The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  “Why did you bring me here?” you demanded. Your nasal voice was a high wire stretched tight between two skyscrapers.

  I backed up until I bumped into the edge of the kitchen counter behind me. “I didn’t. You came here last night on your own.”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t, I know I didn’t. You did something to me.”

  “Are you … You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”

  “What did you do to me? What’s my role?”

  “D____ …”

  “Where is it?” you snapped, loud enough to have woken the neighbours. “Who am I supposed to be?”

  It took me a moment to figure out what you were looking for – the crumpled pages of script on the chair next to the bed, wrapped up in a bundle of loose clothing. “I don’t know where it is,” I said.

  You slammed an open palm against the kitchenette counter. “You’re lying,” you hissed.

  “I’m not.”

  “You know who we’re supposed to be and you’re keeping it all to yourself.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I know exactly who we’re supposed to be. I’m M_____ and you’re D____.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t what? Say our names? This is us, you fool.”

  CHARLIE

  Malorie, don't you do this to me.

  “M_____, my name is M_____.”

  RICHARD

  Eleanor, this isn't funny.

  “My name is M_____.”

  ALEX

  Goddamnit, Silv --

  “M_____, you asshole! My name is M_____!”

  And you broke stage direction.

  And you swung as hard as you could and –

  CUT TO BLACK

  * * *

  ††

  And when I woke up again there was blood.

  More than I would have thought.

  28. Remembering

  Posted: 04/13/2014

  Our Relationship (March–November) was a love story of epic proportions and even grander delusions. We lived a hundred different lives together and took just as many along the way.

  And then you went and broke my jaw and I couldn’t speak or eat solid food for more than a month.

  You are survived by me, un-fucking-fortunately for us both.

  Act III

  29. On the Move

  Posted: 05/15/2014

  Things change, D____. Constancy, it seems, is the enemy of progress.

  Today it’s Jerry’s Famous Deli in sunny Marina del Rey, where I’m picking at a slice of carrot cake the size of my head, figuring that if I drag it out over enough hours, and if I can keep it down, it counts as multiple meals. Tomorrow, maybe next week if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll bus with my laptop to another Wi-Fi hotspot in the city, where I’ll be able to continue our tale unhindered. Now that I know how involved you are in the telling of it – now that I’m aware of the lengths to which you’ll go to keep me from finishing – it’s my duty to push on, to go forward and complete with total veracity this sad, sordid story.

  Eighteen months ago you broke my jaw in two places and fractured my nose. I woke up after twenty minutes spent lying in a pool of my own blood and bits of tooth and gum, and you were already long gone. That was the last I’d seen of you until almost exactly one year later, when Andreas Rain just happened to drag your sorry ass into the spotlight on national television. And now here we are: a mere three weeks ago, someone busted down the door to my apartment while I was out at a walk-in clinic, tore open my closet and took out all the sleeves, dumping them on the bed, slicing, frantically cutting them into small, jagged postcards of skin. Whoever it was that broke in, they’d searched desperately for something I’m certain was not found.

  No, that’s not a baseless accusation I’m making – put down the phone, Ezra, before you pull a fucking muscle; your attack dog attorneys will still be there in the morning. I’m not saying it was you or your client that broke into my apartment while I was out that day, nor am I suggesting it was either one of you who took a bat to the dust-covered desktop in the corner of the room when you couldn’t figure out the password – COWARDLYMOTHERFUCKER, all one word – all the while making sure not to leave a single visible fingerprint, which I dusted for using the Home Crime Stoppers kit I picked up at the thrift store down the street for just such an occasion. It’s so goddamn stupid, too. I mean you know how a blog works, right? It isn’t tied to just one computer – this doesn’t stop just because you got all smashy-smashy with my personal effects. Anyway, you – or whomever – didn’t search through a single drawer in the kitchen, didn’t go through the nightstand next to the bed … for fuck’s sake, do either of you know the first thing about how to make a home invasion look impersonal? I swear it’s like I’m working with amateurs here. You’d think, D____, with all the roles you’ve had, all the people we’ve … you’d have picked up some basic breaking-and-entering skills along the way.

  But whatever. It totally wasn’t you guys. I get that. It was probably just some crazed Internet stalker, right?

  Forgive me if I come across a bit pissy about the whole thing. It’s my birthday and I think this cake and I are entitled to a bit of self-pity. It’s strange, though, to think that I’ve made it this far; when I went to the hospital last summer, back when I was just mostly broke and not completely broke like I am now, complaining of unusually agonizing migraines, and they found the mass in my brain, they said I had maybe six months to a year at best. As it is, we’re coming up on month nine and my body still hasn’t quit on me. I weigh what feels like half of what I did when you last saw me, D____, and I’m tired all the time and haven’t really worn a sleeve in a lot of weeks, but I’m still here, still visible to anyone bothering to look. Despite all that, it was still a surprise this morning when I woke up and checked the date. I suppose I hadn’t given much thought to seeing another birthday, let alone where I’d be or what I’d be doing when that day at last came around again.

