isn’t the one he thought he would make when he first dreamed of neon and subways and fame, it earns him an Oscar nomination. He is in love with the assistant director of photography, and he is loved in turn. He is happy in the city smelling of the sea, as happy as he can be. The love he has with the assistant director of photography—whose eye is good, but not quite golden—isn’t the kind of love that would willingly take the burden of death and pain from Henry’s shoulders. For that, Henry is grateful. He would crack under the weight of that kind of love, and besides, half his burden already belongs to the man he willingly took it from years ago.

  At first, Maddy sends a card every Christmas, and Henry and Paul exchange emails on their respective birthdays. But Henry knew, even on the day he packed up the last of his belongings to drive to the other coast, when he said see you later to Paul, he was really saying goodbye. Paul chose, and Henry consented to his choice. Maybe Paul’s relationship with Maddy could have survived the weight of his pain, but sharing his burden with Maddy wasn’t a risk Paul was willing to take.

  Henry is the one to drop their email chain, “forgetting” to reply to Paul’s wishes of happy birthday. When Paul’s birthday rolls around, Henry “forgets” again. It’s a mercy—not for him, but for their friendship. Henry can’t bear to watch something else die slowly, rotting from within, struggling for one last breath to stay alive. Perhaps it isn’t fair, but Henry imagines he hears Paul’s sigh of relief across the miles, imagines the lines of tension in his shoulders finally slackening as he lets the last bit of the burden of the woman’s death go.

  For his part, Henry holds on tighter than before. The movie that earns him his Oscar nomination is about a woman, one who is a stranger, yet one he knows intimately. He saw her at her weakest. He watched her die. The words scratched in the floor where the woman breathed her last, find me, are also written on Henry’s heart.

  He cannot find the woman physically, so he transforms the words into a plea to find her, who she was in life or who she might have been. Henry imagines the best life he can for her, and he puts it on film. It is the only gift he can give her; it isn’t enough.

  When Henry wins his Oscar, his husband, the assistant director of photography, is beside him, bursting with pride. They both climb the stage, along with the rest of the crew. The score from their film plays as they arrange themselves around the microphone. Henry tries not to clench his jaw. A thread winds through the music, so faint no one else would ever hear—the faint burr of rising insect song.

  Paradoxically, it is making the movie he never expected to make that finally allows Henry to understand the movie he tried to make years ago. Even though he destroyed the clips, that first movie still exists in his mind. He dreams it, asleep and waking. In the theater of his mind, it is constantly interrupted by windows seen at the wrong angle, water stains, and slivers of light, and scored entirely by insect screams.

  The movie that doesn’t exist isn’t a coming-of-age story. It isn’t a story about friendship. It’s a love story, just not the traditional kind.

  Because what else could watching so many hours of death be? How else to explain letting those frames of death corrupt his film, reach its roots back to the place where their friendship began and swallow it whole? What other name is there for Henry’s lost hours of sleep, and the knowledge that he wouldn’t say no, even if Paul asked for his help again. Even now. When Henry would still, always, say yes every time.

  Every time Henry looks back on the film in his mind, all he sees is pain, the burden he willingly took from Paul so he wouldn’t have to carry it alone. Even so, Henry will never let it go. The movie doesn’t exist, he destroyed every last frame, but it will always own a piece of Henry’s heart. And so will the man he made it for.

  Excerpts From a Film (1942-1987)

  Silver Screen Dream Productions, August 1987

  Alone in his office George Harwood watches the dailies. She’s there in the background. After so long, he almost dismisses it as a trick of his imagination, or maybe the Laphroaig at his elbow, ice warming and cracking in the glass. But no, she’s there, his Mary.

  George still does things the old-fashioned way, running 16mm film through his Bell and Howell projector. He leaves space on his office wall blank, the furniture cleared to give a clean line of sight. Mary Evelyn Marshall. Sometimes Mary, sometimes Evelyn or Eve. Eva. Lillian. A myriad of names to slip into like a different dress every day.

  He comes around his desk, moving closer to the images on his wall. Black and white, a recreation of another time, all high silver and sharp-edged night. The women smile with lips like coal; the men watch them through eyes like high-beams beneath their hats. A bar scene. Couples dancing in the foreground, men and women sipping cocktails in the middle ground. In the background, Mary, Evelyn, Eva, stands almost out of the frame. She isn’t watching the band or the couples, she’s watching him.

  *

  She’s been dead for over forty years. A shallow grave is the best he can hope for, because the other options are her body crammed into a storm drain, rolled into a tarp alongside the highway, scattered in pieces across defunct rail ties. In the dark, in an alley, in a rain-slicked dead-end.

