The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  Then there’s D____. The “villain” of this piece. The world is rapidly contracting around him and still he says nothing. Which is about all I expect at this point.

  One last thing I learned from therapy: to know when it’s time to move on. I don’t want D____ back. I never have – this blog was never about that. I already knew at the start of all this that there was no chance of us ever being together again, but revisiting our final night as a couple – not to mention the weeks of recovery that followed – has helped make everything crystal clear.

  When I began this blog back in November I was furious with him. I’d convinced myself he’d taken something from me – time that I no longer had. But, plainly, anger is exhausting to maintain, and in this instance it accomplishes nothing. I write now because I need to know, when all is said and done and my body has diminished beyond all hope for recovery, that I existed.

  31. The Dead Came Knocking

  Posted: 05/24/2014

  Unnamed Female Love Interest, early thirties (The Dead Came Knocking). Temporarily “survived” by her ex-boyfriend, Unnamed Undead Male, mid-forties. Our heroine was a kind person, always willing to open her heart and her door – foolishly, some might say – to a soul in need of salvation. In the first days of the zombie apocalypse, Unnamed Female Love Interest fought hard for her survival, maintaining an upper-level apartment stronghold in which the living were able to find shelter and a temporary reprieve from the evil that hunted them through the streets of Los Angeles.

  The Post–Zombie Apocalypse Historical Society acknowledges her sacrifice. God be with the splintered remains of humanity.

  * * *

  ††

  Bonita Paraiso (Dead in the Desert). Together, Bonita and her partner, Claud, were two of the most feared and successful bank robbers this side of the Rio Grande. They stole indiscriminately and looked stylish as fuck all while doing it until their semi-retirement some time ago. When Claud was gunned down during a drug deal gone wrong, Bonita, to make ends meet, to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, got back in the game.

  It didn’t go so well.

  * * *

  ††

  Wife of Guard 528491 (Zero Chance, Zero Escape). Wandered the desolate planet searching for compassionate life.

  Found none.

  Died alone.

  32. All That Viscera Come to the Surface

  Posted: 05/30/2014

  Stories are beginning to emerge from the outside world. The Hollywood Reporter posted an interview on Wednesday with Quinn Margolis, star of such masterpieces as Sharkopolypse 2: The Second Wave and the spy thriller/romance Incognito. These days, however, she’s more widely recognized as Sleeve Zero – otherwise known as the real Malorie Marcello from The Scorpion and the Frog.

  “No, I don’t know who’s writing the blog,” she said in her interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Shouldn’t you be asking the Los Angeles Times? The sicko worked there, didn’t she? Do they even have an obits writer? I thought that was just something people submitted on their own …” The interview notes that when contacted, the Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief refused to comment on the matter – more than likely under the advisement of their lawyers. “Yeah, I think I remember the guy who played Charlie, but it didn’t happen like that – I don’t think he and I ever said two words to one another that weren’t in the script.”

  “I’ve been reading the blog since January,” said Felicia Webb, who silently dressed your wounds in A War to Remember, to a reporter from the Huffington Post. “I don’t get it, really, why someone would go to such great lengths to lie about something like this – especially when the truth is so easily unearthed. I can’t help but think what a sad and lonely person they must be. I hope there really is a Doctor None-of-Your-Business, and I hope she’s able to help this person, I really do.”

  “I don’t know if I agree with all that. Actually, I think it’s kind of beautiful.” That was Valerie Bedson, your dancing partner from The Buddy Holly Incident, in an interview with Celeste Shields yesterday on Good Morning America.

  “You don’t worry this mysterious blogger might be dangerous?” Celeste asked.

  Valerie smiled sweetly, lips pressed together. Her eyes showed just a hint of sadness in the way they turned down slightly at the edges. “I don’t,” she said. “Whatever this person’s going through has got to be hard. It’s like … one giant love letter written to the idea of a man but not the man himself.”

  “So you don’t find all that viscera unsettling?”

  “I really don’t. It isn’t real, Celeste. None of it. It’s just … Tragic is what it is.”

  * * *

  ††

  I guess if I’m surprised about anything it’s that it’s taken this long for things to begin to unravel. And not just for me – I’ve noticed the resurrection clock on www.risefromthegrave.net has stalled, too. Either their news sources have dried up or you’ve pulled out of your upcoming contracts for the first time in twenty-one years of doing this type of work.

  Or you’ve been sacked.

  Before now I’d not given much thought to the worth, or lack thereof, of a death scene artist with a very public, almost impossible to ignore persona. All this attention being suddenly paid to you has undoubtedly lifted your career from the dregs of celebrity society to C-, maybe even B-list status – welcome now, should you accept their invitations, to the finest couches of daytime television shows and restaurant chain openings. There exists still a gulf between an artist of your calibre and the always eye-catching A-listers, but it is certainly not as wide a gap as it once was, back when you were able to recede like a chameleon into the wallpaper of any party. Without meaning to, I’ve turned you into a sideshow attraction. For this I am truly sorry. I gave up my identity when we were together, and now I worry that I’ve taken yours away, as well – what little there was to take, that is. I thought it was what I wanted, for both of us to share in this notoriety, and I think maybe in the beginning it was, but … Things are different now, and I see the details of our time together more clearly than I once had.

