The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  * * *

  ††

  The setting: a town hall dance floor at night. Rather than construct one from scratch, the production team secured use of a high school gymnasium in Silver Lake and crafted a false floor raised just high enough to be awkward. They added some streamers here and there, a couple of balloon archways, a row of punch bowls set atop long cafeteria tables that ran alongside a vomiting of pastel dresses as far as the eye could see. Voila! We had ourselves a decent replica of 1950s-whatever, provided your main point of reference was Back to the Future.

  I saw you before you saw me, standing in the middle of the floor, awaiting your dance partner. “You look familiar,” I said, walking right up to you. I took both your hands, placed your right on my hip before you even knew what was happening. We took position, stood at the ready as if in a still life, surrounded by more than thirty other couples, their eyes all locked on their partners as they – as we – waited for our cue.

  You blinked then, and I saw shock register in your eyes. It was as if you’d only just noticed the ravishing beehived and red-lipped vixen in front of you.

  “I’m sorry,” you said, “did you say something?”

  “I said you look familiar.” I grinned. “These teeth had freckles, once upon a time.”

  You stared at me carefully, examining my face as you would bacteria under a microscope. Your eyes narrowed then, and I could tell you were busily, nervously sifting through your internal card catalogue of lives, searching for where it was and under what circumstances we’d met.

  “Malorie?” you whispered.

  I nodded. “Charlie.” And you smiled, shyly, appearing dapper as all hell in your pressed off-white slacks and pinstriped suit jacket. You looked at that moment like a little boy who’d gotten into his father’s wardrobe and, without permission, decided to try on all his clothes.

  “All right, everybody, places,” shouted the former coffee runner–turned–assistant director as he swept anxiously through the crowd, quickly checking and rechecking each dance couple’s placement.

  “You look nervous,” you – Richard – said.

  I turned to the right and watched as a band set up against a tall false wall to one side of the gymnasium. Stretched across the wall was a large yellow banner that read HAPPY NEW YEAR 1959.

  “I’ve never done anything like this,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Died.”

  You let out a small laugh. “There’s nothing to it. Forty-five seconds in the hydraulic gimbal will rock the floor and the wall over there comes tumbling down. It’ll be a loud bang, lots of chaos. Just remember to go down with it and you’ll be fine.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It can be.”

  I glanced over at the false wall. “It looks heavy. Will it hurt?”

  You shook your head. “Not in the least. It’s a little like being toppled by a soft foam mattress, only not as fun.”

  “You’ve done this before then,” I said, already knowing the answer.

  “Once or twice. It’s kind of like being back in high school: just roll with the punches and you’ll be fine; stay standing when you should be on the ground and you’ll just stir up trouble.”

  “Yeah, I kinda remember trouble finding me either way,” I muttered, still concerned about the wall scripted to fall on top of us.

  “What did you say?”

  But before I could respond, the assistant director, whose dreams far outclassed his talent, cued up the band and they began to play. “All right, everybody,” he said. “Ready, and action!”

  Richard-you took me by the waist then and we began to dance, swaying slowly in each other’s arms. You adjusted your grip, brushing my arm in the process. When you did, the skin I was wearing tightened beneath your touch, the sudden heat causing the loose flesh to contract slightly, shrink-wrapping around my limbs, my chest, my face and scalp and even all the way down to the base of my spine.

  Then the floor beneath us began to shake. Just forty-five seconds after we started dancing, a series of pistons beneath us and on the other side of the false wall rocked the set, drowning out the music and transforming the ground beneath our feet into an uneven wood-tiled ocean. Couples all around us started screaming, parting, faking confusion and anxiety as our set – our world – continued to shudder and quake.

  Your hand never left mine.

  “Get ready!” you whispered. Seconds later, a series of even larger vibrations not all that dissimilar from an actual earthquake knocked down the walls of our makeshift town hall, burying you, me and everyone else in a sea of foam and lightweight particleboard.

