What was I supposed to say? I'd not seen the script -- I didn't know what sort of role I was meant to play, or if I was meant to play one at all. For all I knew you were a man married to his work with no life outside the prison. I was flying blind and quickly fished a life from the ether.
M_____ places a hand on GUARD 528491's chest.
M_____
(Concerned)
You can walk away from … from that place.
GUARD 528491
I can't.
M_____
You can. I know it's difficult to accept, but --
GUARD 528491
The company … if I leave my post, they'll come after me -- after us. There's nowhere to go, nowhere we can escape to.
M_____ sits on the bed next to GUARD 528491 and puts a hand to the bar code on his neck.
M_____
We can still try.
GUARD 528491
We won't make it.
M_____
What matters is that we give it our best shot.
GUARD 528491
They'll kill us. They'll kill you.
M_____
(Smiles)
Then we give them hell before we go.
M_____ leans in and KISSES GUARD 528491 on the lips.
17. The Best Stories Bleed Real Blood
Posted: 01/28/2014
It was fast becoming the norm, me waking up alone in motel rooms, feeling sunrise disoriented while I tried to remember where I was and how to get home again. As Guard 528491, he’d slipped out of the room at four in the morning to face his destiny head-on. I had pretended to be asleep, but still I felt it as he sat on the edge of the bed, the ancient mattress springs creaking beneath as he laboriously put on his boots. His character’s impending doom sat heavily on his shoulders, forced his head to the ground in what could easily have been mistaken for either prayer or quiet resignation.
An hour after he left I got up and showered, still dressed in my best interpretation of our night together – in a patchwork of the skins he’d provided. He’d wept with me over the life he was scheduled to lose – the life that was never his to begin with. And while I was sitting down at a greasy spoon just up the street from the motel, getting a plate of runny scrambled eggs with carbon-black bacon and “freshly brewed” turpentine on the side, he was being unceremoniously torn to pieces by an escaping prison mob of futuristic cyber deviants. Running another forkful of egg through a glob of ketchup on the corner of the plate, the red and yellow and white mixing in a disconcertingly gory manner, I thought of dropping a twenty on the table and hurrying to the set, to be there for him when he needed me most. But I didn’t. I knew enough to see that the skin I’d stitched together the night before, from the patterns he’d stolen for me – for us – had already started to wither from strain and lack of treatment; small cracks like pale winter lips had started to appear in the webbing between my fingers. It wouldn’t take more than a scrub brush or a coarse towel to open an exit wound in this sleeve. To say nothing of my ability (or lack thereof) to break onto a closed set. I did the only thing I could think to do and went home.
* * *
††
I’ve asked myself on more than one occasion if what we had was really all that different from the relationship between a sex worker and a john. There was a sense of impropriety to the whole thing, starting from the moment he slid that duffle bag of skins over to me. It was akin to a sack full of money, and held an inherent degree of quiet accommodation that accompanies such … transactions. Even if it was something I wanted, or thought I wanted; even if at that moment it was exciting, in the aftermath I struggled to tell the difference between the wear on my sleeve and that of my heart. But when I opened the bag and the thick, dense memories wafted out, filling the space between us, all my concerns and hesitations and reasoned arguments against just … crashed to a halt. I stopped seeing the rendition of D____ that appeared when he exited the makeup chair at the end of each day. In his place I saw, first and foremost, Charlie the Chin, who was sweet and funny and kind to me that day – the first I saw him die – and not at all the mysterious collection of half-promises he was turning out to be. In Charlie there was still the hope of something more. Like there always is at the start of something new. Maybe Charlie saw the me in Malorie and not the other way around. Maybe he, unlike so many others, saw my true face and all the others I wore and didn’t need a caveat for any of it.
When I revealed this to my therapist at our session last week, she asked if in fact I felt like a sex worker, or if I’d simply felt wronged and was looking for something – a label – to secure myself.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Which part?” she asked, tapping her pen against the pad of paper she balanced on one knee. I wished she would stop. She talked so much about my obsessions, my idiosyncrasies, but right now it was all I could hear – that tap tap tap in groupings of three, like she had a waltz stuck in her head that she couldn’t help but share.
“I’m not just looking to put a handle to this mess. I’ve better things to do than play name-my-psychosis.”
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing, M_____. Putting a handle on things, as it were. That’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish here: isolating how you feel and condensing it into something small and manageable that might help you to better see the whole picture.”
“But I’ve already seen it,” I said. “I lived it. I’m still living it.”
“Which is at the very core of your problem – you’re still so deeply entrenched in the past that it has physically manifested right here, in your present. Biology makes up only one half of our health, you know. The key to lasting wellness is in caring equally for one’s mind as one’s body.”
“I’m fine,” I said, louder and more abruptly than I’d intended.
“You’re not,” she countered. “You’re in deep, extended denial about your relationship with D____. Otherwise we wouldn’t still be discussing it more than a year after the final swing of the axe, for lack of better phrasing.”