  Or she isn’t dead at all. The truth is, he doesn’t know what happened to her, but she’s here now, blooming like a stain across his latest film. He stops the projector, pulls free a ribbon of celluloid, and holds it to the light. Not just one frame, all of them. Always in the background, smudged-hollow gaze fixed on him.

  There are other dead girls, too, fitting themselves into the spaces between actors. As George fits the film back into the projector and runs it again, the ghosts are so obvious he can’t believe he missed them, spreading outward from the point that is Mary Evelyn Marshall. Like mushrooms, fruiting after a hard rain. Their skin soft, born on the edge of rot, and so easy to bruise. Once he’s seen them, he can’t un-see them, until the rest of the film blu
rs and they’re all he can see.

  George reaches for his drink. He fumbles, knocking the glass to the ground. Leaving the amber liquid to soak into the carpet, he pulls canisters of film from the safe in the corner of his office instead. 1973—The Lady in Green. 1967—Blue Violet Girls. 1959—Bloody Rose. 1946—The White Canary Sings. A whole rainbow of his sins. He runs them through the projector one by one, even though he already knows. She’s there, in all of them.

  Shaking so he can barely thread the film, he opens the last canister, the first canister from the bottom of the safe. 1942. Mary Evelyn Marshall is there again, but not dead this time, not yet. She’s on the beach, a screen test from a lifetime ago. Wind tugs her curls, and she lifts a hand to push them away. There’s no sound, but he hears the question anyway.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  He answers from behind the hand-held camera, and from decades away in his movie studio office, here and now.

  “You don’t have to say anything. You’re perfect. You’re going to be a star.”

  She doesn’t answer, but her eyes and her smile say, I know.

  Waves crash silently, and she turns to look at the ocean. She’d claimed to be eighteen; he hadn’t believed her. Another runaway with dreams of being a big star. A dime a dozen. She’d come miles and miles. He could smell it on her skin—the road, the desert, pine trees, crossing the whole country chasing her dream, or running away from whatever was chasing her.

  He hadn’t lied about making her a star. She had it. Like hunger, but the opposite somehow. The kind of thing men, and even some women, wanted without being able to name. The kind of thing audiences would tear through meat and bone to get their hands on.

  George watches the film, spools it back, and watches it again.

  There’s another film that isn’t in the safe. One that arrived nearly forty years ago, wrapped in brown paper, delivered to his office with no return address. Amateur. Full of skips and jumps, cutting off before the end, the last frames ragged and burned.

  He finished the job, putting the rest to fire, as if destroying the evidence could undo the crime.

  As if reducing it to ashes could bring Mary Evelyn back from the dead.

  It occurs to George—far too late—that the only kind of magic he ever needed was this. Watching his films backward to arrive here, on the beach in 1942. This is his Mary, better than resurrected, not yet dead, bright and terribly alive. She flashes her teeth as she flickers on the blank space of his wall like she wants to devour the world.

  George smells the ocean, licks the tang of salt spray from his lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  He puts his face in his hands. It isn’t enough. After forty years, he finally understands. She isn’t here for him. This haunting isn’t about forgiveness, or offering redemption from the cheap thrills he put on screen. She isn’t even punishing him. All she ever needed from him was to see, and stop trying to reshape her story and make it his own.

  The weight of it crashes down on him. George’s chest tightens. Pins and needles tingle up and down his left arm. He’s cold. It takes him a while to notice. That’s always been the way. He never sees what’s in front of his eyes until it smacks him in the face. Too late for apologies or goodbyes.

  His vision narrows. A pinpoint, a tunnel. He’s not rushing toward the light, it’s coming at him. A train. When it hits, the impact bruises across his entire body and he goes down. His legs fold. He grasps wildly and gets only a handful of film canisters. They clatter to the floor and he goes with them. Ribbons of film flutter and crackle, tangling in his fingers and around his legs. Thousands of frames of her, over and over again. Mary Evelyn Marshall. Lillian. Eve. His last thought as the screen fades to black is, Finally. Finally, at last, thank God.

  *

  Monument Valley, Utah, April 1942

  The land here is like something out of a dream. Or a nightmare, depending on your perspective. The sky is huge; the rocks are impossible colors that would look like a mistake if someone tried to paint them that way. There are whole cities carved out of the land by the wind. From a distance, they look like castles in a fairy tale. The kind where ogres live.

  I wish Mama had stayed to see this. She turned back in Nebraska. I knew she would. Just like she must have known I would keep going. Nothing in the world could make me go back home.

  Because here’s the first thing I remember—in my life, I mean. I couldn’t have been more than two years old, standing up in my crib, looking out into the hall. A lamp had fallen over, and the light was shining on Mama and Daddy, casting their shadows on the wall like a picture show.

