Final Cuts

by Final Cuts- New Tales of Hollywood Horror

  Right on schedule, then, twenty, twenty-five minutes into the movie, I’m watching the movie alone, my father-in-law’s head lolled forward in sleep, the green light glowing against his throat like a visible heartbeat.

  By now I’m as into the movie as it’s possible to get, considering the fare. It’s all car chases followed by car wrecks, with sporadic gunfire and bikinis stitching it all together in the least likely ways. Not complaining, it’s not like it was false advertising or anything, you get what you’re paying for, but still, it could be in another language and I’d be watching the same movie.

  Just because it’s one of my assigned duties to conserve any and all battery life whenever I encounter it—Sheila says I’m the battery police, the hall monitor for charging—I contort myself to reach over, into my father-in-law’s sleeping space, to turn that green light off. At which point, my fingers having to see by feel, I discover a notch that turns out to be a headphone jack.

  It makes sense, I guess. If you and your movie date are sitting together, then one unit can receive for the both of you, if the kid at concessions can supply you with an auxiliary set of headphones to string between the two of you.

  Instead of turning the unit off, I untangle my own headphones from my jacket pocket, reach across with both hands to hold the assisted listening device steady while I plug in.

  Why not, right?

  I lean back, want to chock my knees up on the seat in front of me except this is handicapped, there’s just open space before us. I tilt my head over to thumb one earbud in, then the other.

  Thirty seconds later, my face goes slack with wonder.

  I’d assumed, the way anybody would, that what piped into a device like this would be the same thing coming through the surround sound.

  Wrong.

  It’s—it’s so much better, so much fuller. And of course it is. This isn’t for hearing-impaired people, dummy, this is for the blind, who want to experience the movie the only way they can: through running description, while still hearing everything coming through the speakers mounted all around.

  This description, though, it’s…I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It’s not that it’s a woman’s voice, an older woman it sounds like, one I guess I would call “Mom-class,” as in, the kind I’d expect to be reading to the boy I still am inside, it’s what she’s saying, and how she’s saying it. I lean up, to be closer to the screen, but then, finally, I close my eyes like I’m supposed to.

  What the woman in my head is telling me is “A white convertible Jaguar skids in from the left, from a road that’s suddenly just there, and it’s already sliding, it’s going to hit our red Charger, but the driver, whoever she is, she’s hauling the wheel back over hard, she’s shifting down, and from right above we can see the passenger-side door handle of the Jag just touching the driver’s-side door handle of the Charger, slow motion, and in that moment the two evenly matched drivers look across into each other’s eyes and smile, each knowing how many miles of open road are waiting before them.”

  At which point the speakers in the theater deliver the Charger driver’s line, “Welcome to the party, babe,” and then the narrator is back, saying, “the Charger’s rear tires smoke, his hand guides the shifter deep into the next gear, and we stay in place behind the two cars as they race away.”

  And, the thing is, with my eyes closed, I can see this so, so clearly, so much better than if I was just watching it with my eyes. Which, I know, it’s not quite cool of me to say “look how the other half lives” when I’m doing it by choice, not by accident or birth or whatever—I’m just a tourist in the land of the blind, of course it’s fun if I can leave whenever I want—but still, this woman painting the scene for me, all the sounds of the movie still coming in, it’s a way of watching I’d never considered, a way of seeing I’d never guessed was possible.

  I close my eyes tighter and suck air in deep, to relish this.

  The bar fight at the strip club is something else, but I don’t even peek, just surreptitiously guide my popcorn bucket onto my lap, in case other moviegoers have filtered in.

  At the high-rise scene I already saw in the trailer, my chest actually hollows out to be this high, and when the gold Lamborghini is crashing through the golden window in even slower motion, the narrator practically showing me each piece of flying glass, I cue in to a sound that…what is that? Kind of an undertone, that I guess must have been there the whole time, since I started this.

  It’s like…it’s not steady, but it’s constant. A grinding? Metal on metal?

  I open my eyes to the comparatively bright theater, to see if, I don’t know, to see if some woman is standing before me, filing her fingernails on an emery board, her metal fingernails, and using a file, not sandpaper and cardboard, but there’s no one. I chance a look around, and we’re alone in here in the middle of the day.

  Beside me, my father-in-law is still sleeping.

  I pull my left earbud out, listen to the theater, but there’s only those shards of glass whistling down along the side of the high-rise, whuffing down onto the white umbrellas set up around the pool, so many stories below the action.

  It’s an old device, I tell myself. An old device at a crappy, soon-to-be-retired theater, and we’re probably the first person to use it in years. There’s dust in the transmitter, there’s bleed over from a competing signal, or—or the headphones for this particular jack are proprietary, that must be it. Whatever I’m hearing, it’s because the grooves in my plug don’t line up perfect with the internal ridges in the device. I’m not even supposed to be listening like this. Of course something’s going to sound a little off. What was I thinking?

  Mystery solved, I thumb my earbuds back in, lean back, close my eyes to try to make this movie not so terrible.

