Aud finished her drink, her fingers lingering on the glass, tapping her nails on the rim to fill the silence. “I just don’t know what it is,” she said, finally. “Why you’d be interested in someone like that and not someone better.”
“Someone like you?”
“For example.”
“Aud, haven’t you heard? It’s death I’m obsessed with, not ticking time bombs.”
“Salaud.” She chewed the word as if gnawing on a piece of steak.
“At any rate,” I said, “I doubt I’ll ever see him again. I was just thinking out loud.” But even speaking the words, I knew I didn’t quite believe them. There was this nagging thought, though, in the back of my head, that maybe I should. I was falling for him, yes, but also I was aware, to some extent, how loose and entirely chemical the whole thing was at that point. In those early days he was something of a ghost to me, that much was true. At first I assumed it was performance-based, like he was actively carving an identity out of stone, doing whatever he could to be seen as a serious artist and someone not at all swayed by the limelight. It was commendable; he was bristling with that thing people have when they’re not being total assholes: professionalism.
But Aud was right about one thing: tracking him down was initially like hunting Bigfoot.
That night, after Aud and I said our see-you-laters, I went home and jumped on IMDb – where there are no pictures, no biographical information of any kind on D____ – and started my search. His page – the first of three I found with his last name spelled different enough on each profile to confuse anyone suddenly interested in who he was or what he’d done – was just a list of a few hundred roles with very few proper names attached, mostly basic descriptive identifiers such as “Charred Body in Driver’s Seat” and “Plague Victim #312.” It was the two roles we’d shared, however, that first clued me in to his somewhat splintered persona: the name he’d used on the call sheet for A War to Remember didn’t list Charlie the Chin among its credits – they were two separate people. A bit more cross-referencing and some quick math, adding up the various roles across the multiple profiles I’d found, and I began to better understand Alex’s Frank Welker comparison.
He’s a ronin – a travelling purveyor of death for hire to anyone, seemingly regardless of the quality of the script. (Clearly – have you watched Piranha Head? Good. Don’t.) I immediately started downloading everything of D____’s I could get my hands on – educating myself, as it were, on his career and, hopefully, the person behind the name(s) on the call sheet. The more I watched, fascinated by the very idea of a death scene artist, the more his true self was revealed to me layer by bloody layer. He embodied something quintessentially beautiful about film, how flexible it was, how … transient. Fuck, I promised myself after everything he put me through I’d never use that word again, but it’s really all that fits. Slowly, I started to see patterns emerging in his work – waves – where he’d take up a job in one place, sort of settle down for a few weeks, maybe a month, do a few more jobs, some walk-ons if they were available, and then he’d suddenly disappear and pop up again a couple of weeks later on the other side of the country, doing the exact same thing all over again. It was like he was holding his hand to a hot stove for as long as possible before running away and thrusting it into a bucket of ice once the heat – the sitting still in one place – became too much to tolerate.
Yes, I was quickly becoming obsessed. I see that now. I admit it. I could not escape his deaths, so I turned to documenting them instead:
#1: Steven Price, The Man in the Machine
Steven Price, son of Jason and Martha Price, passed away late last week at the tender age of eighteen. Young Steven was the victim of a renegade cyborg named Victor One-Oh-Seven. The thirty-five seconds of Steven’s glorious eighteen-year existence ended abruptly, as they have for so many children and young men in our unfortunate time of conflict and strife, when the factory-rejected, inhumanly scaled exoskeleton crushed Steven’s pitiful body beneath its Volkswagen-sized steel heel. Though Steven’s unremarkable life was tragically cut short, he still managed to leave his mark upon this world – a lovely shade of crimson etched forever into the pavement at the corner of Manchester and Sepulveda, five minutes outside of Culver City.
He will be missed.
It’s a little rough, I know. It’s surprisingly difficult to detail a life from just the character name on a casting sheet and thirty-five seconds of footage – which, in glancing at the trivia on The Man in the Machine’s IMDb page, was a marked increase from his character’s original allotted screen time of only twenty seconds. Apparently the very first time he died on cue was so transcendent he managed to eke out an extra fifteen seconds of all-eyes-on-him.
I accidentally submitted this obit to my editor at the Times. He called me on a Saturday afternoon to see if I was feeling all right, if I needed some time off or maybe someone to talk to. I hadn’t realized my mistake until then, and it took five or ten minutes of frantic backpedalling before he relented, leaving me alone with the promise that he’d be there for me, if and when I needed a shoulder. We’d come a long way from me basically breaking his spirit for my benefit. From then on, however, I was more careful with my work.
Every night for weeks I watched another film on D____’s various lists of credits, and following the end of each one I’d write another obit. The more goodbyes and farewells I was able to conjure from his single-serving turns for the camera, the better the picture of him I received. It was never that clear, more like staring at a person through the narrow slits of half-closed blinds, or the white snake of an unfinished crossword puzzle, but it was more than I’d previously known. Words filled in the blanks and letter by letter he appeared – the bare minimum of him, anyway.
