The Movie That No One Saw

by May Seah

  But he simply could not move. He could not go before or behind or below. Any step in any direction would be too big or too small or too left or too right.

  When his heels began to hurt, he realised that he had been standing in front of the mirror for hours. The shadows under his eyes were weary.

  Henry’s image could appear only in the mirror and so he blinked when Keh blinked and breathed when Keh breathed.

  If Henry could exist externally—if Keh could only see him moving independently on the screen—then and only then could Keh envision the possibility of escaping from his chokehold and turn the tables on him.

  Henry was too real and he was too unreal.

  “And who am I?” Keh thought to himself. “I am everyone and I am no one.”

  That was when Adjonis Keh realised that his life had always been and would always be nothing but a series of farcical anticlimaxes.

  19

  It seemed unlikely that things could get worse, but they did—at least, they certainly did not get better, and the passage of time, which meant more production funds draining like water from an open faucet, made them objectively worse.

  That was where things stood when he found himself lying in a ditch covered in fake blood.

  It was the scene in which Henry, while filming a take in a back alley with Violette for their movie, was suddenly set upon by a modest congregation of gangsters from his shady past.

  The scene was meant to be a portentous one because at the end of the movie, Henry’s soul would be dramatically sent to the underworld by his nemeses, while his head would be delivered to Violette in a satin-lined box.

  The weather was cooperating—above the heat of the day, the sky was brooding with gathering clouds that shimmered in dark hues of pink, purple and abalone-shell.

  The assistant producers hid themselves under caps and hats, fussing with the trolleys of equipment and trying not to trip over the wires that snaked all over the ground. Meanwhile, the make-up artists fanned themselves and sipped on bottled water and prayed that their lipsticks wouldn’t melt.

  In the scene, a sobbing, breast-beating Violette was cradling in her arms a comatose Henry, beaten to a pulp, and petitioning him with many sighs not to leave her all alone in this cruel world. Meanwhile, Lee was waiting in the shadows to carry her off like an opportunistic vulture. And a smattering of extras, employed to act as production crew members, was hovering in distress amid overturned equipment.

  Holliday, crying prettily, had already posted a video of herself emoting, the tears moistening her large, limpid eyes, dancing over her waterproof mascara and spilling obediently out onto her rouged cheeks.

  Going for the take, the camera tightened its shot around the two of them as they lay on the baking pavement. “Henry,” Holliday wailed, her eyes raised to heaven and her tears falling onto Keh’s face as he drooped limply against her, feigning insensibility. “Wake up, Henry! Please wake up! You can’t leave me!” As she sobbed and gasped for breath, he lay still and let her clutch his body to her heaving bosom.

  But Gareth Abraham bellowed, “Cut!” and jumped up so abruptly that his director’s chair fell over backwards. Keh and Holliday bolted up as he strode towards them.

  “Jon Keh!” he yelled through his megaphone, his incendiary eyes flashing. “You are a top actor and a leading man, and you can’t even play a corpse?” He snorted incredulously. “Just shutting your eyes does not equate to acting unconscious, okay? My dog is more convincing at playing dead than you are.”

  Shaken, Keh scrambled up and went to the monitor. He stared at the playback until his eyes throbbed. Gareth was right. Even with grime on his forehead and blood smeared across his nose, he looked in the pink of health. He looked like he was in an ad for some airline’s newly launched first class flatbed. He looked like he had just returned from a spa retreat in Bali in which all the fruit baskets had been free.

  He raked his fingers through his hair in despair and looked blankly at the director.

  “I’m going to call Management and ask them to let you take a couple of days off,” Gareth said. “We’ll rework the schedule and do other scenes first. That’s going to cost us money, of course. But I can’t make this film when my lead actor is faffing about with his head in the clouds. Jerome, you’re up. We’ll do your scene instead.” As he was changing into his own clothes in the cabana, he heard murmuring just outside the tent flaps. It was the executive producer and a few of the assistant producers, convened in worried discussion.

