There’s a man with a lanyard and a walkie-talkie by the doors. I march straight up to him and mime threading a needle, then stabbing myself with it.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “The Human Pincushion. The kids are backstage.”
He keeps shooing me forward as I walk down the auditorium’s empty aisles. I hesitate at the stage, unsure, but he waves me on. “Up the stairs, behind the screen.” As I near the edge, I can hear voices, one of which sounds like Luz. I wonder if this is the best time to interrupt, but with the coordinator looking on, I have no choice but to see this through. I slip into the wing, the curtain’s shadow giving me a temporary reprieve from forward momentum.
She’s there, right in the centre. The only girl in a group of ten students. But this Luz looks nothing like the one I dated. She’s got the skinniest grey denims rising up from ankle boots, the heels as tall and pointy as the ones Jennifer Jason Leigh brained Steven Weber with in Single White Female. Her hair, still her natural melted-tar black, is restrained in a side bun, bangs diving over her eyes. She’s a woman out of a magazine.
I can’t speak to her like this, not dressed in my days-old shirt, my chest a bib of sweat. Not with my hair that I haven’t cut in two months. The guys she’s with look like American Apparel models. A few have old-man cardigans, others button-down plaid; the one brown guy next to her is wearing suspenders. From the waist down, a rainbow of skinny jeans fans out across the room.
Luz’s group is talking with someone who looks important; maybe he’s an organizer, maybe a filmmaker. She’s got her body tilted to him, her hand on her collarbone, the way she stands when she feels shy.
He’s the one who sees me first. “Which one of you is using the mascot?” He motions for me to come closer. I walk as slowly as I can into the semicircle of manicured stubble to give Luz time to react.
“So, who ordered the squirrel?” he repeats.
I nudge closer to Luz. I slide toward her with my hands up like at the beginning of the “Celebration Sensation” song. For a second in her reaction, I recognize her, the Luz I know.
“He’s mine,” she mumbles. Her co-director bends toward her, confused. She lays her fingers across the back of his neck and pulls his ear next to her lips.
“Great idea.” The man pats my chest. There’s something familiar about his features, the lines below his cheeks carved like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Nothing’s worse than a stale-turd introduction.” Then I realize. It’s Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck Effing Palahniuk.
The hipster mafia fidgets, shown up at the swap meet. Fresh turd or not, I’ve got nothing else planned. I haven’t even seen the final movie. Before she canned me, Luz did show me the preliminary storyboards. There weren’t any squirrels.
After Chuck’s pep talk there’s a half-hour break before the screenings and most of the other directors leave to hit up the green room catering. Luz and her co-director stay behind to deal with me.
“This is Graham.”
He leaves his arm around her waist as he shakes my hand. I still have the gloves on and he gets a mittful of fur. The Frankie suit only has three fingers and a thumb. Somehow, in this moment, it feels like a personal anatomical failing.
“Was this the plan?” Luz asks. “Or have you worked out the next step?”
I’m too humiliated to take the head off, so I stand there mute, aiming Frankie’s gape-mouth smile at her.
“We can work with this.” Graham leans down and kisses her cheek, in case I found the earlier PDA too subtle. “Like Chuck said, it won’t be boring.” As he shifts to face me, his nose traces her hairline. Like she’s his own personal Kleenex.
“Is this something that happened before Christmas?” My voice is nearly a snarl. When she’d sat me down halfway between New York Fries and Jimmy the Greek, she’d insisted there was no one else. It was just about life stages. Things running their course. It sounded like a science experiment that was ready to be written up, the precipitate all settled at the bottom of the test tube.
“This is the first year someone’s in the showcase who’s not from NYU or Columbia,” Luz says, fuming. “The only question I care about is what the hell a pincushion has to do with Frankie’s Funhouse.”
“It’s like a joke,” Graham says. “A squirrel and a tailor walk into a bar. It’s theatre of the absurd.”
