The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  13. From One Transient to Another

  Posted: 01/12/2014

  I’ve thought a lot in the weeks and months since that night at the Galaxy, about the lie you so expertly sold me. That bit about freedom – to be who we wanted to be, live how we wanted to live – it was absolutely true, but the subtext with which you laced it was like arsenic at the bottom of a drinking glass. Louise saw it long before I did. She tried to warn me, but I was (unfortunately, expectedly) too stubborn to listen.

  I’ve thought a lot about that word, too: transient. You made it sound like something glamorous, whispering it over my shoulder like you wanted to ask me to prom but were too shy to do it to my face. But transient isn’t anything glamorous or romantic. It isn’t even all that nice. Do you know its synonyms? Ephemeral, fleeting, passing, short-lived, volatile – actually I kind of like that one. Insubstantial. Temporal.

  Temporary.

  * * *

  ††

  Recently, I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about the future and all the things I want to do or try while I still have the time. Invariably, I come back to something I used to wonder about when I was younger: what it would be like to have a career as a foley artist. It was something that crossed my mind every now and then, when I was still living at home and the writing wasn’t going as well as I’d have liked. When you break it down, the work of a foley artist is piecemeal, invisible. For them, to succeed is to craft the closest approximation to the sounds we perceive – or think we perceive – as natural, so that no sore thumbs exist, no hollow footfalls on solid concrete or tears in the fabric of reality, like when you see someone onscreen using a computer but you can tell that the audio’s been lifted straight from the soundboard of a 1981 Galaga arcade cabinet. Do you know, for example, what it is that gives a lightsaber its telltale hum? Idling motors from old movie projectors and the interference from a television or microphone. Just fucking wild.

  When I think now about what it is a foley artist does and how they do it, dissecting the world through soundscapes, I wonder what they might lack to better foster their preternatural awareness of sounds and noise. Because it’s a trade-off, right? That’s how gifts work – you get something extra in exchange for something else. I imagine most of them are half-blind, or can’t taste or smell for shit; I picture them as athletes with left legs three inches shorter than their rights, forever hobbling, compensating. Me? I smell everything. It’s the hyperosmia – it’s never really gone away, regardless of the way my weight’s fluctuated over the years, and it only increases the further I drop to better fit each new skin. That’s my gift, or curse, I guess. This world is thick with layers of scent, each a memory of its own. We wear smells like points on a map showing where we’ve been, what we’ve done, what we love or eat or even our addictions and failings. We reek equally of failure and success. Smells are earthy. Real. Sounds … sounds can be faked. They can be falsehoods. Lies. A scent or stench, however, can only be masked so much, and will hurl you back in time like nothing else.

  What sound does a gun make when it’s fired? Does it change when fired at a person instead of a lifeless target? How about the sick slide of a butcher’s blade slipping between someone’s ribs, puncturing tissue, lung …

  This is the world you live in – the promotion of death via makeup and guns that fire blanks. The more I think about it, the more I revisit our conversation at the Galaxy Drive-In, the less sense it all makes: each life on film, no matter how short, no matter how quickly death’s approach, is immortalized. It’s the nature of the beast that the work you do in this industry will outlive you. The better the job you do, the greater the likelihood of gaining recognition for your hard work – and no one, my dear D____, works harder than you. I watched so many times as you sank, completely, into a nothing role, into a twenty-second spin as a faceless soldier running into a battle you were destined to lose. What if what you wanted more than anything was to disappear and forget all the lives you’ve led? Why would you do something that seems, at least on the surface, so at odds with the life you wish you’d had?

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business called it months ago, when I first started talking about you and I and us. She was quick to say that you probably have no idea what you really want out of life, that you’ve likely never had a plan and move from role to role without ever looking into a mirror because you’re always searching for something to help you better define yourself. Only you never find it and you never will because we both know it goes a lot deeper than that. Maybe you should speak to someone about this, really get to the bottom of your shit. I know a person. She’d probably love to hear the other side of this mess.

  * * *

  ††

  It was late June, and our last day together as brother and sister. We died in each other’s arms as our hero desperately tried to save what remained of our radiation-poisoned convoy. Stragglers picked up along our journey would survive to rebuild, to start a new society from the ashes of the old and to lay the groundwork for the sequel due out by next Christmas. They buried us in a field, where the cold winter ground had not yet frozen. Heads were hung and prayers uttered, carried on the wind with what I imagined would be a sweeping orchestral score. I watched from afar as our former companions cried spritzed tears over our empty graves.

  I searched for you in the aftermath, but you’d already gone.

  My expectations had gotten the better of me yet again. Following our meeting at the Galaxy you’d acted different. Cordial. For the rest of the week you helped me prepare our lines; you brought me coffee and snacks from craft services; you even helped me adjust Claudette’s sleeve, massaging its features so that her skin was indistinguishable from my own. “There we go,” you said, once more pressing your thumb to my cheek just below the eye, smoothing out my skin exactly as you’d done with Eleanor. We hadn’t seen each other at all outside of work, but I thought … once the job was done we might have taken some time, talked a bit about what was next. For us I mean – assuming, foolishly as I was, that there was even an “us” to talk about. However, it seemed you had better things to do than stick around for your funeral.