  As he was pulling on his shoes, he distinctly heard the word “recast” being mentioned. It was uttered once more, in a louder tone this time. And his blood ran cold.

  When he stepped out of the cabana, the producers looked up and hurriedly scattered, none of them meeting his eye.

  Keh’s steps were decidedly springless as he trudged away from the set in disgrace. A blast of warm, humid air hit him in the face. Clouds were choking out the tepid sunlight. It was about time they had some rain. The ground was dry and cracked, and the few sparrows that remained in the area looked parched.

  He climbed into his car, turned the air conditioning on at full blast and let the engine idle as he sat there, blank and immobile. Once, at the very beginning of his career, before he had overcome his shyness in front of the camera and the little horde of people who were always standing around behind it, he had had to do a photo shoot for a magazine in which the direction was to “look sexy”. He had writhed unnaturally as flashes of light exploded in his face with each click, trying to angle his head and part his lips and relax his brow as the art director instructed, all while feeling his poorly feigned sexiness descending into parody, like an orangutan decked out in red lipstick and a conical brassiere. When the photographer decided to end the shoot, Keh hadn’t been able to look anyone present in the eye. The photo that was eventually published in the magazine was rendered human by digital imaging, but he had not been able to look that in the eye, either.

  Taking a deep breath, he put the car in gear. He drove without thinking much about it to The Lion City Lance’s headquarters, parked and dodged into the café across the road from the building.

  “Please come out,” he texted April as he chose a table in the quietest corner and slouched into the chair, his cap pulled low over his eyes. Conscious that the people at the other tables were staring openly, he picked up the day’s issue of the Lance and buried himself in its pages while he waited for her. He really did not feel like posing for selfies and being civil that day.

  She came through the door about a quarter of an hour later. “Are you okay?” she said. As he lowered the newspaper, she gasped and reached out towards him. “What happened to your face?”

  It occurred to him that he’d forgotten to wipe off the blood that had been carefully applied by the makeup artist. “Sorry, that’s the fake stuff,” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his cheek. No wonder people were staring.

  “Chey,” she scoffed, sitting down across from him at the little table. “Still, your text sounded despondent. And you’ve dragged me out of the office in the middle of the day. I’ll order you some chocolate cake. There’s nothing that chocolate cake can’t fix. What’s the matter?”

  He took off his cap and raked his hands through his hair. “I’ve lost it,” he told her.

  “Lost what?”

  “The ability to act.”

  “Have you tried looking in the last place you saw it?”

  He grasped her shoulders almost forcefully and looked so hard into her eyes that her body grew tense. “You wanted to know my big secret? This is it. I’ve never told anyone this before. And now I’m telling you.” He let his hands drop and hung his head. “All this time, it hasn’t been me doing the acting. It’s been the actor persona that I’ve been acting as. And now, suddenly, he’s gone. I can’t find him any more.”

  He had not planned to tell her everything. But in her presence, for some unknown reason, he’d always felt an overpowering urge to rev
eal all that he was to her. And this time, he was too tired and overwhelmed to fight it. He no longer cared even if she were to march back across the road to her office and publish an exposé right then and there. He needed to tell her.

  As he stammered out the truth, from the beginning of the whole story to its incredible highs and now, its wretched nadir, her eyes grew softer and softer.

  After a very long silence, in which he could feel his heart pitching from side to side like a drunken boat, she said, “Okay. I think I understand. And today, for some reason you don’t know, you haven’t been able to act the actor?”

  He swallowed. “I just can’t do it any more. I’m worse than a hand puppet at a pantomime. In my early days, a reviewer wrote, ‘Adjonis Keh is about as convincing as a rambutan pretending to be a soursop.’ Compared to this, I was Anthony Hopkins in that role.”

  “And this happened all of a sudden?”

  “It’s this project. The Movie That Everyone Saw. I can’t get any of the takes right. I can’t play the character. I can’t do it.”