This is the worst way to die. Dressed as a squirrel in front of the woman you love. In front of her blowhard new boyfriend, who’s perishing from nut suffocation in his cherry jeans. This is the juncture at which I’d like to spontaneously combust, the old film-catching-on-fire trick, the flames bursting out from my downturned, oversized mug. Death by embarrassment.
“There’s a warehouse, right?” From what I remember, the human pincushion is a fetish performance artist who stuffs hundreds of pin tips under his skin and then uses magnets to theatrically remove them. A homicidal tailor tries to frame him for a series of slit-up bodybuilders.
“I can’t hear you.”
I pop my mouth out under Frankie’s neck. “There’s a warehouse, right?”
“Darren, we have twenty minutes.” Luz seizes the head by the cheeks and lifts it off. “What the hell happened to your face?”
Graham retreats a few feet, unsure if I’ve Trojan-Horsed in just to rough him up.
“Forget about it.” My hair must look like a cartoon porcupine but having free access to air feels incredible. “The tailor has a warehouse of clothes that need repair.”
“It’s not really about the tailor.” Graham reasserts himself, hitching his thumbs in his belt loops. “It’s about kink. The way our society monsterizes consensual deviance. The tailor is the villain but the pincushion looks like the villain.”
“You were her TA, weren’t you?” Last fall, Luz went on and on about her Fine Art tutorial, speaking in the kind of quotes they splash over application packages: “He’s making it relevant to the real world. He isn’t dumbing it down.” “I got that Derrida book out of the library – if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re welcome to it.”
Graham ignores me. “We’re looking at notions of conformity. What’s more conforming than Frankie’s Funhouse? Suburban-packaged entertainment.”
“You know, Graham,” Luz says, her voice spiked with annoyance. “It’s also meant to be a fun splatter film. Let’s just decapitate the rodent.”
The plan is for me to walk up to the podium, look like I’m going to take the mic, then Luz will jump out and lop off my head with a prop sword. The costume’s just roomy enough that I can duck and balance the head on my shoulders. She’ll exaggerate the sword windup, but the head should drop off with a tap.
Head off, slump to the floor. Someone will drag me off by my feet. They’ll leave the severed head onstage during the film, swimming in a pool of fake blood. Graham goes off, trying to scrounge some up from the nearby vendors.
“Do you think you can keep your head in the costume when you fall?”
No.
“Maybe pull your shirt over your head. Then, if it shows, it’ll just look like stuffing.”
What the hell else can I do? We can hear the audience clamouring into their seats on the other side of the screen. I wonder if Henry’s there yet. Luz always liked Henry. Maybe if she sees him, she won’t hate me forever.
Five minutes before I’m set to go on, Graham comes back. “No blood,” he says. “But I’ve got two bottles of ketchup from catering and some Ziploc bags.”
“How the hell is that going to work?”
“Why don’t we just squirt the ketchup inside?”
“I’ve got to give the costume back.”
“Put your shirt over your head,” Luz suggests. “We’ll just squirt the top with ketchup.”
It’s the same no-name stuff that the Funhouse buys, which comes in tins big enough to barrel over the Falls. This stuff’s been sitting a while, more vinegar than tomato. Between the funk of the suit and the acidity of the condiment, it’s hard to keep my gag reflex in check.
The ketchup soaks through the cotton of my shirt and mats my hair. I can’t see at all. When my cue comes, it’s a lot harder than I expected to walk without wobbling the head. A few steps out and I can feel it start to tip. I raise my hands up, as if in victory, so I can stabilize it with my arms. For some reason, the crowd loves it. They applaud and cheer. I lose track of how far to walk and picture myself misjudging the distance, toppling off. My middle collides with the podium. I’m able to catch it in time and get my arms back up before the head spills. I wave to the audience, my arms lower now, waiting for the blow.
Behind me there’s the click-thwack of Luz’s approaching stilettos. Each step sounds like it’s coming through a mixing board, the editor going to town on the echo.
Click-thwaaaack. Click-thwaaaack. Click-thwaaaack.