  After the pool scene, which the visual-assist somehow makes believable—it’s all about if you want to enjoy or not—in a moment of comparative silence when the hero is just cruising along in what turns out to be an electric car, which means a quiet car, I hear it again, that undertone of metal on metal.

  This time when I turn my head toward it, toward my father-in-law, I keep my eyes closed, and my whole body goes cold.

  I’m in his apartment with him.

  And—and I haven’t been actually hearing that sound, it’s that, this woman’s voice, it’s split in half somehow, has a top level, the stuff she’s supposed to be saying, the stuff she’s reading from her script, but somehow she’s whispering under that, asking me, “Can’t I hear that, can’t I hear that metal-on-metal grinding?”

  My first impulse, my almost reaction, it’s to open my eyes and push away from whatever this is, what this can’t possibly be, but, but—I do push away, both my hands firmly on the armrest, the cable between us tightening, but I don’t open my eyes.

  This…I’m with him, somehow, my sleeping father-in-law. Like, his memory, his mind, his self, it’s leaking out through his ears, it’s infecting the device, it’s crawling across the headphone cable into my mind’s eye.

  I shake my head no, no, but at the same time, in a sort of wonder, I look.

  * * *

  He’s standing in the kitchen, the television blaring from the living room. It’s the Turner Classic stuff Sheila’s mother was always so in love with, that she always insisted on instead of my father-in-law’s blarey news programs. Meaning this is from then, from before, from when she was alive. Before she died.

  Why I keep watching now, it’s because I want to see how old she is in this. And, because, I don’t know, maybe we’re all voyeurs? Or we all have that tendency, will all sneak a look if given the chance, if there’s no real risk involved? If there’s no way to get caught doing the Peeping Tom thing?

  All I’m doing is listening to a movie through a pair of earbuds, man. Completely innocent, here.

  I close my eyes even more, to see better
.

  Judging by my father-in-law’s gnarled, liver-spotted hands, this can’t be more than five years ago. What he’s doing in the kitchen is…it’s dinner? Sort of. Maybe. Which, I never knew he was capable of that, of dinner, of being the one to prepare the food, of bringing it instead of having it brought.

  But, what this means, what I know it has to mean, it’s that Sheila’s mom is already sick, that she’s already been coughing up blood for a few months.

  That grinding sound, though, that metal-tearing sound, I can finally attach it to something that completely makes sense, now that I’m seeing it: a can opener, one of the old-fashioned wall-mount electric ones, that slowly turn the can around, biting perforations into its top. I guess I’ve maybe even seen it there in their kitchen tucked under the counter right by the doorway to the living room, the wallpaper all stained under it, I just never actually noticed it. And I assume its motor or chassis or whatever must be mostly in the wall, since all that’s showing is a square white plate and then the silver arm that holds the can while the little saw blade teeth chew into it.

  Sheila’s father is opening a can of generic creamed corn, holding it with his right hand to keep it from dropping when it’s done, I guess—to keep more splashes from happening. But it’s not built to be guided like that. The pressure he’s applying to the side of the can is changing the tilt of the can, is slowing it down, is making the sharp teeth dig in at a slightly different angle, and maybe into the same place in the lid, even.

  In the living room, the music swells for some romantic moment or another.

  Next door, the action movie roars on, as if on the neighbor’s incredibly up-to-date sound system.

  I start to turn that way, to the bright lights and screeching tires, but I come back to this slowly rotating can of corn, and the visual-assist narrator says, as if speaking just and only to me, for me, “And we can see what his hand on that rotating can of corn is resulting in, can’t we?”

  I look closer, can’t, no.

  Not until my father-in-law lowers the can from the magnet that stays latched onto the lid.

  “Glittering there in the yellow kernels,” the narrator says, rapt on this detail, highlighting it for me, “are little…are those metal shavings?”

  They are.

  The ancient can opener would have worked fine, done its job like it’s supposed to, probably works just like advertised every time my father-in-law uses it for his own meals, but by angling the can over just enough, and slowing it down, he’s turned it into a weapon.

  He sees these metal shavings, too, I mean. And he nods about them, humming in his mouth contentedly.

  They’re so obvious, now that I’ve seen them. Before he stirs them in.

  Then he’s walking into the living room but “We stay behind, don’t we?” the narrator says right into my mind. “We stay behind, and we look over to the pantry. The door’s open, isn’t it? Go on, lean in, see what’s there.”

  It’s the trash can, overflowing with the torn-open cans of food my father-in-law’s been feeding my wife’s mother for weeks now, it looks like. For months. That he’s been killing her with.

  I suck a harsh chestful of air in and open my eyes, find myself staring right into my father-in-law’s face, his saggy eyes wide open.

  He smiles at me, then chuckles, turns back to the screen, clapping me once on the thigh and leaving his hand there, like initiating me into a new place. Like ushering me in and keeping me there.

  On-screen, a car explodes on landing from an impossible jump and the sound of the explosion is muted and distant for me, is happening in some land far, far away from where I am now.