  * * *

  ††

  I remained silent and still beneath the remains of the false wall, waiting for some sound or indication they’d finished the take. As I waited, still dressed in the skin of Eleanor, slightly twisted and dishevelled from the fall, my thoughts again turned to my sister.

  Louise had been a party girl back in her high school days. After Dad got sick, everyone seemed to conveniently forget about the two times he’d had to bail her out of jail – the first for being caught drinking underage in public, the second less than a year later for being caught drinking underage in public and telling the arresting officer to go fuck himself. Mom had no qualms about glossing over that embarrassing bit of family history – usually trucked out during Christmas dinner with the aunts and uncles – when it came time to point out all the ways Louise had succeeded where I had so gloriously failed, completely disregarding the nine-year age gap between us. Louise had gotten her shit together, made it through business school and gotten a meaningful job as the brand manager for one of those companies trying to market yoga pants as respectable office attire. I, meanwhile, fantasized about writing monster movies and “slash-and-bash porn.” That’s what Mom called it when she wasn’t too busy primping her eyebrows to look like a pair of circumflex accents. “It’s childishness,” she said when I was ten and told her about the notebook Dad had taken from me, which contained the unfinished first drafts of three short horror films I’d written – incredibly juvenile stuff, all gore and no plot, but mine regardless. “I won’t allow you to waste your life on such … preposterous endeavours.”

  Years later, after Dad died, following months of Mom’s watchful eye scrutinizing my every move, reminding me of all the ways I’d not lived up to her expectations, I’d had just about all I could take from Herr Mutter. It was Louise, though, who, knowing what I wanted to do and sensing that I’d arrived at the end of my rope – and was ready to hang myself with it – drove me to the bus station early one morning. I remember it all so clearly; as I climbed out of her car and into the crisp pre-rain air with my duffle bag full of clothes and a few empty notebooks, she pushed a wad of sweaty American bills into my hand. “Because we’re all we’ve got,” she said, “and I don’t want you to ever forget it.” I stared at the crumpled ball of cash in my hand, understanding what it meant: she was telling me to go, to figure out my life without the spectre of either one of our parents looming overhead. Louise, in her own way, was admitting to me something I’d known all along: I didn’t belong. She was the favoured child – the one whose path was clearly marked in front of her. The one Dad had called his special little girl, the first-born, the one happy in her skin who got to take dance classes and go shopping with her friends on weekends. I was the odd one out. The one that came with a list of caveats when introduced to friends and co-workers. The one who wanted to wear the faces of their best friends to school, to selfishly try on each life like they were dresses on a rack – like they were mine to begin with – but was told no, don’t do that, that’s not what’s done. “They won’t understand,” Louise had said as I tried to leave the house one morning dressed as someone else. She stopped me, quietly pulled me into the downstairs bathroom and shut the door without alerting Mom. She carefully li
fted off the face I’d been wearing, wet a hand towel and helped clean my skin of whatever dried blood remained. “They won’t know what to do, M_____. They won’t get it. They won’t get you.”

  As luck would have it, a spectre is exactly what I’ve become – the gaunt, malignant silhouette of “no one special.”

  As I lay there in Eleanor’s supple skin, pretending to be dead, I managed to play back our limited interactions, recycling the image of your raspberry-flecked smile as if it were a three-second GIF on an endless loop, and I fooled myself into thinking you were truly interested in me, that the kindness you’d shown me in the minutes leading up to our demise was somehow genuine.

  An hour after we wrapped for the day, as I was still pulling pieces of foam and sawdust from my beehive, you stepped out of the makeup trailer dressed once more like a human being and not some throwback from a bygone era. Your hair was short, dark brown, messed just enough to be cute without looking coy. I tried not to look nervous as you came straight toward me.

  “Hi …” I said.

  “Richard,” you said, taking my hand and kissing it. I could still hear your affected 1950s accent – just a little bit more Midwestern than was normal.

