"Who?" Marius asked.
"The jury," Victor answered. He was spinning his wedding ring on his ringer, a sure sign of nervousness. He'd lost fifty pounds since the accident and the ring seemed two sizes too large. "They were enraptured by the film. You couldn't have pried their eyes away with a crowbar."
Marius imagined Victor handing out comment cards, treating the jurors like the audience of an advance screening.
Between 1 and 5, how would you rate the motion picture you've just seen?
(please circle)
1 (very poor) 2 (poor) 3 (average) 4 (good) 5 (very good)
Shaking off the image, he asked, "Vic, you see anything different this time?"
Victor drew a question mark in the air with his pinky. He spoke with his hands often, sometimes pantomiming more than verbalizing. The joke was that in an earlier life he'd been Harold Lloyd. "Different?"
"Yeah, like more." He put a heavy accent on more, turning the little word into a euphemism. Victor's crinkled brow made it clear he had no idea what Marius meant, so he added, "More, like a higher angle or something. I swear I could see inside the cart. I saw. . .everything."
Victor shook his head. "I've seen the footage a dozen times. You can't see anything until the cart—"
"The cart overturns, yeah, that's what I always saw, too." His gut tightened. He felt foolish. "But this time, I saw more. I saw the wooden beam tear their heads off."
"Jesus, Marius." Victor turned his head. "You know how movies work, we don't ever put anything on screen, not really. We film just enough to get the audience's imagination to fill in what's missing. You're just tired. It's been a shit-storm of a year for you—the accident, Beth leaving with the kids, this goddamn trial. You got this prosecutor calling you a monster every day. Ain't no surprise you're seeing—"
"This isn't me feeling guilty. I saw it."
The cameraman tapped his fingers against the table. "People swear they can see a dead munchkin hanging from the trees on the trip to the Emerald City. But all that's there is an out-of-focus bird flapping its wings in the background. But people think it's a dead midget, so they see it, really see it."
Marius felt heat rising behind his face. He shook his head. "This wasn't like that. This wasn't a bird out of focus."
"Man, it's always a bird out of focus."
***
Marius sat at the crowded defense table and watched the jury return from deliberation. At the end of the table, co-defendant Bruce Dunn, soundman, stopped tapping a ballpoint pen against the table, frozen by the sight of the nine men and three women taking their seats. The courtroom was silent. Then Victor leaned in and whispered into his ear, "It's like watching a test audience leave the theater, right? Trying to figure out what they thought by the looks of their faces?"
Marius nodded. It did feel that way, exactly. Just as frustrating.
On impulse, he turned in his seat and surveyed the courthouse. They'd conducted a lottery for tickets to witness the celebrity trial. His eyes flickered between the jury and the rows of onlookers, and he wondered, who's the real audience?
At a separate table, the fourth defendant, producer Andre Ferronte whispered into his lawyer's ear and smiled. He must have seen something Marius had missed. It happened sometimes. That was why it was best to have fresh eyes in the editing room, even if he had a final cut provision in his contract.
The judge called the courtroom to order and asked the foreman if the jury had reached a verdict. They had. The judge asked him to read it into the record.
Silence for a long moment. Suspense worthy of Hitchcock.
***
The reporters were waiting outside, a wide crescent swarm of low noise microphones and hi-def cameras. The defense team led the way, pushing through the first wave that came running up the courthouse's marble steps with their arms up in defensive little poses, the last nerdy kids remaining in a game of eighth-grade dodgeball. Marius and Victor followed, so close that their toes nearly touched their lawyers' Italian leather heels.
A storm tide of questions hit them, the ocean of voices drowning out individual voices until only a few spare words made it to their ears like flotsam riding on the tide: "—acquitted—", "—regrets—", "—vindicated?"
They kept moving, trotting down the stairs, avoiding eye contact, until a young reporter's voice broke through the noise. The question had nothing to do with the outcome of the trial. It was simply this: "What's your favorite movie?"
