The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  While you busied yourself getting back into the proper headspace, I began to feel it again, a terrible itch on the back of my hand, just beneath the surface. I started to scratch, massaging the skin covering my knuckles, kneading the flesh of the slightly too large body sleeve. It was hot inside the skin, but I tried my best to ignore it, to keep my hands away from my face and the makeup that had been so carefully applied by a timid mouse of a girl wearing a plastic Hello Kitty hair band, which pulled her long, blond hair back and over her ears. When I first saw her I wanted to reach out and pull out the band, to let her hair fall down over her face. There was something there, something held back, held in. I saw it in how she looked at me while she worked, her almond-shaped eyes a focused, steaming mix of longing and bottled ferocity, that she’d wanted to be something more than what she’d amounted to – she was a hopeful, maybe-one-day movie star who’d been reduced to methodically reapplying layers of blush and mascara between takes. Though I couldn’t tell you her name or anything about her, I felt right away as if I knew all the parts to her story, because in reality it was no different than yours, mine or any other.

  “Don’t forget,” the director said to you as he took his seat. “You love Malorie. You’re ready to die for her.”

  And you would, again and again, until they got it right.

  “I’m ready,” you said, energetically snapping your head to one side, then the other – light pops both times. Hands on your thighs, deep breath, you crawled back into the Buick’s trunk.

  “Places,” said the director. “And, action!”

  And I watched for another three hours and forty-five minutes as you screamed and bled out and died, over and over again.

  4. No One Special

  Posted: 11/12/2013

  The very last thing I expected when flipping channels this past Friday evening was for you to come crashing into my life again. But there you were, on my television screen, all tuxed out and walking a red carpet for a premiere somewhere – North Hollywood, from the looks of it. You appeared sheepish, looking around uncomfortably with your hands stuffed in your pockets, like you desperately wanted to make a run for it as you were sandwiched impossibly between Eden Grant from Access Hollywood and multiple-award-nominated filmmaker Andreas Rain. Cameras flashed an electrical storm. I watched as you put a hand up over your eyes, to shield them, while your co-stars filed into the theatre.

  “I’m here with Director Andreas Rain at the premiere of his new film, Child of Honour,” Eden said to the camera, half-shouting above the cries of the gathered crowd. “Andreas, two years ago your film Only the Dead Know, both a critical and commercial success, was left out of the running for Best Picture at the Academy Awards – a glaring oversight to many. What do you think your chances are of Child of Honour landing a coveted spot on next year’s ballot?”

  Rain, dressed in his usual combination of dark blue jeans and a black button-up dress shirt, with a salmon-pink scarf tied loose around his neck and oversized egg-shaped sunglasses that covered most of his face, crowded close around Eden’s mic, almost pushing her out of frame. “You know,” he said, “I don’t like to speculate. If my work isn’t to the Academy’s tastes, I’m not going to try and change their minds. I’m just going to keep doing what I do best. But if you really want to know the film’s chances come award season, this guy –” he glanced back then, saw you and pulled you in front of the camera. He threw his arm around your shoulders. He hugged you. “This is the man to ask; he’s seen it all. D____ here is one of this industry’s unsung heroes. Do you know how many films he’s been in? Tell her, D____.”

  And like a deer in headlights you just stood there, stunned, not at all sure what to do or say. You just shoved your hands back in your pockets and glanced into the camera for a split second before awkwardly staring down at your shoes. “A few, I guess,” you muttered, your shyness palpable.

  Rain laughed boisterously. “He’s modest. Do you have any idea how much arm-twisting I had to do just to convince him to come out here tonight and celebrate with us?” He laughed again, patted your arm while you grew increasingly uncomfortable. I could see you anxiously doing the math inside your head, estimating just how many eyes were on you at that moment, televised or not. “This guy’s a harder worker than anybody I know. He’s been in dozens of films. Hundreds. He’s … well, there’s no two ways about it: he’s the world’s greatest living redshirt.”

  Eden gave her best, punctuated television host chuckle. “What’s a redshirt?” she asked.

  “For more than twenty years,” Rain continued, “D____ here has been dying like nobody else.” He spoke excitedly, like he’d discovered you – like he was somehow responsible for your entire career up to this point. “This guy …” Then I watched in disbelief as Andreas Rain, a man who’d been called on more than one occasion the affable reinvention of Stanley Kubrick, an auteur in the most exhausting sense of the word, swept you into his arms and gave you one of the most emotional bear hugs I’ve ever seen, arching back, nearly lifting you off the ground. “You did it,” he said, practically crying into your shoulder. “You gave my story its soul.”

  Now Eden’s no fool. She’s been around long enough to know a story when she sees one. She watched as the director named “Oscar’s Biggest Threat” in last December’s Empire magazine lost all composure in the arms of someone who, just moments prior, was an unknown, and stepped up to the plate. “How do you respond to that, D____? How does it feel to know what an important part you played in bringing Child of Honour to life?”

  The camera pulled away from Rain, who made a show of things using the tip of his scarf to wipe tears from his eyes, and focused, instead, on you. How did you handle it? True to form: you went a little red in the cheeks, offered a noncommittal shrug and said, “It was just a small role. I really didn’t do much – I just showed up on set and did what Mister Rain asked me to do.”