Suddenly, the pulse stops. I can hear Luz breathing behind me, both of us inhaling in sync. There’s the bird swish of her arms rising.
In the sweep forward, before the sword collides, a girl screams out from the audience. “No! Frankie! No!”
Starr.
HENRY
THE LIGHTS SNAP ON. STARR IS STIFF, HANDS OVER HER ears, lips pinned between her teeth. Her cries come out like desperate humming. It’s too loud for them to start the film and an usher makes her way down to us. I stand, wrapping myself around my daughter. Everyone in the rows around us is staring. They don’t know how afraid she is. They think it’s comedy. I catch a young guy pointing a digital camera at us and growl for him to turn it off. His eyes jolt from the screen and catch mine. “Sorry.”
I lift Starr up under her armpits, like when she was a little girl and lead her along the path of turned knees.
Only the mascot head is left onstage, rolled so we can see into the hollow. A trail of red bleeds off into the wings. I’m the closest thing Darren’s got to a legal guardian within eight hundred kilometres. I brace Starr’s weight on my hip and walk up the steps, despite the usher’s protests. With my free hand, I grab Frankie’s head by the helmet strap.
Darren is on the floor of the green room, flanked by three paramedics.
“He’s dead. He’s dead.” Starr gulps between breaths.
I point out his hand, flexing and closing. He’s come to, but barely.
“He was supposed to keep his head tucked,” Luz says. She’s off in the corner, arms crossed. Next to her, some guy in red jeans pats her back. You can tell he just wants to sneak off and watch the movie. They’ve started the program and the opening music filters through the door.
One of the paramedics holds his hand up to the light, something thick and dark dripping off his glove.
“It’s ketchup,” Darren says, his head immobilized.
I sit Starr down and grab a stack of paper towels, wetting half. “He’s fine,” I say, looking back to reassure her. The paramedics wipe Darren off, searching for real blood under the fake. They cut open his French zombie shirt, despite his protests. I unstrap the bottom half of the Frankie costume so they can pat down his legs.
Starr is moaning loud enough that they can probably hear her in the theatre, but I don’t care. If she doesn’t calm down soon, I’ll have to give her a Lorazepam. I find her a bottle of water and ask her to take a few sips.
The older paramedic shines a light over Darren’s black eye.
“A fight. Earlier.”
“We should still take you in. There’s a good chance of concussion.”
There’s no way in hell Darren’s bought travel insurance.
“How serious is it?” I ask.
“I’m feeling better.” Darren twitches his right leg for emphasis. “I just fell harder than I’d planned.”
The medic stabilizing his head looks to the other two for direction.
“We can’t force you to go.”
I’m hoping, for Darren’s sake, their services are covered by the convention. Angry as I am, he shouldn’t have to dip into his tuition money for this. Darren pulls himself to sitting.
“Take it easy.” He’s steadied by the supervising paramedic. Younger than me, but taller, with ropey muscles punching out from his pressed uniform. A flat, no-shit authority to his voice. “If he gets a headache, any vision problems, get him to emerg.” He packs up the blood pressure cuff and looks over at Luz. “Was this your idea?”
“Yes.”
Darren throws himself in front of the punch. “I agreed to it.”
“There’s a difference.”
Luz pulls out a chair as the medic helps Darren off the floor. Darren curves against the back of the seat, naked from the waist up, eyes fixed on the Frankie head. There’s a dent on the side where the sword cut the wrong angle and ketchup is matted inside. In the fall, the bulb of the squirrel’s nose hinged.
The next film has started and ghost hoots flood the room. The paramedics hand off our copy of the refusal of care form and clear out. Luz’s friend has already drifted back to the theatre. Someone has brought the wheelchair around for us and I help my daughter into it. As I start to wheel her out, she swivels to face Luz.
“You need to say sorry,” Starr says, working herself back up. “Darren is a nice boyfriend and a funny person. When you love someone you’re not supposed to hurt them.” She’s looking angry enough to spit. I’m sure the audience can hear her tearing into Luz. “You need to apologize. Now. Say you’re sorry.”