Marius turned and scanned the crowd. He was unable to pinpoint the source of the question. A dozen microphones sparred for position under his chin, each with a different news organization's logo printed on the foam windscreens. He mumbled the answer, "Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou."
***
He didn't need groceries, he needed to get out of his house. The beachfront villa seemed empty and sterile, like an abandoned hospital, and it was no place to come after winning a court case. He'd called around, trying to find some company, but the phones just rang until answering services or machines picked up. He didn't leave a message. Some of them might have been out, he knew, but not all of them. How many were looking down at tiny LCD displays, reading his name, and deciding not to pick up?
The supermarket was sterile and cold as well, but at least there were people inside, employees and college kids and couples.
Turning down the personal hygiene aisle, he saw a family bickering over shampoo. Shampoo—that was their problem. Not manslaughter charges. Not a yoga instructor from the valley with eyes for married women. Not a Rolodex filled with names that wouldn't return a phone call. Shampoo.
A young girl and boy sat in the family's shopping cart, watching their parents argue. They turned and stared up at Marius as he passed. He froze, unable to take his eyes off them for a moment, gripped the handle of his own cart, and fought the urge to crumble onto the tile floor. They were so young and innocent, so fragile. Forcing his eyes shut, he pushed on, passing the family, and snatched a box of single-sided razor blades off the shelf.
He got the hell out of there.
***
Not quite drunk but far from sober, Marius split his attention between the forty-two-inch plasma screen on the far wall and the tabloid on the leather ottoman at his feet. Open to the article advertised on the lurid cover, he skimmed the text, ignoring all but the most important words and phrases: manslaughter, acquittal, judge furious, tainted jury, rumored bribery. He wondered if the paper had the article already written, or if tabloid writers were just that much faster than screenwriters.
On screen, Maureen O'Hara cowered against John Wayne's chest in The Quiet Man. She broke away and ran under a stone arch as thunder crashed and rain began to fall. Joining her, Wayne removed his coat and wrapped it around her.
Outside, the real rain had been pouring down for hours. Marius swept up the bottle of Ladybank Single Malt, pressed it to his lips, and sucked. He was sure a stomach full of whiskey would have kept Maureen O'Hara warmer than the Duke's coat.
Strings swelled. They kissed.
And then John Wayne began to cough.
Dropping the bottle onto the ottoman and not bothering to glance down to see if it spilled or not, he stared at the screen with more interest than he had all night. He'd watched The Quiet Man a dozen times since he'd first caught it as the bottom half of a double feature as a kid. He knew the graveyard sequence as well as any scene from any film. O'Hara and Wayne would kiss, and kiss again, and once more, until the inevitable fadeout. There was no coughing.
Except there he was, one of Hollywood's most treasured icons, clutching his chest and hacking, his face turning bright Technicolor red. O'Hara stepped away and disappeared into the dark blur at the edge of the screen. Holding his fists tight to his lips, his chest heaved and he bent forward, eyes squinting. The coughing fit continued as the fadeout finally came, later than it ever had, but Wayne remained on screen, surrounded by blackness, gasping for breath and convulsing.
Marius reached down and
plucked the remote control from the sofa and hit the button marked info. A bar appeared on screen with the name of the channel, the film's title, and the time remaining. He hit the button again and half the screen was filled with a synopsis of the plot. He expected to see some notation about a special edition with restored footage but there was none.
Then what the fuck was all this?
John Wayne stiffened on screen as a massive shock hit his body. A moment later he went limp, arms and legs falling to his sides. The scene around him brightened, illuminating the hospital bed under his body. His eyes, still open, went hard and still, no more life in them than a pair of marbles.
Marius fumbled with the remote, juggling it in his hands, until he was able to gain enough control of his shaking hands to change the channel.
Then he sat down and finished the bottle of scotch.
***
Victor looked bad. Sitting across the booth, the cameraman was smoking again after ten years without a puff, the glowing tip of the European cigarette matching the color of his eyes. His skin was pale and drooping. It looked as if he hadn't slept in days.