  “I mean you were Richard, but –”

  “Still am,” you said. “For tonight, anyway.” And you reached out and caressed the side of my face. “Hold … hold on a second.” You hesitated briefly, then, using your thumb, pressed down on my cheek, smoothing out an unwelcome ripple of loose skin, leaving it taut, not unlike a porcelain doll. You even smirked at the change. “There we go. You’re even more beautiful now than you were just a moment ago. Tell me, do you have dinner plans this evening?” I shook my head. “Perfect!” and you placed your right fist on your hip, making a loop with your arm.

  I hesitated, then threaded my arm through the gap. You were close enough that I could smell your aftershave, and a little of the sawdust that had covered us just a short time earlier. My heart was beating harder and faster than I’d ever thought possible.

  “Let’s get out of here,” you said.

  “Okay … my name is –”

  “Eleanor.”

  “… Okay … but … just for tonight?”

  You smiled with searing confidence. “We’ll see.”

  10. The Morning After

  Posted: 12/10/2013

  “I’ve been reading your blog,” my therapist announced at the start of my most recent visit. Absent from her voice was her usual delicately embroidered inquisitiveness, replaced instead by sharp, almost accusatory punctuation. “It’s … interesting. I admit I was a little surprised to see parts of our last conversation so readily discussed. I wrongly expected, when you first told me what you were doing, that our sessions would remain private.”

  “If I’m going to do this right,” I said, “I’ve got to be willing to put all my knives on the table.”

  She smiled thinly. “I’d like to investigate that notion, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Shoot.”

  She cleared her throat. “Ignoring for now your comments relating to my appearance, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask how you feel the process of depicting your story in this manner is affecting you.”

  “I’m not so sure it is,” I said after a moment. I leaned back on the couch in her cluttered forest-green office that always smelled of garlic and hummus from the falafel place below and crossed my arms. Outside, I could hear a couple arguing in the street about their order. “Some days are better than others, but nothing’s really changed. My situation’s the same as it ever was, I’m just whining from on top of a larger soapbox now.”

  “Do you feel as if detailing your memories in this way is helping you to come to terms with your situation?”

  “That’s like asking a death-row inmate if a last-minute confession will absolve them of their sins.”

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business frowned. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad melodramatic? You’re not a prisoner awaiting execution, M_____.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  She sighed and quickly jotted something down on the notepad in her lap before looking up at me again. “Last time you were here you said that writing this blog wasn’t about receiving validation or satisfaction, but that you hoped to present to the world some degree of transparency – for both D____ and yourself. Do you feel on any level that you’ve accomplished or are accomplishing this?”

  I sat up straight, swung my legs over the side of the couch and gaped at Doctor None-of-Your-Business. “I don’t feel like I’ve even begun,” I said. “Every time I sit down to write it’s like my fingers start tying themselves into knots and I lose touch with who he was – who I thought he was. When I step back and look at what I’ve written so far it’s like I’m staring out at an iced-over lake, and everything interesting, everything I thought was special about the other person – about him – is muddled and obfuscated, trapped just beneath the surface where I can’t reach it. I sprint out onto the ice and start chasing after our memories and all I wind up doing, in the end, is slipping and falling on my ass.” I sighed. “In my head I thought I had a painting of a person, but the more layers I peel back the more I see that it was just a sketch.”

  “That’s because you’re still afraid,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Disappointing him.”

  “D____?”

  “No, M_____, your father. You said so yourself in the entry dated November 17: the last conversation you ever had with him he said he was disappointed in you. So far you’ve managed to write a great deal about your family life, but, as you say, you’ve only barely touched upon the other half of this …” She flipped through her notepad to her notes from our last appointment. “This ‘part and parcel’ equation. If I were to hazard a guess, I think your father’s legacy is keeping you from saying all you want to say, both about yourself and about D____.”