  April’s brow furrowed. “Okay. Tell me about this movie.”

  He swallowed. “It’s set in a film production company. I play Henry, who’s an actor with a dark past. And Holliday plays Violette, an actress with a terminal illness. We’re in love with each other. We’re also starring in a movie together. So, The Movie That Everyone Saw is about the stuff that happens while we’re working on this movie. Like, someone tries to sabotage the production. And the director is secretly in love with Violette.”

  “Let me guess—there’s a Shakespearean ending in which everybody watches everybody die, and then they go off and have spicy hotpot.”

  “Not quite, but Henry eventually—here’s the fun part—gets chased down and decapitated by gangsters from his past.”

  She nodded. “So, what happens in the movie?”

  He stared at her incredulously. He could not believe that the girl he loved was suddenly so obtuse. “Were you not listening to what I just said?”

  “No, I mean, what happens in the movie that Henry and Violette are making?”

  “Erm”—he ran his fingers wildly through his hair again in frustration—“ some boy-meets-girl slash convenient bildungsroman stuff, I think. It’s not fleshed out. I don’t think their movie even has a title. It’s just a couple of scenes here and there that they’re seen working on. Why?” He was confused, not understanding why she had latched onto this random and insignificant detail.

  She ignored his question and asked, “You feel unable to play this character in The Movie That Everyone Saw?”

  “I am physically unable to play this character. I’ve been trying and trying to get into the headspace. And I just can’t. I just came from a scene where I couldn’t even play dead.”

  She looked at him with eyes of sympathy. “Looks like your actor persona has run up against his kryptonite. Obviously, those two roles have neutralised each other. They’ve cancelled each other out because they’re too uncannily similar.”

  His eyes widened. “What should I do now?”

  She picked up a fork and took a huge bite of chocolate cake.

  “Well, you weren’t eating it,” she said, through a mouthful of cake, when she looked up and caught him staring at her. “What do I do, April? You have to help me. You’re the smart one here.”

  She put down her fork, chewing carefully and swallowing. Then she smiled brightly. “Did you say Henry gets decapitated?”

  “Er…yes.”

  “I want to see your severed head! Has it been made already?”

  “I’ve done a few sittings for it, but I don’t know if it’s finished.”

  “Let’s go to the Props department and see! This would make a great feature story. You can pose for the photo holding your own head under your arm.”

  He let her pull him towards his car.

  20

  They drove to the production lot and pulled up outside the Props department. Spilling out of the dilapidated doors and encroaching into the parking lot were a chainsaw, some tyres, a Qing dynasty sedan chair, three papier-mâché eyeballs about two metres in diameter, a trampoline and a rusty old swingset.

  Keh and April stepped carefully over the things strewn about the unfinished concrete floor and into the large, hushed space.

  Late afternoon light filtered weakly in through windowed slats high up the walls near the roof, illuminating flecks of dancing dust. Keh led her through the rows and rows of very tall shelves, each stacked high with the most disparate of objects: a double bass, a pile of colourful piñatas, some clay urns containing a tangle of hair dryers, a clear plastic box filled to the brim with bulbs of plastic garlic, and a hundred volleyballs contained within a fishing net. To get to the top shelf, you needed a ladder and a strong immunity to dust. The shelves displayed a valiant attempt at organisation, with some marked “Christmas”, some marked “pillows” and some marked “zombies”. But for the most part, the sheer amount of stuff defied containment, much less categorisation.

  “Imagine the costume parties you could win if you had access to all this stuff,” April whispered, grabbing a mediaeval helmet and holding it to her chest. “Oh, look, I wonder what this box marked ‘feminine products’ could possibly contain.”

  “Wait until you see the Wardrobe department,” Keh said, leading her through the aisles towards the workshops in the back.