  It doesn’t take much to wear me out these days; I nap whenever and wherever I can, on buses, in quiet corners of hotel lobbies and all-night restaurants and cafés, carrying a backpack filled with my laptop, a disposable burner phone, a couple of pairs of underwear and socks, a toothbrush, some toothpaste and the last few hundred dollars from my savings account. I could go back home – my lease doesn’t run out for another six weeks – but it wouldn’t be safe to go there now, not after what happened. Because I don’t have the protective cushion you do. I don’t have a following.

  You didn’t even know they existed, did you? Trust me, they’re out there, and they’re voracious. You’re their celluloid Lazarus, a phoenix rising from the ashes over and over again. A helpful commenter on my blog posted a link to a website – www.risefromthegrave.net – documenting every on-camera life you’ve ever led. The site’s iconography is a bit crass – your face Photoshopped to the crucified body of Christ with a ticker counting down the months, weeks, days and hours until your next half-minute of screen time drops into theatres nationwide. And then there are the YouTube video compilations – an entire series of mash-ups of every second you’ve appeared on film, and every single punchlined death, all synched to Clint-fucking-Mansell’s “Lux Aeterna,” for maximum bravado. Personally I’d have gone with The Benny Hill Show theme, or maybe Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse.”

  How about it, Jesus 2.0? Have you ever sat down and watched one of these compilations? I can’t tell you how strange it is, seeing you die on a continuous loop without proper context:

  RONNIE BYRNE, a cop on the beat murdered, shot in the head on his last shift before retirement by the same drug lord who'd killed his wife and daughter three years prior begets …

  MICHAEL WRIGHT, a firefighter with three kids and an elderly, cancer-stricken mother at home, who dies rushing into a burning building to save a woman on the fifth floor, is followed by …<
br />
  SCOTT LEWIS; AKA SCOTT SMITH; AKA "THE HUNTER," a secret agent plot set-up device who never got to be with the woman he loved because he had to lie about every part of his life to protect her from the former KGB diehards who shot him in the back of the head and sent his body home in edible cubes, naturally bleeding into the life of …

  CHARLIE ELLINGTON; AKA "CHARLIE THE CHIN," a kiss-of-death mob loyalist who smiled the wrong way at a pretty girl with raspberry freckles on her teeth.

  By the twelfth video in the series I began to feel a bit like I was circling a drain. The fatalist in me wants to have confidence in the karmic ramifications of a life consisting solely of death and death scenes, dying again and again and in every conceivable way. The Buddhists would have a field day with you: I’m little more than a wannabe playing dress-up; you, on the other hand, are a prime psychological specimen just waiting to be couched and studied.

  The realist in me, however – the better half of our once-was, the part that is actually dying – will tell you what I was too afraid to say that night while lying in bed with you: “Yes, Ezra is absolutely taking advantage of you, and you shouldn’t stand for it a moment longer.”

  “But I need her,” you’d have implored as if it really were a matter of life and death. “I can’t do this without her.”

  “You can and you fucking will because you’re not her supplicant any longer. You want to know what it’s like to survive on camera for more than five minutes? Then you’ve got to ditch mommy dearest.”

  That night, when you invited the shrill silhouette of your agent into our bed, it was your moment of clarity. I learned about them from Doctor None-of-Your-Business – what it is when one strikes and how much it can knock you around if you’re not prepared for it. When you asked me about Ezra, when you tore down that barrier between your work and all your other lives, I think I expected the next day to wake up beside a new you, both of us completely naked, more exposed than we’d ever been. I excitedly thought that we’d tapped a new vein of our relationship. However, those true moments of progress take time – more than I’d anticipated. Your moment of clarity was just that – a moment. Your first. Most certainly our last.

  I could at this time offer you another moment of clarity. I could give out our names, your identity and mine, here and now, on this blog for millions to see. But what would be the point? It’s easier this way, keeping my distance, even if the safety it offers is but an illusion.

  Another thing I learned from Doctor None-of-Your-Business is how to spot a predator. I don’t know the sorts of conversations you have with yourself when there’s no one around to see the performance – if, in fact, you’ve shared any of the same thoughts or questions about us that I’ve had in the months since it all came crashing down. I’d like to think, on occasion, you’re able to see through the walls you’ve put up, to take a moment and glimpse the world that exists on either side.

  Ezra doesn’t have any such concerns. Make no mistake, D____: to her you are a meal ticket. Nothing more. Do you think she’s ever marketed you as anything but a corpse? Maybe she cared more at the beginning of your career, back when you were still a novice cutting your teeth. But I guarantee whatever negligible iota of concern she once held for you died as soon as you exhibited just how amazing you were, and are, at taking a bullet to the face one minute and dying tenderly in someone’s arms the next. This is your first lesson in how a person becomes a commodity: you trust the wrong people – the people with the means, motive and opportunity to keep you transient – and hurt the right.

