And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  You peel yourself off the floor and run the film back. The scene isn’t there anymore. Once again, you’re not surprised, but you are—even if you don’t want to admit it—a touch disappointed.

  You finish what’s left of the third film—as expected, the estate with the silly name burns to the ground, and everybody laments—but that night, you can’t sleep. She’ll haunt you now. She’ll live in your veins, not like a disease or a poison, but like a cure.

  You’ll want to pull her out of the screen, to rewrite history and bring her back as gleaming and perfect as she was before.

  Or better yet, you’ll want to crawl right through the cigarette burns, into the spaces between the frames. You’ll want to go where she is. Even if that place is dark and yawning and packed with earth, six feet deep.

  You squeeze your eyes closed, and for reasons you can’t quite understand, tears seep down your cheeks. You steady your breath, and you promise yourself that somehow, you’ll save her.

  And she’ll save you.

  ***

  Though it isn’t horror, the fourth film is the ghastliest of the bunch, a cheesy cult classic with highbrow fashion and low-brow dialogue. She had to say things like “Oh, baby, don’t worry. Marla Doll is here now!” and keep a straight face. But she said it, and said it well, every syllable enunciated with the commitment of a Shakespearean pro. By this film, her voice is steadier, more confident. She was coming into her own, a prime that would never be realized.

  All the bloggers talk about this film, not because it’s good, but because of the behind-the-scenes story. Her killers sneaked onto the set. Of course, they weren’t her killers then. They were merely strangers to her, hyena-laughing hippies that weren’t really hippies at all. Hippies were in it for the peace and love. These four were in it for the headlines.

  Online, there are stills of them, hanging out in the background among the best boys and gaffers and makeup artists. In their paisley and buckskin, they’re conspicuous in retrospect only because you know what to look for. They grin and watch her, planning what they’ll do, how they’ll come for her when she’s alone, when her beau is away shooting another movie in Paris.

  And there she is, standing nearby, blissful and ignorant, smiling at the man she already considered her husband, while he’s smiling at a pretty redheaded extra who blushes and smiles back.

  You try not to think of any of that. You try to focus on her.

  Every night for a week, the film plays on repeat in your apartment. Your friends text you and invite you out for drinks or a movie, but you don’t text back. Anyhow, you already have a movie, and it’s better than anything they could offer. On the fifth night, your girlfriend calls and chastises you for standing her up at dinner. You don’t remember having a girlfriend, but she sounds vexed enough that you take her at her word about it and apologize.

  “Maybe sometime next week?” you say, and hang up.

  On the television, the film is frozen. You reach for the remote, but she trembles on the screen, and you realize the movie isn’t paused. She’s paused, reclined on a chaise lounge, not moving, not speaking, her long legs tucked under her, as though she’s waiting on you.

  “Sorry,” you say, and power down your phone. No more distractions. This is where you want to be, here with her. Your time together seems more real than your time with still-living people. If any of them are really living.

  She drifts back to her role of an ill-fated model, and you blink at the glare of the screen. All the lights in the apartment are off. You don’t remember turning them off, but you must have.

  The final frame of the film soft-focuses on her face. She smiles at something off-camera, but it’s a strained smile, a practiced smile, one coaxed from her by a patient director.

  She glances at you, and her skin glistens like the ocean at dawn, but she doesn’t reach for you.

  Then the screen fades to black, and she’s gone, that smile is gone, and you’re alone.

  In the dark of your apartment, you wonder about the last time she smiled for real. There must have been a last time, even if she hadn’t known it then, hadn’t known the hyenas were coming, were already on their way to slit the screen in her Malibu house and orchestrate her third act.

  You wonder what made her smile that final time. A sunset maybe, or a silly joke, or something secret, something that belonged to only her.

  You wonder if it even matters.

  You’re sure it does.

  ***

  The fifth film isn’t a film at all. Not unless you count snuff as a genre.