  Naomi Weston, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a column in yesterday’s paper citing this blog as the “single most vicious attack on a celebrity’s character in recent memory.” In her own words:

  The sporadic entries on the blog Die First, Ask Questions Later are nothing more than one jealous individual’s indictment of a person, a professional actor, whom they don’t know and have likely never met. The assumptions and accusations made therein constitute an open threat to one man’s safety, and a breach of the social contract between celebrity and rampant, unchecked fandom. This “fanfiction,” as it is, represents the delusional ramblings of a disturbed mind that has, unfortunately, lost all sight of reality. Are we, as readers, to take this love affair as true on any level? We already know the stories of random women being sliced open and zipped up again as full-body catsuits to be an absurd lie, as are this blogger’s many increasingly ridiculous acting claims. What, then, of their supposed romantic connection? What of the cancer slowly eating away at the writer’s brain? Can anything that’s been written be trusted?

  The answer is no, of course not. Because these are not the words of a human but of a broken shell of a person, a transient desperately searching to be made whole again – scrambling through the dark for someone as cold and broken as they happen to be – or seeking someone to whose greatness they only aspire.

  The way she slipped that word into the middle of her denunciation – transient – like it was dirty, coated in a layer of sweat and after-sex. Like she was calling me a whore; a nobody dressed in pigtails and a pinafore dress one moment, and a suit jacket, skirt and tall brunette sleeve the next.

  Like I was weak. Like I was nothing.

  But I’m stronger than anyone has ever given me credit for. I see it now where I didn’t before. Louise, she could never d
ecide how she felt about me, pushing me to go and build a life with one hand while using the other to try and keep me close, to tell me what I was doing wrong. To her I would always be lost, little M_____, standing in the mirror, trying on everyone else’s face to see what fit best. She helped me, yes, in the beginning, but I wonder now, the times she helped make adjustments to the fit of each face or when she pointed out a suitable skin, if she wasn’t so much a partner as I was a project.

  Aud … When I look back on things I think Aud saw me for who I really was. She watched, and she worried, yes, but she never made me feel like I was incompetent, no matter my decisions. “You might be a lost cause,” she said to me one night, “but you’re my lost cause, ya?”

  This isn’t for them, though. It isn’t for Doctor None-of-Your-Business, either, or for Naomi Weston. It isn’t even for the actresses I saw you flirt with so dishonestly from my place behind the camera, or from somewhere just off set, where I watched, reciting your scenes as if I were there, with you, and not forced to pretend I didn’t know you until we were alone again, away from curious eyes.

  Valerie Bedson was right. As much as I don’t want to admit it, I must: This is for you. I’m writing this, at least in part, for you.

  33. The Buddy Holly Incident

  Posted: 06/03/2014

  Eleanor – just Eleanor (The Buddy Holly Incident). Eleanor strolled into town one day with a suitcase full of dreams and two nickels to her name. Daughter of Someone Else and Wish I Knew, Eleanor was a bright girl who always had a song in her step. She left home at age seventeen and made her way to the coast, following the never-lasting promise of champagne and made-to-order stardom. While she patiently awaited her big break, she waited tables at Gus’s Malt Shoppe, where her all-too-light-on-her-toes attitude made her so impossible to resist.

  * * *

  ††

  Quiet French Woman (A War to Remember). Alone in her cabin in the woods, this unscripted heroine was kind to all and turned none away. One day she dressed a fallen soldier’s wounds, only to have him die in her arms – but not before an indescribable love developed between them, like two sparks bonding in silence. Moments later, she died from a broken heart.

  34. Natural Born Disasters

  Posted: 06/13/2014

  It’s a strange dichotomy, to feel at once utterly exposed yet totally invisible. I’m like a rat you can’t catch, scurrying just out of reach, beneath the trained eyes of all observers. Though my sleeves have been taken from me I still know perfectly well how to hide in plain sight – I’ve had, after all, a lifetime of practice. I am curious, though, with all Ezra’s said to The Hollywood Reporter, and in her telephone interview last week with Access Hollywood, as to why she’s kept my identity under wraps, referring to me only as “the individual in question,” who she’s been keeping an eye on, because of course the situation is under control and there’s nothing to fear, nothing with which to be overly concerned. I wonder though, were I a fly on her wall, if I’d see that it was in fact D____ who was at least somewhat responsible for her reticence. What did he say to keep her from spilling every jelly bean in the jar? Why? Is it he who’s afraid of the ultimate truth getting out or is it her?

