The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  INT. SOUNDSTAGE—DAY

  Save the afternoon is exactly what we do. Jean-Marc and Clarke and I manage the job of directing between the three of us, with help from the camera operator. We tell Nataliya and everyone else that Joey’s fallen ill. Nataliya just shrugs off the news without a whisper of emotion one way or another. Joey’s ceased to matter to her.

  Nataliya is good in all of her scenes. Carter-Ann comes in after an hour or so, but has nothing to contribute. We finish the day’s shooting ahead of schedule. I’m so grateful for the peace on the set that when Nataliya brings up her monologue again, I look at Jean-Marc and shrug.

  “What the hell,” he says.

  So we put Nataliya in her bedroom set and sit her on the bed under a poster of Cretan windmills and set up a simple three-light system to light her. We put a camera in front of her. Medium close-up. And then we tell her to start.

  During the performance I’m expecting to have to stuff a towel in my mouth to keep from laughing out loud, but you know what? That doesn’t happen.

  What Nataliya does is magical. She looks at the camera, and she calls up her character’s dreams and secret terrors, and she tells us all about them.

  She’s alone in a strange city. She’s afraid she might be pregnant. Her boyfriend won’t answer her calls. She’s texting everyone she can think of just to have some kind of human contact, but she can’t tell them what’s really bothering her.

  I don’t know if Nataliya’s actually got her speech memorized, or if she’s improvising around an outline, or if she’s suddenly possessed by the spirit of an anxious teenager.

  She doesn’t mention spies. She doesn’t burst into song. She gets into the head of a young girl who’s completely unlike her, and she’s absolutely wonderful.

  I don’t know how she manages it. My biggest problem on Family Tree was that I was supposed to be playing a normal American kid, and I had no idea what a normal American childhood was like. My character, Brent Schuyler, experienced all the typical rites of passage—the big baseball game, the first dance, the transition to high school, the first date, the first kiss; and these were all experiences I had no familiarity with—except for kissing, and I’d actually had sex before I’d ever kissed a girl. In the dance scene I had to ask the other kids to show me what dancing looked like and how to do it.

  That’s what makes Nataliya’s accomplishment so extraordinary. She’s put herself into the head of someone she couldn’t possibly know. It’s even more singular for someone as self-involved as Nataliya. I had no idea she thought anyone else even existed.

  When Nataliya finishes, there’s a long silence, and then she turns to Jean-Marc and says, “That’s it.”

  I lift my hands and applaud. Everyone else does, too.

  Nataliya listens to the applause with her head tilted, as if she isn’t quite sure what she’s hearing. And then she says, “Do you need another take?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Hell no,” says Jean-Marc. “That was perfect.”

  “I guess I’m done, then.” And then, without any more words—let alone words of thanks—she rises from the bed, smooths her wolfhound hair, and heads for the exit and her pack of admirers.

  Jean-Marc and I watch her leave, then turn to each other.

  “The old Nataliya’s back,” he says.

  I look after her in amazement. “She’s only a human being when she’s acting.”

  “I believe,” he says, portentous, “that she is not of this Earth.”

  The door opens, a passage into another, brilliantly lit world. Nataliya’s silhouette passes through it, and then the passage closes.

  “What are you going to do with the take?” I ask.

  “Bump it up to Dagmar. She gets dailies anyway.”

  “It won’t go in the movie, obviously.”

  “No, but Dagmar’s got side projects going. Games and so on. It might end up there, as like a prize or something.” Jean-Marc lights one of the 555 brand cigarettes left over from shooting the New Delhi scenes, scratches the stubble on his chin, and looks at me sidelong. He lowers his voice. “What really happened with Joey?”

  I look around at the various specialists in the process of packing up for the day. Carter-Ann stands twenty feet away, talking on her cell.

  “If you want that story,” I say, “you’ll have to come to my trailer.”

  Which he does. We sit in the kitchen, I tell him what happened, and he’s not surprised. Joey’s been calling him at two in the morning to rant about Carter-Ann’s latest outrages. Jean-Marc’s attempts to calm him only resulted in greater anger and bitterness.

  “Ten years ago he could have gotten away with this,” Jean-Marc says. “Now…” He shakes his head. “Now he’ll be lucky to be offered a commercial.”

  Jean-Marc returns to the studio to help Allison deal with editing the day’s work. The makeup artist’s assistant comes in to remove my makeup, and then my driver takes me home while I relax in the backseat with a fruit juice concoction called a pomegranate surprise. Left at the curb, I punch the code into the wrought-iron street gate and enter the condo complex. I hear splashing from the pool and vintage doo-wop from an open window on the upper floor. There’s a strong smell of burning rubber in the air. I’m halfway to my condo when a neighbor—a young Hispanic guy with an Irish name, Murphy—comes running up.

  “Hey,” he says, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the last couple hours.”

  I’m surprised. “What’s happening?”

  “Your car burned up, man.” Murphy looks at me out of sad, earnest brown eyes. “There’s nothing much left.”

  I’m too tired to be surprised. This seems the perfect capper to an already shitty day. Goodbye, Mom’s Mercedes.