  In it, she begs for her life. Two full minutes of pleas and bargaining, and then just quiet sobs before the flash of a knife in the lens. Before the world crumbles to black.

  This film is the easiest of the five to locate. You can sit down at your computer any day and find it there. YouTube has removed the clip a thousand times, but somebody somewhere will upload it again, and the cycle will start over. If people want something, you can’t stop them from getting it. Death has an impeccable retail value.

  So you join the fifty million previous viewers, and press play. Her voice is scratchy and wheezing and not like her, though no one would claim this one is dubbed. Thirty seconds in, you wince and turn away, but you force yourself to look back, to live this moment with her. You can’t abandon her, not now, not when she needs you most. You might not be able to help her, but at least you won’t leave her alone.

  In the sidebars of the screen under Up Next, there might be another video of her from happier times, on a nothing talk show in a sparkling Lycra dress, or in a behind-the-scenes documentary waving at the camera in a puffy jacket, her breath fogging around her face like smoke on a cold early morning shoot. There will also be videos of her hyena-grunting killers, interviews after their arrest, after their skipping into the courtroom like schoolchildren on a fieldtrip, after they settled down years later and learned a little something about regret.

  There will always be more videos of them than her. They’re the real stars. Before the verdict of guilty on all counts was ever read, true-crime books about them had already crawled to the tops of bestseller lists, and TV movies based on their bloody exploits were nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes. And when the usual monster angle gets stale, fresh-faced California writers will recast them as misunderstood, as Byronic, as just like us.

  No one will want to tell her story. This is a truth no one openly admits—that murderers are always more interesting than victims.

  Victims are tally marks, case files to be completed and cataloged and tucked away in dusty file cabinets.

  Victims are someone to blame.

  If only she’d locked the door and closed all the windows.

  If only she’d screamed as loudly as she did in her films.

  If only she’d been stronger and fought back.

  If only, if only, if only.

  Because the dead-and-buried generate few headlines, the world forgets her, slowly at first, and then almost altogether. She becomes an obscure trivia question, the kind in a final tournament round that wins a league team twenty-five dollars in buffalo wing vouchers.

  She becomes an entry in an online encyclopedia that starts with her death and then maybe mentions her career, her childhood, her life. Maybe.

  She becomes a cipher. A ghost, but not a ghost, because at least a ghost exists in the white noises and the shadows. These days, she hardly gets that.

  The hyenas fare better. They snicker and enjoy conjugal visits and find God in prison, as if He’s hiding in the corner of their cell behind the toilet, like mildew or a cockroach.

  In interviews televised during primetime with smiley blonde reporters who boast more hair than heart, the hyenas clean up well, and they even say they’re sorry.

  But hyenas lie.

  ***

  Perhaps we lied, too. Perhaps there’s a sixth film, if you’re brave enough to search for it.

  Prepare yourself, though, because this one won’t be easy to f
ind. It never hit Netflix or YouTube. Even most bootleggers claim it doesn’t exist.

  “An urban legend,” they’ll tell you when you ask.

  But they’re wrong.

  It’s out there, and if you’re patient, if you comb all the film convention tables and seedy backrooms at dying video stores, you’ll find it. A VHS cassette with her name written on the spine. It comes with a warning label, the type a character in a horror film would ignore and then wish he hadn’t.

  You aren’t like that character. You already know the risks.

  You don’t care.

  Even once you unearth the video, it takes you another week to dig up a VCR. You finally buy one at a yard sale for ten dollars too much. The curmudgeonly old couple with matching gray hair can see how much you want it, and they refuse to give you a deal. Most of the buttons are worn off, and the tracking on the tape is a mess, but it doesn’t matter. Once she materializes among the static, everything else falls away.

  Her body flickering with life and promise, she tips up her chin beneath a spotlight, and you realize it: she’s there waiting for you. She’s always been waiting for you. Even before there was a you to wait for.

  And you’ve been waiting for her.