  “My boy,” Rain said, his large hands on your shoulders as if he were gripping the top rung of a ladder, “you did so much more than that. So, so much more.” With that he let go of you and headed into the theatre with the rest of the cast and crew, leaving you alone on the red carpet with Eden for your moment of … glory, I guess?

  “I should probably …” you began, nodding to the theatre’s entrance.

  Eden, however, continued talking; if she noticed your discomfort, she certainly didn’t let it stand in the way of her curiosity. “Wow,” she said. “That must feel pretty great, hearing your praises sung with such enthusiasm!”

  “Yeah … I guess.”

  “He said you’ve been acting for twenty years. Where have you been hiding all this time? Is this your first major Hollywood production?”

  “No, but listen, I really should –”

  “I’m not sure I should let you go.” She fake-laughed again. “There’s so much I want to ask you. Who else have you worked with? What’s next for you?”

  “I really need to get going.” You started walking toward the theatre’s entrance. Then, as if to deflect whatever follow-up she might have had, you turned back around and said, “Honestly, I’m no one special.”

  * * *

  ††

  I don’t suppose you know what it does to a person to hear those words uttered by someone they once loved. Five times I watched that interview, listening for some sign or tell in your voice – something to indicate you weren’t being as serious as deep down I knew you were. But each time I got to the end, the words stung anew: “I’m no one special.”

  Then forgive me for asking, but what the fuck was I?

  For three hours I let it fester, what you’d proclaimed, live on television, to the entire world. I drank and shouted and cried out loud until my upstairs neighbours started pounding on the floor, threatening to call the cops if I didn’t cut the noise. But I wasn’t listening to them – I was too busy feeling pissed off and hurt and not nearly as imp
ortant as I’d been trying to convince myself I had been for going on a year now. After everything we’d seen and done together – the lives we’d appropriated, all those bodies left behind, half-buried in the dirt – it was like you were stabbing me in the heart all over again. It’s obvious now I was blowing things out of proportion – we’re ex, and you’re free to feel whatever the fuck you want about who you are and what you’ve done – but to see you on television, in about as uncomfortable a position as I could ever imagine for you to be in, and to hear you so wilfully tear yourself down, in front of millions, while someone was trying desperately to pull you into the spotlight …

  Yeah. You might say it hit a little close to home. The whole time we were together I lived in your shadow, not the other way around. It was your sandbox, not mine. You made that very clear. And if you were – are nothing, then I …

  That night, clearer heads prevailing, I registered this blog and started stitching the past back together again. It began as a writing exercise: I wanted to see if I could go back to it, to the very beginning and the first time you spoke to me while I sat next to you on top of an audio equipment trunk, and we shared that raspberry croissant you’d snatched from the craft services cart. I wanted to remember what it was I’d been so attracted to in the first place. The more details from that day that I gradually pieced together, the clearer the overall image became. It started to feel like here I was and there you were and nothing at all had changed, like time had stopped for us and you were still pointing and laughing at the seeds stuck between my teeth as I rummaged through some poor production assistant’s unguarded purse, searching desperately for dental floss or a toothpick or even a credit card – something, anything I could use to clean up my smile.

  “It’s okay,” you said, beaming, revealing your own set of raspberry-spotted teeth. You closed your mouth, ran your tongue back and forth across your teeth, and smiled again – spotless. I blushed. You rested your hand on my thigh. If we only had a few minutes more, a few seconds even, we might have … maybe …

  You say you’re no one special, but I’ve done the numbers. Television and film combined, all online aliases accounted for: seven hundred and sixty-three. Seven hundred and sixty-three on-camera deaths in your twenty-one-year career. That averages out to approximately 36.3 deaths a year. Throw in uncredited one-day walk-ons as a background body in the periodic disaster film or zombie apocalypse and that number rises considerably. Andreas Rain was right: you are the greatest living example of cannon fodder to ever grace the screen. And I wonder, and I’m not sure why I never asked this when we were together, but as you stumble ever closer to your forty-sixth birthday I have to know: Why? Why after twenty-one years are you still doing this to yourself? You sink into someone else’s shoes, put on a good show, give death everything you’ve got – and for what?

  Whatever. You wanna say you’re no one special, that’s your prerogative. But I’m not ready to follow you to the gates of obscurity. There’s been enough of that already, and as it is I’m running out of time to tell our tale. I never wanted the spotlight for myself, not really, but I wanted …

  I just wanted to stand in enough light that you could see me.

  You probably won’t read any of this – I doubt you’re able to sit in one place long enough to make it to the end of even a review of any of your films – but if by some chance during what I’m sure will be an amazingly meta mid-life crisis you do manage to stumble upon this blog, know this: you’re more special than you give yourself credit for.

  Also, you’re an asshole.