  * * *

  Walking down the sidewalk when the movie’s over, ready to catch my father-in-law should he stumble, what I’m really doing is rewinding through my mother-in-law’s last couple of years. The doctors diagnosing ulcers and “nonspecific intestinal hemorrhaging” or whatever it was. It didn’t matter then. What mattered was that she eat only bland foods. What mattered was all the prescriptions meant to quell the digestive storm raging inside her.

  What she was doing was watching TCM and eating tiny slivers of metal. If her health plan paid for more or better imaging, maybe the jig would have been up, and it all could have been an accident, bad luck, one failing kitchen appliance trying to kill her, her husband unwittingly involved.

  As it was, she just kept getting chewed up from the inside.

  And nobody suspected anything, least of all Sheila. Her mom was the right age for her body to be failing in unexpected ways, wasn’t she? It was a tragedy, it was sad, but it wasn’t any kind of real surprise. It’s what we all have waiting for us, surely.

  Only, it didn’t have to be. Not for my mother-in-law.

  Did she know right at the end, too? Did she finally see a glittering shard in her corn or peas and look up to her husband, watching her spoon this in?

  At that point, coughing up blood, blood in the toilet, her stomach and intestines in revolt, all failing, did she just guide that next bite in anyway and turn back to her classic movie?

  I don’t know.

  She was from that long-suffering generation, though. The one that would rather hide a thing like this than involve her own daughter. The one that would rather her daughter keep a father she could believe in.

  “And now he’s walking along the sidewalk close to the building,” the narrator now whispering in my head says, “reaching forward with his brown cane as if pulling the sidewalk to him rather than pulling himself forward on the sidewalk.”

  And no one knows, I add, my heart beating in my throat, nearly choking me.

  Do I tell Sheila, though?

  I mean, first, before that, how do I even say I know this, right? I “saw” it in the audio description for that car movie I took your father to? A woman reading a script in a sound booth months ago whispered it to me?

  More like I dreamed it. More like I zoned out in the movie as a form of self-defense, and in that zoned-out state I worked up this grand story for how your father, he killed your mother, Sheel, really, serious, I solved the case. Also, there is a case.

  As proof, of course, I could take a can from the pantry, it doesn’t matter what, and mess with its angle in the can opener until it leaves sharp little slivers of metal behind.

  At which point Sheila would look up from the bowl I’ve just poured, study me long and hard.

  “Are you accusing him?” she would say to me. “Do you really think my father’s capable of this?”

  It’s as unlikely a scenario as a car crashing out the high window of a building, landing in the pool in a way that doesn’t kill everybody involved.

  It doesn’t mean I don’t believe it with every fiber of my being, though.

  I saw it. With my ears, sure, but in a more pure way, too: in my head, leaked across through a headphone cable.

  Whenever my father-in-law is sitting in the room with us, nodding like catching his head from falling over and over again, now I know that what he’s doing is congratulating himself on having gotten away with it, with killing his wife of forty-five years. And for no reason I can come up with other than that one day he saw that he could.

  Can that happen, at the end of your life? Can you become a killer in your dotage, in your golden years? Can you want control of the remote enough that murder’s your best option?

  Nobody will suspect you. There’s no motivation anybody can claim, there’s no first attempt, there’s no bad history, there’s no evidence anybody can find. Just, one day you saw a bright, curled piece of silver in some sliced pears you’d just opened, and you looked up from them to the horrible old movie filling the living room, and you nodded maybe. Maybe.

  It can happen, I think. It did happen.

  I’ve never considered doing anything even remotely like that to Sheila, but I’d be lying if I
said I hadn’t imagined her dying in a car crash or a mall shooting. Not just imagining it, but fantasizing over it. Not like I wanted it to happen, but like…I don’t know. Like the pity that would result after that, for me, and how I wasn’t involved at all in this, could just start over now, start clean, it was attractive somehow. In a dull, never-going-to-happen, please-never-happen way.

  I love Sheila, I mean. I want us to grow old together, to watch our television shows together until the end. I want it to be her and me, a team. We’ll be the ones who make it, together. That’s what I’ve always intended, what I’ve always dreamed.

  But if this ever surfaces, what her father did to her mother, I don’t know.

  It’ll send her into a spiral, I know. One she might never pull out of all the way. One that might take me down with her.

  And I can’t have that.

  * * *

  “He punches the button for the third floor with his cane on the third try,” the visual-assist in my head narrates when we’re back to the building.

  We stopped at the store and went up and down every aisle, so now I have two paper bags of groceries, not including a secret carton of smokes, thank you.

  “Did you two have a good afternoon?” Sheila asks, opening the door while I’m still trying to get the key into the lock.

  “Lords of the matinee,” I tell her, stepping aside to present her father, safe and sound.

  Sheila’s hair is in a scarf, her sleeves rolled high up her arms like Rosie the Riveter. The stringent scent of cleaner washes out past us.

  While she gets her father settled I quietly haul all the trash bags down to the trash. When I get back, Sheila’s unfolding a blanket over her father’s lap and working the big-button television remote into his right hand. There’s not an ashtray in the room, not a newspaper left. For him it has to feel like his life’s been dialed back to five, ten years ago. Sheila’s beaming, glowing, bright and smiling. It’s been a successful Sunday for her. She’s a good daughter.