"You okay?" Marius asked, though the answer was as obvious as the jitter of the cigarette in his hand. If he didn't know better, he would have taken him for a junkie on the sweat-and-piss-stain end of a two-week jones. "You look like hell."
Victor flicked the ashes, glanced over at the disapproving glower of a waitress leaning against a pie case, and stubbed out the smoke on the chrome napkin dispenser. "They'd ban breathing in restaurants if they could. . .I'm glad you called, man. Thought about ringing you up, but kept losing my nerve."
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Remember when you asked me if I saw anything different in the movie? I didn't lie to you. I wasn't watching it, didn't see a frame, had my eyes locked on the jury." He leaned across the table as he spoke, glassy eyes fixing on Marius. "But then afterward, maybe a couple days, things started to happen."
"Things?"
"Yeah, things, motherfucking scary things." Victor tilted his head. His brow lowered. He fished inside a coat pocket and brought out a digital camera. Turning it on, he set it down next to Marius' coffee. "Tell me what you see."
His eyes flickered down to the LCD screen. "Your family?"
He nodded, and hit a button. "And this one?"
"Two kids? They the niece and nephew you always talk about?"
"And this?" he said as he brought up a third shot.
It was the waitress. From the looks of it, he'd snapped the picture moments before Marius arrived. "What's going on, Vic?"
"That's just it. To you, these are just pictures of people, right? My Dad and Mom, little Stephie and Ryan, a girl working at a greasy spoon. That's what you see. I see them, too. But when I look at these pictures, they're dead. Pale waxy skin. Sunken eyes. Except for Stephie. . .she. . .it looked like an accident. . ." Victor scrambled for the cigarette butt, not lighting it, sliding it between his lips and sucking on the filter. A moment later he'd regained enough composure to point at the camera and say, "Look at the next picture."
Marius hit the button. On the screen, Victor stood in the middle of his family and smiled.
He said, "When I look at it, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. My family's all alive in that one. Stephie's head. . .we're all okay. Do you know why? I do. Because I handed the camera off to my brother-in-law. I didn't take it."
The camera clinked as Marius set it down on the table.
"You don't believe me, do you?" Victor pressed a palm against his forehead as if fighting a massive migraine headache. "It's fucking insane, I know, tin foil hat stuff, but I swear to you—"
"Vic, stop." Marius raised both hands as if in surrender. "Do you know how I spent the weekend? I watched some of my favorite actors die. Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Roy Scheider. I saw Michael Redgrave die from Parkinson's. Richard Burton's brain hemorrhage. James Dean's car crash. If I watch a movie, any movie, there's always someone on screen who's died. And I have to watch it happen."
He waited for a reaction, a roll of the eyes or twitch or nod, but if anything, his words had calmed Victor. Exhaling, he reached for the camera and replaced it with a cell phone. "You need to talk with Bruce Dunn."
Bruce Dunn had been the soundman on all of Marius' features, including the last one. "Is he seeing these sort of things, too?"
"No," Victor said with a sad shake of his head. "He's hearing them."
***
After Brandon Lee stopped twitching, Marius got off the couch, kicked over a beer can, and loaded a DVD into his player. An FBI warning screen replaced the dead actor. Sitting down, he waited for the menu to come up, then pressed play on the remote control. Un Chien Andalou began, title flickering before surrendering to the silent film's first card:
Il était une fois
The next image was a barber sharpening his long-handled razor on a long strip of leather. Marius dropped the remote control. His hands rifled over a dinner tray on the couch next to him, digging under the plate of reheated Chinese takeout. He came up with the box of razors, opened it, and slid one between his fingers.
The barber smoked on the balcony. Marius thought of Victor. The barber stared up at the full moon, his face a blank slate, unreadable. How did Buñuel, both the director of the film and the actor portraying the barber, die? He supposed he could keep his eyes on the screen and find out.