“I’m moving forward, just like you said to do. I’m writing about him now, not my past –”
“But you are.”
“– and not about Dad or Mom or Louise, not anymore. This is about me and him and how he treated me.”
“Which was like a sex worker.”
“I … No … The sex was consensual.”
“Prostitution often is consensual, M_____, to a greater or lesser degree. The issue here is intimacy – trust – not consent. If you were to view the events of your time together as a series of transactions – that you accepted – and not perhaps the togetherness you sought, then what stage have you on which to argue your point? Why did you allow such things in the first place?”
“Because I was in love with him.”
“No,” she said, flatly, “you were in love with the idea of him.”
“Is there a difference?”
“A monumental one.”
“But no one’s really who they say they are,” I quickly said. “Everyone lies. Everyone exists as their best hope for themselves.”
“If that’s your belief then why try for intimacy in the first place? Isn’t it by its nature more trouble than it’s worth?”
“I don’t … I mean I’m not …” I started feeling hot beneath the collar of my shirt. I reached up then and pinched the skin at the back of my neck, to allow it to breathe, and the dry, chalky feel of it reminded me I was trapped there, in her office, as myself.
She continued: “You’re angry because while you initially got what you wanted from D____, you quickly found out that, like blind love in every form, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”
“That’s not it,” I said sullenly. She folded her arms across her chest, pen still in hand, ready – waiting for me to tear the h
ead off some new scab at which she could pick and poke. “I wanted to play in new sandboxes with him, I genuinely did. That was exciting and everything, but still I wanted the impossible that really should not have been. And with practically anyone else probably wouldn’t have been.”
“Which was what?”
“For him to come home with me at the end of the day.”
“Which brings me back to the question I asked when you first started writing your blog: What do you hope to accomplish through this? It isn’t transparency. Look at you,” she said, pointing accusingly to my hand still absently teasing the flesh at the back of my neck. I quickly dropped it to my lap. “You don’t really want to strip yourself down – you’re still too busy trying to hide beneath the stories and lives you’ve taken for yourself.”
“They’re mine,” I said. “I earned them, every last one.”
“You stole them.”
“From people who didn’t know what a good thing they had. Their lives, they were being wasted on boring people with zero ambition.”
“That’s not for you to decide!” She paused, cleared her throat, before continuing at a much calmer register. “In your entry from eight days ago, you called your blog an invective. A tirade, M_____, which leads me to believe the following: This was never about transparency. This is not – and has never been – about honesty, or about finding your truth. This blog is retribution of a sort, and you’ve chosen to rake both your bodies over the very same bed of coals. Why? What for?”
She waited then, for me to fill the space with enough silence that the session would simply draw to a close. Or maybe she was holding out hope that I would somehow choke myself with my own words.
“I’m trying to figure out what went wrong,” I said, eventually.
“But when was it ever right?”
“When it was just the two of us.”
“Except, M_____, it never was just the two of you. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all this time? You were never you and he was never himself, either.”
“No, that’s – I didn’t say that.”
“What is it that you’re trying to understand? Really?”
“… I think … I need you to stop reading my blog.”
“It’s public material, M_____. You’ve opted to share it with the world.”
“But not you.”
“I’m part of the world. Why not me? Are you afraid I’ll find out something you’ll wish I hadn’t?”
“No, but –”
“Because if you hope to get a handle on things, I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“I am. I mean I have been.”
“Then why are you afraid? What is it you’re trying to find out?”
“I want to know if I mattered!”
Doctor None-of-Your-Business sat back in her seat. At first I thought she was surprised by my outburst, but then she smiled, slowly, slyly. Fucking satisfyingly. She waited patiently for me to continue.
“I want to know if I mattered,” I repeated once I’d calmed down again. “I want … I need to know if there was ever anything between us – anything real I mean – or if I’ve just been deluding myself this entire time.”
“It wasn’t a real relationship,” Doctor None-of-Your-Business said, firmly. “It’s time you admit this to yourself. What the two of you had … It was a fiction.”
“But it still hurt like it was real.”
“The best stories always do.”
18. Tragicomedy
Posted: 02/05/2014
If we, in fact, were a fiction, as Doctor None-of-Your-Business suggested, what type would it be exactly? Certain possibilities could be immediately eliminated: we weren’t action or adventure; there was no science fiction or fantasy to what happened between us, when we were alone, no matter the pattern of the wallpaper. In a romance – most romances, anyway – there exists a certain degree of sympathy toward the plight of the two (usually) likeable leads. Suffice to say in this we were lacking. Hard. So humour me a moment. Let’s see if we can figure this out by examining the elements of proper storytelling.