  I want to tell you about the email I received this morning while eating a day-old bagel I’d picked up half-price from a bakery across the street from the hotel lobby in which I’d spent the night – undisclosed location number nine on my Victim Relocation spreadsheet. It reads:

  Dear Anonymous M,

  In very little time, your tender, unfortunate life has touched millions. The story you tell of forbidden passion, even as your health wanes, is akin to the great tragic loves of our generation and of generations past. We at Hayfield and James Publishing would like to extend to you the opportunity to gift your story to an even wider audience than you’ve already reached.

  Of course, we would be more than happy, in addition to a sizable advance, to assist in whatever medical costs there may be to get you healthy again.

  Please contact our New York offices at your earliest convenience and we will discuss how best to proceed.

  Yours,

  Christopher Hayfield

  Publisher, Hayfield and James

  Can you believe it? A book deal with a for really real Big Apple publisher! Because this will benefit my family and I for years to – Oh, right. Well, fuck me.

  I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked to have received a proposal like this, though I’ll admit I’m surprised it took them this long to figure out how best to market this embarrassment of dysfunctions to the public, who are always salivating for new examples of schadenfreude. But to compare this sordid serial to the great love stories of times past is missing the point entirely. Great love stories are Romeo and Juliet (minus the death and familial warfare), Jack and Rose and their big fucking boat, Batman and Robin … Our history is not, in hindsight, so romantic. We were Mickey and Mallory with guns turned on one another instead of poor pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr. – it was death by mutual attraction and ritualistic self-denial.

  It feels redundant to even contemplate selling this story in another format. It’s already out there, in the open – it exists, and is available for consumption by anyone with a certain degree of voyeurism in their blood. What good would it do to publish this mess in hardcover? I guess then the film rights could be optioned – Hollywood could turn lives in film into lives in film on film. It’d be an exercise in diminishing returns, like standing between two funhouse mirrors and staring at one’s infinitely multiplied self, getting smaller and smaller with each receding reflection.

  That’s not, however, to say there isn’t a market for it. As early as the 1920s the public has foamed at the mouth over famous relationships like the poor survivors of the apocalypse left fighting one another over the world’s dwindling supply of canned goods and Twinkies. At first it was only celebrities who garnered such obsession – poor Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks unwittingly paving the road for all who would follow – but it soon became clear that fame was only a part of the equation, and that what people really wanted to see, what they sat in the corners of coffee shops and restaurants and movie theatres listening to, pretending to be oblivious to, was any relationship unfortunate enough to be drawn into a spotlight. They love us, D____ and I, because we’re the covered, dismembered bodies on the side of the road in the immediate aftermath of a highway collision. Because they can’t see beneath the clean white shrouds of our sleeves, his and mine, our ragged flesh and shattered bones – because our onlookers don’t yet know enough to look away.

  “Is that how you see yourself?” asked Doctor None-of-Your-Business near the end of our first session together, once I’d finished telling her about D____, about how we met and how I’d started to see myself – as more of a victim than I really was. I was naive, telling her how I’d been robbed of a future that I know now never existed, that was only ever a dream. “As a body left abandoned by the one you love?”

  “I’m not sure how else to phrase it. I was forgotten in less time than it took to spit on the sidewalk.” I grew angry, reliving our final moments together for the first time since it all went down – since D____ left me. “It’s like he hollowed me out. I was never really in control, I just thought I was.”

  “Because you thought it had been you crafting your fiction. But it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just said you feel as if you’ve been hollowed out. All those lives you say you created, you weren’t really the one building them – you only think you were. But it was D____ who set the tone every time. You merely followed his example. You feel hollow, M_____, because when all the cards are placed on the table you weren’t actually his lover. You were, and still are, so long as his actions continue to guide your journey, a puppet.”

  And then there she was: Aud, back in my brain, cursing me out, telling me to “live right here, right now, in this mother
fucking moment. That’s what matters. It’s all that matters.” At the time I thought she was right. And I guess to some extent she was – I lived my lives, with D____, in a way that I needed to at the time. The problem was I never actually let go of thoughts of the future, of what might have been or could possibly be. Futures weren’t something that ever interested him, however. And that power dynamic, that gulf between us – me wanting more even if I refused to voice it – allowed him to take control of … of us. Of the shape of us.

  And unfortunately, horribly, infuriatingly, Doctor None-of-Your-Business was right. Because there are no bodies, are there? Not really. There are no flayed corpses or stolen identities or pilfered futures littering the back alleys of our tryst – that much of our farce has already been revealed. There are only dreams and ideas that I’d written into the pages of large black binders once shelved at the back of my closet, details of lives – of possibilities – learned, memorized, having left nothing to chance. Scripts, all of them. Our “what might have been.” They’ve since been removed, torn to pieces, shredded in a moment of unrestrained fury as you invaded my home, my hollow, puppet, futureless life, searching for, but not ever finding, the origins of us.

  35. The Scorpion and the Frog

  Posted: 06/15/2014

  Malorie Marcello (The Scorpion and the Frog).

  Malorie fucked the wrong guy.

  She watched him die.

  They took turns.

  36. The Army at the Galaxy Drive-In

  Posted: 06/28/2014