Luz’s bangs have fallen over her eyes. She scans the no man’s land between Darren’s feet and Starr’s wheelchair. “It wasn’t my intention.”
Starr interrupts, more insistent. “Say you’re sorry.”
“You’ve made your point.” I back the wheelchair out the door. This is something Darren needs to finish on his own.
Outside, we’re swept back into the flow of aliens, space cowgirls and superheroes streaming to the autograph hall. I can tell Starr wants an explanation for what’s happened. I don’t know whether it’s better to go into it or to distract her with the costumes. Kathleen will be livid when she hears what’s happened.
“Darren will be fine.” I bend down to kiss my daughter’s temple. “He’s tougher than he looks.”
DARREN
LUZ HANDS ME A SHOWCASE T-SHIRT. I DOUBT I’LL SEE her again after this and I know I should say something or notice the moment, but all I can think of is the two-thousand-dollar price tag on a new Frankie suit. Right now I have to get the bulk of the ketchup off before the sugar hardens. There’s only so much Woolite spray can do.
I pick up the loose parts and spread them out by the sink. Luz offers to help, but I shake her off. If I’m going to mess it up, I’d rather do it myself. The shoes have a few drops of ketchup on them and the pulp sponges off, leaving a red circle.
I hand Luz the footies and she finds a black garbage bag to collect them in. “I’m sorry I suggested it,” she says. Even if the stains come out, I’ve got the nose to worry about. The fibreglass needs a specialized repair kit.
“It’s done.”
“Why did you come?” She winds her fingers around her necklace, rubbing her thumb against the metal beads.
It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I wonder if she’s even with Graham or if she asked him to pretend, thought I wouldn’t get it unless she was with someone else. What’s worse, she’s right. I am that pathetically in love with her.
“You’ve missed your film.”
Luz nods, biting her tongue.
I point out a splash of ketchup on her top, underneath the silk-screened ink blot. She looks down at it but does nothing.
“Should I be worried about you?” Luz traces the bruising under my eye, her nail a magnet at the pins of my nerves.
“You should see the other guy.” The violence in the alleyway already feels like it happened to someone else. An intersection of fist, meat and wall seen at a distance. “Not a scratch.”
“Lover not a fighter, huh?” She already sounds like an older sister. “Do you want me to call you when you’re back? So we can talk about this?”
My whole crumm
y plan culminating in another conversation at the food court. Jeremy wasn’t wrong, teasing me about texting her. Six months on, he would already be cheating on his next steady, not carrying this throbbing, embarrassing longing. Luz is not the same person anymore. Not better or worse, just not my girlfriend.
I think about the toy I made for her. All the videos. All the times I’ve caught myself talking to her, planning things for us to do. I just feel so dumb, like I’ve been speaking to an imaginary friend.
“You don’t need to call.” I can’t tell if she looks hurt or relieved. “I’m sorry you missed your film.”
I gather up the bagged suit and curve past her.
“Maybe we can make a plan to hang out next Christmas?” she says. “Friends-style?”
In Luz’s storyboards, the performance artist killed himself – probably for one of Graham’s polysyllabic commentaries on society – by inserting the pins and then swallowing rare earth magnets. Luz was going to hand-animate the path of one needle straight through his heart. Right now, I’d like something that dramatic, a blow-’em-up finish to this interaction. Instead, it’s quiet and simple. I walk out the door and she stays in the room.
I find the closest bench and fixate on the pylon by the washroom. There’s a stick man seconds away from cracking his head on the tile. Floor slippery when wet. ¡Cuidado! Piso Resbaloso.
In my periphery I can see Henry and Starr approaching. I feel like crap that I upset her and I know Henry must be pissed. I wish I looked more together right now but it’s clear I’m about to cry.
I expect him to berate me, but Henry offers to carry the bag.
Starr takes my hand right away. “Are you okay, Darren?”
In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo Page 14