  You got all that, Ezra? Come on then. Take your best fucking shot.

  30. Recovery

  Posted: 05/19/2014

  I spent three days in the hospital following that whole ordeal where my face tripped and fell into D____’s fist. They wired my jaw shut, said it would be a few weeks before I could expect to chew or speak again. I don’t remember much of the pain; they’d given me a prescription for Tylenol 3, and for the first two weeks I tossed them back like they were Pez candies. One of the nurses gave me a pen and a pad of paper on my second day, once I was alert enough to know fully where I was and what had transpired. She told me if I needed anything to write it down, then she asked me if there was anyone they could get in touch with, and I tried to stop it, the shitty feelings bubbling up inside of me like acid-tinged anxiety, but I couldn’t. I started to weep openly, my body shaking where I couldn’t scream.

  * * *

  ††

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business sat up straight in her chair, framed by the degrees adorning the rear wall of her second-floor office. Outside the window above her desk I saw a string of bright white Christmas lights hung in a loose arch. She smiled politely. “So, M_____, is this your first time speaking with a therapist?”

  I shook my head. It had been nearly a month since they fixed up my jaw and took out all the hardware, but still it hurt to talk. “Long time ago,” I muttered, speaking mostly in consonants. “When I was in high school. I saw somebody then.”

  “Really,” she said, jotting down the information on the legal pad in her lap. At first I was confused; I’d expected her to know all this already. Until, that is, I remembered the hospital records she’d had access to were under the name on my falsified passport, as was my modest employee insurance, now long since evaporated. I suppose it really doesn’t matter at this point, to say all of this – no sense skirting around the obvious. Besides, I’ve already lost everything anyway. “And why was that?”

  “Mom thought I was crazy.”

  “I see … Was there any particular –”

  “I wrote obituaries for the graduating class at my school and put them in the yearbook.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The whole class?”

  “Also, I wasn’t eating. I was … I wasn’t in a good place. I’m okay now, though.”

  She nodded, hummed an “mm-hmm” and continued writing. She didn’t say anything for what must have been at least a paragraph or two. When she looked up at me again, some of the cheer had vanished from her face, replaced by a studious, semi-serious frown. She cleared her throat before speaking again. “Now, can you tell me why you’re here today?”

  “Because I had my jaw smashed up and didn’t really feel like talking to any of my doctors about it,” I said frankly. “One of the nurses at the hospital gave me your number in case I decided I had something I wanted to say.”

  “And do you?” she asked.

  “Oh, I have lots I want to say. But I’m not sure how much of it, if any, is going to make sense.”

  “Don’t worry about that – it’s my job to try and help you understand what happened in the past, and maybe see if we can put it in another light.”

  “I’ve got a sneaky suspicion you’re going to regret saying that.”

  “Try me.” Her warm grin reappeared.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s start with my boyfriend’s death.”

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business nodded. “I think that’s a good place for us to begin, yes. And let me just say, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “It’s okay – it wasn’t his first.”

  * * *

  ††

  I don’t know how to describe what it’s like to open up my inbox and see the literally thousands of emails and comments I’m now receiving daily – some of them people reaching out to me, telling me how moved they are by our story, while just as many are sending out vindictive, bitter diatribes, saying they hope I shut up and die sooner rather than later so as to spare them the pain of having to read just one more self-involved entry. And there it is, Internet logic at its finest: because something exists, apparently everyone must read it no matter how much it pains them to do so, like some centrist asshole who can’t not demand you debate their bullshit ideas on meritocracies in a public forum. You’d thin
k for some people free will really was an illusion. The sense of unearned entitlement is astounding.

  It’s not all so polarizing, though. I’ve gotten hundreds of responses from set workers – makeup artists, set decorators, even directors and assistant directors – who remember D____, for whom he wasn’t as invisible as he might have assumed. Or hoped. Many of them have been unexpectedly captivated by what I’ve written; a few have even gone that extra mile to peer behind the curtain, to comb through the material of our story and try to piece together a visual history of our affair. Some have contacted me privately, asking me to clarify if the couple on screen in this scene or that, at this or that time on the clock, is us – asking why the stories I’ve told don’t always line up with what they see across the many films referenced in my previous entries.

  Then there are the duelling late-night television hosts in a bidding war to see who gets exclusive rights to the public, on-air reveal of the jilted, angry, potentially murderous ex-lover behind the world’s most prolific living corpse.

  Then there’s Ezra’s vow to The Hollywood Reporter that, when the time is right, she intends to come after me with the full force of the legal system behind her. Because saving face is all that matters to her now. I didn’t think it possible, but she looks even more ghastly in print than in person. Greed’s a helluva drug, I guess. That shit fucks with your very soul.

  Then there’s the quiet investigation going on into the veracity of my claims – into the potentially hundreds of women killed and flayed for my “amusement,” their bodies never found, their deaths never reported.