  At the artists’ studio, they peered in and saw Uncle Hong at work. He was sitting at the long wooden workbench, hunched lovingly over a papier-mâché dragon’s head. The legendary reptile had burnished scales, a fiery mane, a snout with flaring nostrils, fierce horns and curling whiskers. Every sinew of the artist’s body was poised in careful concentration as he moved his paintbrush expertly over it. The details, even from a distance, were remarkable. At the instant when the old man dotted the dragon’s glaring, yellowish eyeball with a sooty black pupil, Keh had to blink his own eyes, which were convinced they saw the massive head move in sudden animation.

  “Uncle Hong. It’s me, Jon Keh,” he called softly from the doorway.

  The old man looked up and pushed his bifocals further on his nose. “Hello, Jon. I just finished painting your head this morning,” he said. “Couldn’t wait to stare death in the face, eh? Your timing is perfect. Go ahead.” He gestured towards the low cabinet behind him.

  Keh stood in the doorway, gazing towards the object that stood on a little pottery wheel by the window, where a cloud was slowly obscuring what little sunlight there was. April nudged him forward, making him stop just in front of it. And then he stood there, face to face with his own severed head.

  It would not have been fitting to call the thing lifelike. But it looked so much like Adjonis Keh that the hairs on the back of his neck immediately stood on end. Every angle, every line, every crease, had been so exquisitely sculpted by the artist’s expert hand that it almost hurt to look at it.

  It wore an unobtrusive wig coiffed to look just like his hair. And the features were exactly his, only tinged with a greyish cast and tensed with rigor mortis. The head ended at the neck, where the edges were stained with dark, dried, blood-red paint. It was his own death mask.

  “How does looking at this prop make you feel?” April asked softly.

  He knew that she was in interview mode deliberately, so after a moment of hesitation, he replied with an uncomfortable quip: “It kills me. I’m dead.”

  She smiled.

  He continued, “It’s an out-of-body experience. I feel like I’ve died and I’m looking at my body—I mean, head. There’s no body here, is there? Nobody but me and my own head.”

  He stopped, knowing that he was rambling pointlessly. At last, he said, “I feel exactly like I did all those years ago when I got passed over by some freak glitch in death’s Excel spreadsheet. Or maybe I did die then, who knows.”

  He turned to her. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  April Mehta gently caressed the clay cheekbone with the ti
ps of her fingers. She knew that it was difficult to be conscious of our consciousness and still remain sane. That often, we needed lenses through which to see things clearly. And that to deny this and screen ourselves from the truth forever would be to do ourselves the greatest disservice.

  “People like Holliday Heng become actors because they’re afraid of dying,” she said. “They want to live forever in celluloid, in digital pixels, in people’s memories. You became an actor because you were afraid of living. Everyone plays their role. But a dead man is really dead.”

  He gazed at the head; its screwed-shut eyes even had tiny lashes glued onto their shrivelling lids.

  “I worked hard. I followed the script.”

  “Maybe it’s time to read between, behind, before, below the lines?” She held his hand lightly. “Don’t pretend to live—just live.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But even you, Adjonis Keh, the most boring of celebrities, can script your own story.”

  “There isn’t anything that hasn’t been written before.”

  “Write about that, then—in your way.”

  The hot air was too oppressive; his body was weary. Later, he would come to understand better what she was trying to tell him: that greater even than the need to hear stories was the need to tell them, and that the need to tell was greater even than the need to be heard. Everyone else’s life was a parable and his was the truth; but why was it that one could never arrive at the truth except by proxy?

  She lifted her face towards him. “Hey, do you have two pennies?”

  He rummaged in his pocket and produced a pair of dollar coins.

  She smiled. “Go on. Pay the boatman.”

  He placed the coins carefully over the closed eyes of the papier-mâché head, balancing them so they wouldn’t fall.

  At that moment, his phone buzzed urgently in his pocket.

  It was Dr Chan. “Jon Keh, I’ve done it,” he said, without preliminaries. “I’ve perfected the lenses that will fix your vision. Come in to see me as soon as you can.”