  Daddy had his hands around Mama’s neck, choking her. She was smaller than him, weaker in every sense of the word. He got her down on her knees before he finally let go, and left her there, crumpled on the floor.

  At the time, I was too frightened to cry. If I made a noise, any noise at all, he would strangle me, too.

  That moment right there was when I knew. Even if I didn’t understand it fully at the time, the knowledge was burned right onto my soul. That’s what happens to girls. If you don’t fight back, if you don’t run away, someone bigger and stronger will chew you up and just walk away. They’ll leave you crumpled on the ground like so much trash, and the world will never know you existed at all.

  So, no, I’m not going home.

  I thought maybe when we saw the dead girl Mama would change her mind. That was proof right there of the same thing I’d seen standing up in my crib, watching shadows projected on the wall. But of course she already knew, and despite that knowledge, she’d made up her mind long ago.

  The summer I was twelve, I broke my arm trying out the brand new pair of roller skates my neighbor Wilma Jean got for her birthday. Mama sat with me in the doctor’s office and held my hand while I cried. When I was done, she leaned over and wiped my tears. There are worse things than pain, she told me. Like what, I asked her, because right then all I could think about was how much my arm hurt. I’d heard daddy screaming at her the night before; no matter how I tried to block it out, it kept on coming right through the walls. He said if she was so unhappy, she should just leave. I heard him throw her suitcase on the floor. He must have started throwing her perfume bottles next, because I heard glass breaking and the scent of them all mixed together—rosewater and violets and lily-of-valley—coming through the wall, strong enough to make me gag. But even after that, in the doctor’s office, Mama looked me in the eyes and whispered like she was telling me the greatest secret in the world. She said, Like being alone.

  We first saw the dead girl in a little roadside diner just outside of Ogallala. We’d been driving all night. Well, Mama drove and I helped keep her awake by finding songs on the radio so we could sing along. To her, we were still on vacation, on a lark of a trip to visit Cousin Joyce in Hollywood. That’s what she’d told daddy at least. Neither of us ever said the words running away out loud.

  I ordered a big breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, and toast. All that grease was delicious, and I just wolfed it down, but Mama only picked at her food. She’d ordered scrambled eggs, pushing them around her plate. Her shoulders were hunched the whole time, like she was waiting for something heavy to fall.

  That’s when a man at the counter started talking about the dead girl. He was loud, like he wanted everyone in the diner to hear, not just the waitress refilling his coffee. He’d known the dead girl, you see. Nancy. A real looker, but sweet, innocent, the girl next door that everyone knew. Her family owned a gas station, and sometimes she would help her daddy at the pumps. The man at the counter sounded so proud, like he was special by association now that Nancy was famous, now that she was dead.

  He waved around a newspaper with her picture. The killer hadn’t been caught, and other dead girls had been found in other towns, like the killer was working his way from coast to coast. Just like me and Mama on our road trip. Look at the pattern, he said, a big jagged line like a bloody smile right
across the face of America.

  Some kids found Nancy dumped by the side of the road. Another girl had been found in a storm drain, and one inside an empty rail car. Nancy’s body had been rolled into a tarp with a few rocks and dirt thrown over top, but whoever killed her didn’t bury her. He wanted her to be found.

  When I looked up, Mama was staring over my shoulder. I twisted around to see what she was looking at and there was Nancy, the dead girl, in the booth behind ours.

  I don’t think anyone saw her except Mama and me, and Mama looked down so fast I knew she’d never admit it out loud. The thing about dead girls is once you see them, you can’t un-see them, and you realize they’re everywhere. If Mama admitted to this one, she’d have to admit what might happen to me, what might happen to her, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

  So she looked away, and I kept looking at Nancy. There were none of the cuts and bruises the man at the counter had talked about, but I could tell she was dead. She looked me right in the eye, and I knew what had been done to her.

  I touched Mama’s hand so she’d have to look at me, but she pulled away like she’d been burned.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  There were tears in her eyes. No matter how many times daddy hit her, she didn’t know how to be without him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She dropped money on the table, then she was out the door. A plume of dust kicked up behind her wheels, and she was gone.

  I should have been scared, or sad, but I was only relieved. All I could think as I watched her drive away was finally.

  I know how it all sounds. How many girls run away with the same silly dream of going to Hollywood and becoming a star? But I’m not stupid. I have a plan. My cousin Joyce, the one Mama and I were going to stay with, she’s had a few small parts in films. Not speaking parts, but she’s up on the big screen. She can introduce me to people, take me to the right parties. And there are things a girl can do to get noticed at those parties. You see? Like I said, I’m not stupid.