  You move toward the television, so close you fog up the screen. On the other side, her breath does the same.

  “Thank you for coming,” she’ll say, and it will be her voice, all of her voices, the ones they trained and the ones she trained herself. “Are you ready for my final performance?”

  “Yes,” you’ll say, and mean it.

  Overhead, the lights flicker, and the apartment wobbles around you. With the weight of the sky pressing into your bones, she smiles, a real smile, a smile that glows and twists and lights up the universe. A smile that sears all the bad in the world and turns it to dust. Outside, glass shatters, and brick facades crumble, and your apartment disintegrates to cinders around you. The blazing world smells of smoke and lies and the pelts of feral animals who tried to steal the world, animals who did their best to strip her of everything she was—her body, her voice, her life.

  But even in death, she’s more alive than they ever were, and she doesn’t belong to them, not anymore. They belong to her, and she reduces them to ash with the rest.

  You toss your head back and laugh, because you’re glad to see it all smolder. She’ll laugh too, and as the edges of your life singe away, she’ll reach through the screen. Still smiling, she’ll pull you out of the world that tried so hard to obliterate her, a world that failed because at least you remembered her. And now with no world to go back to, she remembers you.

  In a Technicolor haze of her own making, she’ll hold you close, and you’ll hold her.

  And in the final frame, as the universe fades to black, you’ll save each other.

  THE LAZARUS BRIDE

  We end in fire. All beautiful things end in fire.

  ***

  It’s midnight when you slip from the satin sheets of our honeymoon bed, the train of your wedding gown stalking behind you. In your wake, the room smells of yesterday’s church ceremony, like stale buttercream icing and Bible verses we didn’t believe.

  I sit up on the cold mattress and watch you through the picture window. Outside, the summer air shimmers, and you wander barefoot along the front lawn of our rented cottage, your body a senseless shape in a world of shadows.

  You look back once, your heavy gaze the color of the ivy creeping over the trees. I almost call to you through the glass, but my lips tremble, and I think better of it.

  Right now, you want to be alone. The gold band on my ring finger itches, and I wait for you to return to me.

  I wait too long.

  The glow is faint at first, so dim and distorted that not until the flames have cascaded down the curves of your thighs, your waist, your breasts, do I realize you’re burning.

  I blink back in the light, convinced it’s a mirage or a fever dream. But this is no illusion. The blaze dances and coils and climbs higher into the sky, and handfuls of your skin melt into neat, colorless puddles like silver dollar pancakes.

  Someone is screaming. I’m screaming. I’m screaming and stumbling and trying to reach the door, trying to reach you, but it’s too late.

  You close what’s left of your eyes, and your body turns to ash.

  ***

  We met in ice. It was the dawn of December two years ago, and you were showing your art at a gallery downtown. Friends of friends had told me about you. You crafted weird mixed media on giant canvases, using images of willowy models clipped from vintage issues of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. With a sheen of Mod Podge, you pasted them back together, so that their bodies were disjointed, hips a mosaic of odd angles and mismatched eyes too big and too small at the same time. Fabulous stuff, the critics said, award-winning stuff, strange stuff that I never quite understood, though I pretended to.

  Everyone knew you then, the cool girl with the stop-sign red lips and the scuffed Doc Martens you salvaged from a thrift store. You frequented all the best warehouse parties and cocktail bars and hip little coffeehouses where the playlists alternated between Modest Mussorgsky and sad-sack emo boys crooning over lost love.

  The gallery should have been packed with your admirers that night, cooing over your latest installation of jumbled girls, but a storm descended, and with the frozen roads diamond-slick, nobody braved the weather except me. So you had to make do with one admirer.

  “Thank you for coming,” you said when you realized that I’d won your attention by default. “My name’s Gillian.”

  “I’m Terence.” I choked on my own name. I wasn’t there to meet you. I wanted to meet you, of course, but I also wanted to blend in with the plaster, to disappear in plain sight. I was there for the art. That was what I told myself. But I was really there for you.