  5. Truth in Advertising: Me, Myself and I

  Posted: 11/17/2013

  My therapist, in all her by-the-hour wisdom, tells me confession is good for the soul, but that it often comes at a price. I wonder, though, if I’ll feel any better when all this is over and done, when I’ve said what I need to say. When I told her I was starting this blog, right away she asked why. “Do you think, by writing down your story, D____ will come back to you? Do you want him to?” she asked when after a minute I still hadn’t answered.

  “I don’t … no?” I said.

  “Is that a question or a statement?” She rested her narrow Reese Witherspoon–like chin in the palm of her hand while gently, repeatedly tapping the thick black frame of her glasses.

  “No, I don’t think he’ll come back to me. I wouldn’t want that even if he did.”

  “But you’d feel some sense of satisfaction, wouldn’t you?”

  “What, if he came back to me because I posted our dirty, fleshy laundry for the world to see? No … why would I get satisfaction from that?”

  “All right, validation perhaps?”

  “I think I’d be just as angry.”

  “Why do it then? What do you hope to accomplish?”

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business swivelled in her seat, head pointed halfway to the floor. She glared at me expectantly over the tops of her glasses. Crossed and uncrossed her matchstick legs as I stewed over her question. For several minutes I thought about how best to answer, glancing at her out of the corner of my eye as she started impatiently checking her watch, the minutes slowly creeping past the hour as our session crossed over into her three o’clock. She didn’t use to do that. In the beginning, back when I first started coming here, when she still wanted to help, we regularly ran over time. “It’s all right,” she’d say, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes past the hour. “It’s up to me to keep track of these things, not you.” Now she watches those final minutes and seconds as if they were the last few on an extended prison sentence.

  “Trans … transparency,” I said at last, just as she was preparing to ask me to leave. “Just once I’d like to show myself for who I really am.”

  “By showing the world who D____ really is.”

  “We’re part and parcel. You can’t have one half of this story without the other.” Not if I’m going to tell all the best parts.

  * * *

  ††

  In my closet hang the skinned and stitched body sleeves of a hundred different women of all shapes, sizes, ages and ethnicities. Each one is a composite, a unique artistic statement carefully pieced together from several worlds’ worth of experiences.

  I remember in our early days what it was like, hunting for that perfect body, that exquisite, impossible-to-describe-but-you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it skin that would better serve the stories we wanted to tell. It was an art in and of itself, the pursuit – the creation of a character of our very own. You were good at it, too. I don’t know if you ever realized that about yourself – you were, are, more creative than you ever let yourself believe. I felt in those days, travelling with you throughout Los Angeles, stopping at every late-night diner or coffee shop we came across, watching, listening to the waitresses detailing their life stories to whomever would listen – hoping, praying their customers were somebody, or an assistant to somebody, or someone who knew the guy who mowed the front lawn of somebody that just might have the power to change their life – like we were a cross between screenwriters and costume designers, creating new personas as we rifled through the sales racks at the Salvation Army, looking for that one and only dress that some lonely individual had the temerity to throw away. Knowing that someday we’d find use for our discoveries, a reason for why we were drawn to them in the first place, and that they’d, in turn, bring us closer together, to a shared idea made flesh. There were hours spent waiting in the shadows and far corners of parking lots where we could watch, biding our time until a sweet and lovely girl who’d just finished telling us everything there was to know about her exited her place of employment. Together we’d follow the stink of her hopes and dreams to her home or apartment and barge in after her, knocking her to the floor, restraining her with rope or nylon stockings, whatever was readily on hand. You’d go into the kitchen and find us a knife, and pass it to me while I used a black waterproof Sharpie I kept on my person
at all times to dot a seam in her skin where I would make the first cut; where I would trace a path; where we would insert our hands, our fingers touching, and pry free her flesh from her bones.

  I remember you had your favourites – regardless the demands of a particular scene, preferences are still preferences. You never directly stated one way or another what you were thinking, what you truly, deep in your loins, desired. How you’d imagined it would feel being with me but as her. I could sense it, though, when we were together, the different ways you’d react from one skin to the next – from the sweet and shy way you squeezed my hand, spun my late-1950s beehive-sporting college coed into your arms, to the way you grinded out so much pent-up sexual aggression with an all-muscle-and-sinew geisha living in the middle of a post-apocalyptic vision of Tokyo one or two hundred years in the future. It was practically animalistic the way our always-changing narrative helped you to lose yourself – your sense of time and place – in whatever house we’d built for ourselves at that particular moment in time.

  I wish I could say I’d experienced the same degree of excitement and pleasure as you, and I think at the time, while in the thick of things, I did. But now, when I stop and reflect on our time together, on what it was like being zipped more often than not inside someone else’s skin, trapped living someone else’s life, breathing, tasting and smelling someone else’s air, and not being allowed to step away from it, I want only to be able to claw my way free, to step out of all those limp, false exteriors and simply be.

  When I dream about us now, your hands on my face or your body pressing up against mine, massaging the outer skin of my chest and stomach, pressing the sleeve into my flat shallowness beneath, my heart and body burn. It’s like I’m having an allergic reaction and I wake up feeling as if I’ve walked naked through a valley of poison oak. Sometimes, when that happens, my memory escapes me and I forget for a minute or two where I am – even who I am – and I realize it’s because of what we did together.