Here’s another – it’s one of my favourites:
#312: Commander Epson, Of Widows and Warriors
A good man, a family man, Commander Archibald J. Epson of her Majesty’s Royal Fleet rose to meet all occasions head-on. One day, he threw himself on a live grenade to protect his fellow officers. That was kind of the end of things for good ol’ Archie. Went out with a bang – that’s worth something, isn’t it?
A full week into my research, I started reaching out. I asked Aud if she could float D____’s name around a few sets, see if anyone knew anything about him – anything beyond what I’d managed to cull from my limited celluloid-based investigation. Over the next few weeks she helped put me in touch with a couple of makeup artists who’d done some work on him, prettying him up like a corpse, and one DP who remembered shooting D____ on at least five different occasions and reported that it was like he was a different man each time. Those who remembered him, it seemed – those precious few – declared he was little more than a blip on their radar: he was there and then he wasn’t, poof, gone in the blink of an eye as if he was worried he’d be asked to stick around, to do anything more than he’d been contracted for, if he didn’t light out of there immediately. There was no personal mailing address on file for him with any studio or casting director that would talk to me; they forwarded all payments to his agent. It was like he was a goddamn genie in a bottle – there when he was needed, gone once he’d completed his task.
My mind wandered to the many possible reasons behind the dramatic peaks and valleys of D____’s commitment. I watched with rapt attention every frame, every star, every bit player he interacted with while lying on a concrete floor in a Midwestern pub in a pool of his own blood and vomit, or lying face down in some wealthy Floridian’s Olympic-sized swimming pool while crime scene investigators pored over the carefully positioned clues detailing his final minutes, and I asked myself if any of them tried to talk to him, tried to get to know him on any level. I wondered, jealously, if he’d found others in whose arms he could so comfortably die.
Aud called him a myth as if it were a bad word, like it took something away from who he really was – something tangible. She was
afraid I’d waste my time chasing a phantom that wanted nothing to do with anyone. Another difficult guy, as Louise so ungraciously put it.
That night, our meal finished, Aud and I exited the Chinese restaurant and she immediately lit a cigarette. “I didn’t mean to shoot you down like that,” she said, noticeably calmer after her first drag. “I just don’t want to see you with some undeserving prick.”
“We don’t know he’s a prick,” I said, more defensively than I’d intended.
“We know he’s a fucking bit player who doesn’t like to rub shoulders with the rest of the cattle, ya? Says a lot about a man’s character.”
“I get it, Aud. I do.”
“Ya? So tell me about it.”
“You don’t want me to fuck up my future.”
She exhaled another plume of smoke, and frowned. “Fuck your future,” she said, angrily remembering her rant inside the restaurant. “Fuck all futures. Futures are for the weak. For fucking planners and businessmen and suburbanites with platitude-a-day calendars on their desks and pictures of their kids plastered across their fridges. Live right here, right now, in this motherfucking moment. That’s what matters. It’s all that matters.” She tossed her half-smoked cigarette to the ground and stepped in for a hug. Her skin smelled like a peach-and-vanilla-scented ashtray. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt again. You’ll call me if you need to talk, ya?”
“Yeah, I’ll call.” I gave her a squeeze, and she turned and started walking to her car. I shouted after her, “I love you, you crazy bitch. You know that, right?”
Aud, still walking away from me, raised both middle fingers in the air. “Va te faire foutre!” she shouted without turning back around.
* * *
††
Two months later, in late June, Aud died of an overdose. I remember getting the three a.m. call from her brother in Montreal. He asked if I’d known she was using and I lied to him without even thinking twice. He was furious. He talked about coming to town and finding whoever it was who sold his sister drugs, but I knew, even in the middle of his shouting, that he wouldn’t make the trip. It was all bluster – angry, infuriated vitriol that could not and should not have been contained. I wished I could have felt as much anger and hurt over her death as he did; the luxury of purpose was embedded in his rage. For two days following Aud’s death I contemplated sending her family the obit I’d written for her, thinking it might help their grieving to learn just a little of the Aud I had known for ten years and change. Then, thinking better of it, I deleted what I’d written; as painful as it was to admit, she didn’t belong to me any longer.
* * *
††
In one of my weaker moments near the beginning of my relationship with D____, as we were busy gleefully stealing the skins of practically everyone we met, regardless of how they fit into our scripts – their fuel for our fire – I thought again about Aud, about finding out where she’d been buried and unearthing her body; taking what was left of her skin and using it for myself, to disappear into something new, something D____ would never have expected. It hadn’t been that long – I didn’t know if decomposition would have set in already, or if there was even anything I could do to salvage what remained of her.
In the end, though, I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right.
Her skin had already been stretched far enough.