  The sleet pelted the windows like fists, and we drank martinis—enough for a dozen invisible guests—and we talked about anarchy and politics and Picasso’s Blue Period. A lump in my chest swelled, and I scavenged like a vulture through every tidbit of Art History trivia from my freshman year course a decade ago. You outfoxed me by a mile, and you grinned over the rim of your cocktail glass, because you knew it. You knew I was struggling, that I was desperate to impress you. Everything about me amused you, from the yellow tweed print of my jacket to the name of my job.

  “A switchman?” you asked with a giggle. “It sounds like you’re detonating a bomb.”

  After the storm withered away and the gallery lights dimmed, you asked me to meet you the next night at the ice rink on North Shore. I was sure that it was a cruel prank, that I would wait for you in vain for hours. But when I arrived, bundled up with my breath fogging around me like smoke, you were already there, two pairs of rented ice skates in hand.

  “I figured you were about a size ten.” You smiled. “Is that right?”

  I nodded, and together, we slid into our bladed boots. Our legs quivering, you laced your fingers with mine and guided me onto the ice. I couldn’t skate and neither could you, but that didn’t matter. We crashed into each other exceptionally well, our prickled skin and flimsy bones wrapped together in a never-ending fall.

  “Isn’t this fun?” you asked as we peeled our bruised bodies from the ice.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice a wisp of air, breathless with chill and wanting you.

  We fell again and again in the cold, and it was all a great game to you. Your laugh was wind-chime clear, and when you kissed me, your lips tasted like sugar and ice and light, something pure and indecipherable.

  You had no place of your own, just a loan on a friend’s Cabernet-stained futon, so you invited yourself to my house for the night. In the dim of my bedroom, you undressed me, your fingers flicking open each button on my shirt like you were taunting me, like any moment you might laugh and leave me alone. But you didn’t leave. You unzipped your dress and crawled in bed next to me. I held you as close as I could without smothering you. Your body wrapped a
round mine, and you were so alive you practically glowed, your skin pale as a phantom in the moonlight.

  I should have known then you weren’t supposed to last.

  ***

  Your body is burned now, everything reduced to ash except that golden symbol of eternity I bought for you, the one that never quite fit your narrow finger.

  A mesh of red maples reaches overhead like hands united in prayer, and the leaves are the color of fresh blood, alive and new and dew-draped. This is the lustrous heart of summer, but we welcome no pink moon, no fireflies, no shrill call of the cicada. Not a speck of life dwells in this place, not even you.

  My hands search the detritus for a sign of you, for a patch of unburned skin or the scorched socket of a hip joint. But you’re not here. Where you’ve gone I cannot fathom, so I shape the cinders into an effigy of you. Your face, your waist, your long legs. This is the closest I can get.

  I tip my head to the sky, my cheeks dripping with char-black tears, and I say your name, over and over in its every permutation. Murmuring it like a prayer, shrieking it like a curse, enunciating it with an even tongue as though I’m a preacher reading off a list of the dead.

  I say it a thousand times until the word loses its meaning, until the sound boils in my ears and makes my lips go numb. Somehow, this is enough. Piece by piece, your body reconstitutes, skin and bone and hair emerging from the void.

  The ash remembers. Even your wedding dress returns unblemished.

  You are whole again, and you inhale a breath, your first breath back from the grave.

  “Gillian?” I whisper the word this time, not quite believing it.

  Your lips part, and your voice is so slight it barely disturbs the air. “Terence?”

  Relief, potent as absinthe, surges through my chest. Sobbing, I take you into my arms and carry you inside to the claw-foot tub where I run a cold bath, the coldest bath I can, enough to overwhelm the echo of the flames that stole you from me. A fresh bar of lavender soap scrubs the soot from your skin, and here you are, as beautiful and gleaming as the night we met. I wrap you in a Jacquard-woven towel and escort you to the bed.