  “Well,” I say, “thanks for letting me know.” I turn for the parking area. Murphy bounces along next to me, doing a kind of skip in order to keep up with my long legs.

  “The fire inspector’s waiting for you in the clubhouse,” says Murphy. “She says it’s arson.”

  “Arson,” I repeat, as if trying out the way the word fits in my mouth.

  Of course it’s arson, I think. What else would it be? What else could make my day worse?

  I go to have a talk with the fire marshal, a young, nervous-looking Filipina who seems about half my height. I tell her that the car is something like fourteen years old and belongs to my mother, who’s been out of the country for some time. I hope she takes this as evidence that I didn’t torch it myself for the insurance money.

  I tell her that I’ve been threatened online by a cultist. She does not seem impressed.

  She shows me the car. The condo has an automatic gate on a side street that requires a punch code and leads into the parking area. The vehicles are protected by a metal roof but otherwise are open to the elements. There were two firebombs, she explains, one thrown through a window, the other thrown under the car. The parking spaces on both sides were vacant, and no other cars were damaged.

  It wouldn’t have been hard to get into the parking area. The condominium complex is surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence of aluminum pickets with little fleur-de-lis on top, with the one auto gate and two pedestrian gates, each of which requires a code to open. The picket fence wouldn’t present much of an obstacle to a reasonably agile person—and in any case, an intruder could just wait for a resident to pass through one of the gates and follow him in.

  Police arrive with a tow truck, take a lot of pictures, and haul the car off to their lot, where their evidence techs will inspect it the following day. I’m given a receipt. I mention that I’ve been threatened by cultists but they say I should come by tomorrow and fill out a report.

  They aren’t very interested. I guess cultists burn cars every day in LA.

  It’s nearly nightfall when I finally manage to get to my apartment. I call Joey to see how he’s doing, but the call goes straight to voice mail. I go upstairs to shower and change, and then step out onto the balc
ony to look at the night. The air still smells of burning automobile. I’d love to go out for a meal, but unfortunately someone torched my car.

  Looks like I get to microwave dinner again.

  I lean on the balcony rail and look out over the neighborhood. The air is still and there isn’t another human being in sight.

  Then the black Ford Expedition parked across the street rumbles into life, and I feel electric terror shimmering along my nerves.

  The SUV roars onto the street and speeds off, trailing a faint wisp of oil fumes.

  I feel the cold hand of fear clamp on the back of my neck. I run back into the bedroom and open my T-shirt drawer and claw through it for my pistol.

  It’s a Glock, one of those blocky weapons used by gangsters on TV, and possibly even in real life. I acquired it from Tito Aragon of Live Wire, whose career, like mine, died with his eighteenth birthday. One night a few years ago he showed up at my condo without letting me know he was coming. He was strung out and wanted to sell his pistol to me to get money for drugs. I didn’t want to give him money, and I also didn’t want him wandering around with a loaded firearm, so I told him I was broke and gave him all the weed in my stash in exchange for the gun. He went off in hopes of trading my stash for heroin, and that’s the last I saw him alive. Three weeks later he overdosed on his living room couch. His four-year-old son found him.

  I carry the gun around for the next half-hour until I start feeling silly, and then I put it on my bedside table and leave it there till morning. When I leave the apartment the next day in the limousine to the studio, I put it in a shoulder bag and take it with me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FROM: Trishula

  Perhaps you won’t be so quick to dismiss Babaji now that there’s a smoking hunk of scorched metal in your parking space.

  FROM: Sean

  Can I point out just how fucked up my boy Trishula’s thinking actually is?

  Let me explain this as simply as I can, Trishula—it wasn’t my car that you torched, you moron! It belonged to my esteemed parent, who lives with Babaji in his own compound and is a far more devoted follower of your deity than you are.

  And furthermore, if you had actually read the posts that supposedly inspired your anger in the first place, you would have known that! So you’ve proved yourself both illiterate and an imbecile.

  Do you think Babaji is going to be pleased that you destroyed valuable property that belonged to one of his closest associates? He’s going to make sure your next incarnations are going to be in fifteen different kinds of hells!

  FROM: MaddHaxx

  Jeezus Trishula URA tool.

  FROM: Jaxon31

  Trishula more stupid than Makin here ha ha

  FROM: Krumble

  LMAO!

  FROM: Splendour

  An excellent post. I recommend your blog to everyone. I would like to recommend Arcane Artie’s as a source of magick, Wiccan, and paranormal supplies.

  INT. THE STUDIO—DAY

  After a visit to the police station and a call to my mom’s insurance company, I go to the studio on Thursday even though the call sheet tells me I have the day off. I figure I can maybe make myself useful in much the same way I did yesterday afternoon. Jean-Marc and the others accept my presence without comment.

  Nataliya is still on the set, doing scenes with Ferdy, the kid who plays Emil, and his onscreen family. I help out behind the scenes and offer a few suggestions, but mostly I just watch. I’m a little too distracted to be of much use. Too many of my thoughts revolve around the pistol in my shoulder bag.

  By now the paranoia that has long simmered in my brain has come to a full boil. I took the news of the arson stoically enough, but by now suspicion and fear have begun to dominate my thoughts.