  “I don’t see what Dad has to do with any of this. In case it wasn’t already clear, we weren’t really on the best of terms when he died. I didn’t even stick around ’til the end of his funeral; meanwhile, Mom invited their entire joint address book as if she were filling seats at a party, and she just vanished into a bottomless pit of well-wishers and future support group professionals. Those people, hangers-on, all of them, they swarmed her like blackflies hovering over a carcass. They consoled her and told her it was okay to fall apart without caring that it would be Louise and I who’d have to pick up the pieces of Mom and Humpty Dumpty her back together again.”

  “And with yet another striking assortment of mixed metaphors you’ve once again managed to redirect the conversation from your father to your mother.”

  I could feel the sides of my face curdling into a sneer. “Because she was a witch. I thought I made that clear.”

  “But what of your father? What was he?”

  For nearly three minutes I didn’t respond, listening instead to the commotion below and the traffic out on the street. I allowed my eyes to drift first to the notepad in Doctor None-of-Your-Business’s lap, then to her pointed knees and finally to the black-and-grey checkerboard carpet. “You know,” I finally said, “Louise had this idea … more a saying, actually, that if you spend too much time reliving the past you’ll wind up destroying your future.”

  “Okay: How?”

  “I’m not sure. By missing out on it, I guess.”

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business nodded. “There is truth in that, yes. It’s certainly an interesting statement coming from someone in the middle of blogging their entire life story. But there’s another way of looking at it: revisiting one’s history is the path to better understanding one’s present.”

  “Right, okay … So growing up, my sister had this friend named Peter – Pete.”

  “Was Pete her boyfriend?”

  “He was a boy, and he was her friend, but they we
ren’t messing around with one another if that’s what you’re wondering. Pete was too much of a fuck-up for Louise to ever take seriously in that way. He was two years younger than her and kind of spastic, like one of those kids who’d eaten a little too much Elmer’s Glue in the first grade. But he was a good egg, nice, always had your back. Anyway, Pete had chronic asthma. It was so bad he had to wear one of those silver medical alert bracelets at all times. When Pete turned fifteen, he also started masturbating compulsively. Rigorously even – like he was training for the Olympics in jacking off. He’d leave class two or three times an hour to go rub one out in the boy’s bathroom. Everyone knew what he was doing even if no one said it to his face. I mean I was only in primary school and I still managed to hear about it. Louise told me that one day he made so many deposits he started hyperventilating and passed out against the wall of one of the bathroom stalls, pants bunched around his ankles. When Pete didn’t come back to class that afternoon, his teacher went and found him in the stall. The teacher and a janitor pulled Pete’s pants back up and helped him to the nurse’s office before calling his parents. Of course, Pete didn’t say what he was really doing in there – he claimed he was just having a piss when he got all woozy, and that’s the last thing he remembered before waking up on his back on a bed in the nurse’s office feeling completely spent. The next week, though, he did it again. This time when he passed out he fell forward and hit his head on the toilet paper dispenser – gave himself a helluva gash on his forehead, right between the eyes. This time they called the paramedics and took him out on a stretcher, in front of everybody. Poor Pete was humiliated. That night he told his parents everything.

  “Now Pete’s mom, she was devout. The very next day she took him to see her pastor so he could help Pete fight his evil hormonal urges with prayer and rosaries and shit like that – because unbeknownst to poor see-you-in-hell Pete, he was firing loads of concentrated sin into each and every wad of toilet paper he flushed away. Pete’s dad, though, he was a man’s man, and he was furious. It was bad enough his own son was some weakling who couldn’t catch his breath after jogging fifty feet, but for Pete to have actually injured himself while masturbating? That was just too much for Pete Senior to handle. He called his son names. He told his friends at work what a fuck-up Pete was, and they told their kids, and soon everybody at school knew that Pete had managed to hospitalize himself because he’d masturbated so much he put himself in respiratory distress.