Plot: Lovers meet, fall for one another, fall into bed together, and our flower-petal-delicate protagonist (yours truly) is quickly swept up in a whirlwind series of escapades, sexcapades and misadventures – with the occasional flaying – predominantly flirtatious, sometimes physical in nature. The object of our hero’s affection is more than a little bit fucked in the head, or is playing hard to get, or is hard to get because he really is fucked in the head, but our hero’s cool with that because, as is well documented, love is blind, deaf and, on occasion, exceedingly stupid.
Character: You, me and an audience of nearly eight hundred part-time personality cut-outs. Not to mention dear, sweet, not-at-all-vindictive Ezra, and some roadside debris piled next to a signpost that read friends and family.
Also Aud.
And Louise.
Conflict: Man versus self … versus self, versus self, versus self. To say you’re your own worst enemy is about as dramatic an understatement as one can make. Each life of yours is usurped by the next as if you’re Highlander-ing with yourself. Which seems all the more sad now that I’ve written it out.
Setting: Every motel in town with a by-the-hour rate and an undercover cop in the parking lot sipping scalding hot Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, waiting for the kids in room two-zero-whatever to bust out the weed so he can get his chance to be the bad motherfucker he always knew he could be. They didn’t notice us, though. Not at any motel we stopped at on our journey. We were as invisible as could be to anyone not paying direct attention.
Atmosphere: Alice in Wonderland–style surrealism – every scene, every interaction a reinvention of all that came before, with about as much narrative consistency as an acid trip. We set decorated with the best of them without ever picking up a saw. Well, not for wood, anyway.
Style: Impermanent. Transient.
We certainly weren’t a tragedy. Effective tragedy requires consistency building toward an appropriately painful resolution. A tragedy is a snowball rolling downhill, accumulating shrapnel and broken pieces of rock, wood and dirt as it moves. The route we took was one of opposition, of removing those extraneous things – people – from our lives. Tragedy implies manipulation of one party by the other, but we were both of us liars – experts in the craft, you might say. Though I think, all things considered, you were in a league all your own. Together we embodied the worst traits of Norman Bates and Tom Ripley, of Verbal Kint and Evelyn Mulwray.
We weren’t a tragedy. We also weren’t action, adventure, romance or even remotely family friendly. We were a black comedy steeped in noir and dissolution.
Doctor None-of-Your-Business said the best stories are often painful, disconcerting; that they don’t feel good when they’re happening because they’re not – not in the least. They’re abusive and interrogative, and at the end of it all, if done right, if handled with even an ounce of truth, you’re lucky to be left with anything concrete to hold onto.
And that swirling, nauseating uncertainty that comes after? When the story’s done and you’re left looking back on all that shit and heartache piled up in your wake like debris from a hurricane? That’s reality – that’s catharsis fucking with you. It’s like pride, but without.
19. A Shark in Snake's Clothing
Posted: 02/08/2014
It was August, and more than a dozen one- or two-day roles later, that we again had the opportunity to share a scene. In it, we were strangers on the set of a Civil War epic. There were no spoken lines between us, no seconds together on film; we were connected only briefly as our eyes locked from across the town square. I thought, for a second, I noticed you giving me the shortest of out-of-character grins, but I had no way of being sure. I was the neglected wife of a general for the North; you were a prisoner from the South accused of steali
ng into an encampment with a party of five others, cold and starving and in urgent need of medical attention. In your desperation, you and your accomplices slaughtered more than a dozen soldiers while they slept for what little food and money they had on their persons. In our scene together, I watched, standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the town, as the six of you were lined up against a wall and simultaneously executed for your crimes. The gunshots echoed sonorously. Still, they seemed somewhat muffled. Blanks sounded so close to actual rounds yet … not, I thought, standing there, watching, pretending to be broken hearted, knowing that they’d amplify the report in post. You died then, chest blown open, dressed in filthy, soiled rags and slumped over the body of one of your comrades-in-arms. We remained silent, still, and then slowly dispersed, leaving the executioners to tend to their mess.
That night, as I waited for you, I met a guided missile made to look like a woman. She was short and stout, barrel-chested, her hair tied back so tight her face looked like wet fabric draped over a rock to dry. She wore a bright pink chiffon jacket with a lime-green trim – one of those straight-out-of-the-’80s combinations so bright it managed to offend even the legally blind – with gold and plastic technicolour bracelets clattering together on both forearms. She was waiting for me outside of makeup, stopped me mid-step and asked for my name. I answered, and she gave me a baking-soda smile in return.
“Ezra Oppenheim,” she said, all teeth and no pucker. Her voice was that uncomfortable grey area between high pitch and gravelly, like a sixty-year-old two-pack-a-day smoker who never went through puberty. Or like late-model Joan Rivers high on helium. “Might we have a word?”
“Umm …”
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll be a while still. It sometimes takes a bit of elbow grease to get the blood out of his hair.”
“Wait, you know –”
Without skipping a beat, she palmed me a one-by-three card with bevelled edges, her name emblazoned on the surface like a decorative scar: EZRA OPPENHEIM – TALENT.
The Death Scene Artist Page 11