  That night I learned about Aud. On the phone, her brother could barely contain his rage, tripping between English and Quebecois French when he lost control and started shouting into the receiver. He wanted to know if I knew which of her friends might have sold her the stuff that killed her. I didn’t – for better or worse, Aud had kept me out of all that. But that did nothing to satisfy his hurt; he called me a worthless piece of shit, said me and every single one of her rotten LA friends were to blame for what happened to his sister. I didn’t try to fight him; this wasn’t about getting the facts right and figuring out what had gone wrong or who was to blame. It was about grieving. He wasn’t ready yet to accept Aud’s agency in what had happened. That would mean addressing his own neglect in missing or ignoring whatever warning signs there might have been, given his sister’s penchant for self-destruction, which, far as I knew, went back many years before we’d ever met.

  “Live hard and leave a beautiful corpse,” she’d shouted to me over drinks at a club, and then more drinks, to celebrate my first gig as an extra. “That’s what Jack Dean said, right?”

  “It’s James Dean, and I’m fairly sure no one has ever actually said –”

  She punched me hard in the bicep. “Jee-zus! Lighten up, ya? It’s Hollywood! This fucking town is ours!”

  That was Aud, really and truly. It’s how she’d want me to remember her – a gasoline-soaked rag tossed over the spark of this brilliant, hideous town.

  I called Louise that same night. I didn’t tell her about Aud – she didn’t know enough about my life in LA to know what Aud had meant to me. I just needed someone to talk to. I couldn’t cry … I thought I should be able to – Aud was my closest friend – but the tears just never came. So I called Louise thinking that talking to her might help take my mind off things
. It didn’t take long, however, before the conversation again turned in your direction.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said once I’d finished describing our week together on-set and how you’d disappeared again at the end of our stretch. “That’s all there is to it. You draw in dysfunctional lovers like flies to shit.”

  “Gee. Thanks,” I said.

  “It’s true. Mark thinks so, too.” Mark was Louise’s new boyfriend with whom she’d already shared our family’s history. Because this was the story of my life.

  “I’m unlucky,” I said.

  “The Jews were unlucky, M_____. You’re a glutton for punishment.”

  “Did … did you just compare my love life to the Holocaust?”

  “Time. Everything’s funnier in time.”

  “I don’t think it works that –”

  “You meet these guys who smile at you pretty and treat you real swell for a few minutes, and you go ahead and give them a blow job in the janitor’s closet and what happens next? They walk all over you. Every. Single. Time.”

  “Not every single time,” I said, defensively.

  “Oh, yeah? Carl …”

  “… Was going through a rough patch with his family.”

  “He was living in his parents’ basement.”

  “And they raised his rent.”

  “And he was forty.”

  “He … Carl was trying real hard.”

  “Fine then. Mike.”

  “Realized he wasn’t over his ex and wanted to wait a bit – so he could be sure we weren’t just another rebound fling.”

  “How long is a bit?”

  “I don’t see how this has anything to do with –”

  “How. Long.”

  “… Four years.”

  “Daniel.”

  “Okay, see, that wasn’t his fault. His wife was –”

  “Oh, just fucking kill me already.”

  “Fine. I have shit for radar. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. And this isn’t any different.”

  “It is different,” I said to her, instantly regretting being so open about our situation in the first place.

  “Because he’ll tell you to go fuck a fence post if you call him by his real name? You’re right, M_____, that’s pretty goddamn different.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Please. By all means. Educate me.”

  “He’s … there’s more to him than he’s willing to admit, okay? There’s a lot of love and kindness in him. I see it. I know it’s there. It’s just … it’s buried. For the time being.”

  “For the time being,” she repeated haughtily. I could practically hear her nose pointing to the sky.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you want to be the one to dig it all up.”

  “I … no … I mean … Damn it, Louise, I’m not a fixer.”

  “No,” she said, practically choking out the syllable. “Absolutely not. Also not gullible, naive or living in a dream world.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  “M_____, enough. Forget this Hollywood Wonderland bullshit. Come home. Come back to what’s real.”

  “What for? There’s nothing for me there.”

  And she paused then, rather suddenly, and I could hear it in the silence that followed, what she’d wanted to say but didn’t: she was there, still. She was waiting for the day I’d had enough and would return to her, so we could be a family again.

  She hung up without so much as a sigh.

  * * *

  ††

  Three weeks passed. Louise had tried calling me back a few times that night, but I just turned my phone off and went to bed. She called again a few days later and I let it go to voice mail.

  It was mid-July and we were sharing a scene dressed as Russian lab techs in a spy thriller – 007 fodder, white lab coats and thick black-framed glasses for targets. My hair was done up in a tight bun, with two yellow pencils marking an X through the back. We were on set for just one day of shooting, followed by a callback a week and a day later. It was for the same film, but we’d been transformed into a different set of background expendables.