Buñuel disappeared, replaced by a young woman's face, stark and pale, another emotionless ghost like the barber. Two fingers, one for the upper eyelid, one for the lower, forced her eye open. The barber leveled the razor blade.
Marius brought his own razor up to his face. He could feel fingers on his face and cool air drying his eye. But only for a moment.
The young woman's eye was replaced by the full moon, a single thin cloud, as narrow as a skeletal finger, crossed over. Then her face returned, eye pierced, sclera pulling back like elastic, a thick black bubble of vitreous humor bulging through the chasm, pushing past the edge of the lens sack.
Marius lost sight of the grisly image on screen as his own eyeball ruptured under his razor and the world exploded in a rush of psychedelic color.
It hurt worse than the movie let on.
***
Driving with one eye meant that half of Ventura Boulevard was a peripheral blur. To keep everything in sight, Marius had to swivel his head back and forth as if it were a pendulum, gesturing no to nothing and everything, and even then he found the car swerving from the yellow to the white lines. Worse, his destroyed eyeball pulsed with pain and tickled around the edges under his makeshift eye-patch, tempting him to jab at it with a finger. He imagined the outcome would be something like an already broken grape reduced to peel and wine.
He was thankful when the tall, arching studio gates appeared, and even more so when he was parked in the lot behind Sound Stage Four. He wobbled as he climbed out of the luxury sedan, stumbling in a half-circle as he fumbled with the remote control for the door lock button. Frustrated, he reopened the door and tossed the keys on the seat. He turned and staggered away, leaving the door still open and chiming.
Sound Stage Four was unlocked. He knew it would be the case—nothing had filmed there since the accident. He wasn't sure why, really. Maybe the insurance company still had an investigation open. Or maybe it was just superstition. He kept a hand on the cinderblock wall as he walked the main hallway. He passed a first aid kit side-by-side with an eyewash station. Normally, that sort of thing would have been worth remembering as a gag for a future movie. But he wasn't in the business anymore, all that was over.
As he turned the corner, he squinted with his remaining eye. Something was wrong. The house lights were off, but the diamond mine set was lit. He searched for lighting gear—quartz incandescent bulbs in shuttered lamp-houses, translucent umbrellas, and skirted lanterns—but all the equipment they'd used on that last day of shooting was gone, no doubt spirited away for another production. Only the prop torc
hes fastened to the cavern walls remained.
"What are you doing here?" Bruce Dunn called. He was crouched down by the tracks in a dark alcove, a dark little nook that appeared to be another cave but went nowhere. He stood up, gripped the plaster rock wall, and nearly fell back down. Unshaven, his face resembled a well-worn hairbrush, thick wiry growth protruding from his face at random angles. He could have passed for homeless.
He had a bandage over his left ear, white linen at the top, a dripping red sieve at the bottom where blood pooled. Marius wondered if this was how Van Gough had looked. Then another thought: was it really the madness that cost the painter his ear, or was it the art?
"He's here for the same reason you are," Victor's voice echoed down from the other end of the set. He emerged from the darkness of the main tunnel, the one the set designers had actually built for all of the practical shots. He wore a pair of black driving gloves. The fingers were bound together with electrical tape. Marius wondered whether he'd taken off all of his fingers, or just the ones necessary to operate a camera. "We're here because there's nowhere else for us to be anymore."
It was true. When Marius had reached the point where he could no longer watch actors die—and after the alcohol ran out—the beach house began to feel alien and unreal, as if it were only there as an illusion, a device. Even while driving to the studio he'd felt as if the traffic he'd encountered was all planned and choreographed. He'd seen a road worker speaking into a two-way radio at a construction site and couldn't help but wonder whether the man was giving or receiving stage directions.
"Three out of four defendants," Bruce snorted. "A reunion."
From the doorway behind Marius, another voice boomed, vocal chords as dank and rumbling as a didgeridoo or Australian thunder. All three men turned. Andre Ferronte, the producer, waddled onto the set. "Four. All four defendants."
Horror Library, Volume 4 Page 27