#650: Charlie the Chin, The Scorpion and the Frog
Charlie fucked the wrong girl. Too bad, so sad, the end.
9. The Buddy Holly Incident
Posted: 12/03/2013
You wore the life of Richard Thorn for our first real date. Richard, the upstanding encyclopedia salesman who wore his dress slacks to Saturday nights at the malt shoppe and his black, nearly knee-high socks to bed, even in the summer. Richard, who made his first dollar painting the white picket fences of his very Pleasantville-esque neighbourhood at the age of eight, and from that moment on, believed, in his heart, the virtues of a self-made man. Of a capital-C Capitalist. Of the American Dream™ that never truly existed except on paper.
It was late April when we next met, on the set of a mid-century tragedy. I was Eleanor – just Eleanor. She was a simple sleeve I’d pulled from the back of my closet to match the vague, surname-less description provided in the daily call sheet: a slender, barely-old-enough-to-vote White slip wearing a light blue knitted cardigan over a pale pink tailored blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Eleanor had been a good girl – a God-fearing choirgirl, too kind for her own good, too eager to dance with the very first boy to ask for her hand. I remember how sweet and out of place she had seemed when I met her one evening during my third year living in the city; she seemed so naive, it was like she’d just walked in off a farm. I found her busing tables at a diner in Santa Monica, and smiled when she came up to me and asked with a zero-gravity lilt in her voice if I wanted cream with my coffee. How soft and impossibly blemish free her skin appeared later that night as, crouching in the bushes outside her apartment after walking her home, I sheared her down to the bone with a scalpel I’d stolen from a walk-in clinic: two long slits on either side starting at the shoulders and running all the way down to her toes. I took careful steps to banana-peel her delicate flesh without tearing it at the edges, crying as the overwhelming scent of libraries – of damp, mouldy time- and water-damaged paperback novels – flooded out of her, as I imagined what it would feel like for her skin to fit my body half as well as it did hers. I’d stolen limbs before, a face or two in my youth, pretending I had skills and experience beyond the boundaries of the narrow bubble in which I’d lived, but Eleanor’s was the first sleeve I’d stolen in its entirety. I wasn’t prepared for it, either, the amount of skin, how little it seems when on our bodies but how much it expands, how much there really is when you lay someone flat and see the full extent of their shell. The plastic container I’d brought for her was too small, and her arms and legs flapped in the wind, caught halfway beneath the lid that no longer fit, as I sprinted away from the scene of the crime, sheltered by the night. I would get her home, though, no matter what. I would keep what remained of her safe and secure until I had occasion to pull her off the rack.
It was Louise who, many years ago, first caught me wearing another’s face – a girl in my tenth grade homeroom named Brianna Mears. Brie was athletic and popular and got good grades. She was everything I wasn’t but wished I could have been. One day, while Brie was walking home from school, I pulled her into the woods behind her house and told her how pretty she was and how I wanted to be just like her. She laughed and said that was impossible. Then I picked up a stone shaped like an arrowhead and jammed it into the side of her face, carving her skin away from her skull as if etching a bas-relief out of clay. She screamed until she passed out on the forest floor and I continued sawing an outline around the edges of her face. It was rough cutting at first; the stone made a fwup sound with every severed muscle, like a steak knife sawing through a tenacious vein of fat. The scent of pumpkin pancakes drenched in cinnamon and maple syrup wafted out from the gap in her flesh. I remember salivating at it – it had been some time since I’d enjoyed such decadence. Hyperosmia, a doctor would later say, one of the ones Mom took me to when my high school weight loss became too great to ignore – an intense acuity for scents, sometimes brought on by sudden or extreme starvation.
When I finished cutting I slipped my fingers beneath her skin and tugged three times before hearing the schlop of what sounded like a rubber boot stepping in rainwater-fresh mud. Her face came free in my hands. The next morning, Louise came into my bedroom while I was busy kneading the loose flesh of Brie’s face over my own, one layer of skin on top of the other as if it were an ill-fitting Halloween mask. “What are you doing?” she asked while I stood there, shocked by her sudden appearance. “I-it’s not what you think,” I stammered as I tried to think of a believable excuse for why I was massaging another person’
s skin into my own, the stain of what little blood remained travelling down the V of my neck. For several seconds Louise stared at my reflection in the mirror, her own face a mixture of confusion and disgust, and then, at last, concern. She nodded once, slowly, and backed out of my room, gently pulling the door until it clicked shut. She wouldn’t speak to me again about the matter until a month after Dad’s funeral, when she told me she understood if there were certain things I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about, that it was okay to be me and that I didn’t ever have to wear a second skin around her. “Because we’re all we’ve got,” she said as I slowly removed the face and hair of a young woman I’d met only a week before, in a park across the street from my school, and smiled at her, lovingly, as myself.
The Death Scene Artist Page 5