  Our first day on set, disguised as lab techs, I flirted with you in my best attempt at a Russian accent. Smiled at you, catching the corner of your eye between takes, seductively tracing your shoulder with my fingertip when standing next to you – calling you only by the name you’d been given in the script. I left as soon as our day had wrapped, before you could react to my presence. At the end of our second scene together, this time as a pair of unfortunate background tourists in a studio stand-in for Berlin – recently bullet-riddled bystanders without so much as names, pasts or identities – we walked off set, hand in hand, without anyone to mourn us or inquire as to our wrong-place-wrong-time demise. This time I didn’t try to tell you my name, didn’t try to guess at yours, didn’t for a second pretend we were anything more than we’d been on the page.

  It worked – you caught on. You glimpsed complicity, tenderness, in the way I gently squeezed your hand, as if we’d been together for years with names we neither knew nor cared. It was thrilling.

  That night we went back to the motel we’d shared as Richard and Eleanor. As soon as the door closed behind us you started touching me, running your hands over my outer layer. You bit my ear, chewed through the single-use sleeve of my patchwork European model while traffic hurtled by in the night. The walls were thin; there was no doubt others would hear us. I sucked in a breath and you grew hot to the touch. There were no lines for us to memorize – no character arcs, no narrative rise or fall. Show, don’t tell: the sounds of feet scuffling together, rubbing against the starch-hard motel bedspread. That night you tore my body free from its sleeve and I continued to lie with you as her, as we had been on set, together, a fiction.

  Act II

  14. Zeitgeist

  Posted: 01/20/2014

  Douglas Mayberry, Marine Corps. Part of a convoy killed by a roadside bomb during the pre-credit sequence of Child of Honour. This weekend, I finally had a chance to see the performance so raved about on Access Hollywood. D____ looked good up there, for the three minutes and twenty-seven seconds of screen time allotted to him and the other superfluous grunts. The scene was impeccably shot and staged, and utterly layered with pathos, setting up the audience for two hours of tears as the titular little boy struggled to find himself with only the vaguest memories of last year’s best supporting actor as his dad.

  Andreas Rain did have a point: D____ wasn’t top billed or anything, but damn if the camera didn’t fall in love with him. He was barely more than a name and a body, and still he managed to pull so much out of his ass: wide, watery eyes that, as he lay dying on the side of the road, his insides half out of his body, looked like they were actually staring at whatever it was that existed on the other side of this world. In just seconds he effortlessly threw down against dear old best-supporting-actor dad who’d appear in flashbacks for the rest of the film and still wouldn’t be remembered as strongly.

  Seven hundred and sixty-four. And as an added bonus he succeeded, in a single calendar year, at dying onscreen alongside all four of last year’s Oscar-winning actors and actresses. A dubious honour to which they’re all thrilled, I’m sure.

  Do you know who contacted me today, Douglas Mayberry? Ezra Cunting Oppenheim. It was a quick conversation. Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as it was a fax with the words cease and desist underlined and emboldened at the top of the page, her signature at the bottom, the two Ps looped together like a bow tie with legs. All told, it was a little gauche for my tastes – a few flower doodles and some sparkles and it prettied up nicely, covered all that nonsense about “attacks” against her client, and “cease this destructive and nefarious slander at onc
e or we will be forced to take legal action.”

  Now, I know what you’re thinking, dear readers: Who in their right mind sends a fax anymore? But at least I now know they’re paying attention to me. Pardon me for a moment while I directly address the agent in the room: Fuck off, Ezra. Respect my rights, freedom of expression, blah-fucking-blah. I’ve said absolutely nothing slanderous or incriminating about your client. Don’t believe me? Take a look through the archives. Go ahead, I’ll wait. And I’ll give you a shiny nickel if you can actually find his name anywhere in print.

  Done? Great. Then let’s take a moment and talk about zeitgeist (noun: the spirit of a time or age). See, D____ and I, we’re on the tip of it. It’s certainly fair to assume neither one of us expected this to happen, but forces – and talkative, effusive directors – have dragged us into the spotlight. For my part, I never anticipated this invective would appear on the front page of Reddit; until ten days ago, I hadn’t even glanced at the blog’s stats. As it happens, this quiet little story of excoriation and retreat is averaging eight to ten thousand unique views a day. I’m not even bothering to read the comments section most days, because, as I’m sure you’re aware, therein lies madness, racism, sexism, homophobia and every kind of degrading, demoralizing slander they have a word for – and a few they don’t. Hell, I’ve lost track of just how many people have told me to hurry up and kill myself, even going so far as to offer up suggestions as to how. Like I haven’t already thought of most of them, you rank fucking amateurs.

  D____, on the other hand, put himself in this position. I’m not talking about what shitty thing he said when a microphone was unexpectedly shoved in his face. No, I’m referring to him being there in the first place. Red carpets were never his thing – too many eyes, too much attention. I wonder: What in the world would ever have flipped his opinion on that?