  Some Babaji follower burned my car—with two Molotov cocktails, the fire inspector said, one thrown underneath and another through a window. The same person who threw the firebombs, or maybe someone else, had tried to run me down. And Jaydee actually was run over by someone lurking on her peaceful street, who might just be the same person who tried to kill me.

  It’s all too confusing. I can’t think of anything that connects these crimes except automobiles—and automobiles connect them to Timmi’s death, too, and that connection frightens me.

  During the lunch break I go to the Bruce Bennett Building and look for Richard’s office.

  Turns out he has an engraved plastic nameplate next to his door that actually reads RICHARD THE ASSASSIN. Nothing like a terrorist who puts his job right there on the nameplate.

  I knock on the metal door frame and walk in. Richard sits behind three flatscreens and beneath the unblinking eyes of a couple dozen Japanese warriors.

  A high shelf rings the office, and it’s occupied entirely by action figures. I recognize all of the Seven Samurai standing proudly beneath their homemade banner; I see Toshiro Mifune as Yojimbo and Shintaro Katsu as Zatoichi. If the others are from movies, I don’t recognize them. Many seem to be ninjas. Maybe they’re from history—except, I guess, for the one that seems to be a white rabbit in samurai drag.

  Behind Richard are posters featuring Naruto and the Sega video game character Shinobi.

  When I first met Richard I thought of Spanish hidalgos, but I clearly pegged the wrong warrior culture.

  Richard looks up. His chair properly belongs to an evil overlord in a film, a tall gray Kevlar-carbon office chair with buttons and studs on the armrests. I see the flatscreens reflected in his eyes.

  “Dagmar hasn’t sent me your script yet,” he says. He or one of his assistants continue to hand-deliver my scripts to me every few days, on their booby-trapped memory sticks.

  I close the door behind me and take a seat. “I have a security problem,” I tell him.

  He takes his hand off the keyboard, drops it in his lap, and focuses his polite attention on me. “Tell me,” he says.

  I tell him about Trishula and Babaji and my mother and my burned car. I mention the Ford Expedition that’s tried to run me down. I offer my suspicion that Jaydee’s death was somehow a part of this.

  “I’d better call Dagmar,” he decides.

  Dagmar arrives, an olive-drab tee from something called Magma.com stretched across her pregnant belly. I’ve never heard of Magma.com, whoever they are. Her hair carries the faint scent of lilacs.

  “This better be important,” she says. “I’m in the middle of looking for a new director.”

  Richard offers her his formidable-looking office chair, and as she presses the buttons that adjust it to her figure, Richard sits cross-legged in a corner where he can see both me and Dagmar.

  At least he didn’t have to remove the swords from his belt before he sat.

  I tell my story to Dagmar. She listens intently, writing notes to herself by scrolling her handheld in the air.

  “So you’ve got this Shiva-ist after you,” Dagmar says. “The person you provoked on your blog.”

  “Shaiva,” I say. “A Shaiva is a person who practices Shaivism, which is the worship of Shiva.” When she looks at me, I shrug. “Sorry, but I’ve got one in the family.”

  Richard looks at me. “So this person worships Shiva the Destroyer? Like, a death god?”

  “Not exactly,” I tell him. “Shaivas believe that Shiva is the supreme god—in Shaivism he’s not just the Destroyer, he’s everything else, too. Creator, destroyer, sex god, Holy Ghost, and everything in between. The whole package.”

  “And you’ve also got this SUV after you,” Dagmar says, “and that started the day I first met you.”

  “Right,” I say. “He tried to run me down twice, and then he went away. I saw him last night for the first time in weeks.”

  “And you hadn’t pissed off the Shiva-ists—Shaivists—until after the SUV started hunting you.”

  “That’s right.”

  Her eyes narrow. “You haven’t mentioned the SUV till now.”

  “Yes. Well.” I try to look abashed. “I thought if you knew t
hat someone was trying to kill me, you wouldn’t give me the job.”

  It wasn’t just that, I think. The truth was that I didn’t want anything to interrupt my own sudden, surprising happiness. Everything took second place to the fact that I was working. And not only was I working, I was the principal character in what might turn out to be a very important motion picture, a movie as important from the point of view of new technology as, say, The Jazz Singer—except, I thought, with a better script.

  I was living the life I was born to lead, doing the work I was born to do. After a drought of nearly fifteen years, I had the job I hungered for. So what if someone was trying to kill me? All I had to do was be careful when trying to cross the street.

  Dagmar’s stare turns icy. “You know,” she says, “I don’t like it when my employees don’t tell me the truth.”

  “I didn’t lie,” I point out. “I just didn’t tell you about something that was pretty unbelievable in the first place.”

  “Right,” she says. “You were trying to preserve my sanity out of compassion.”

  I can only shrug.

  “And you also think Jaydee Martin was killed by this SUV person.”

  “I—” I hesitate. “I’m inclined to think that, yes.”

  Her stare is still unsettling. The handheld points at me like an inquisitor’s sword. “Do you know something about that you haven’t told me?”

  I’m suddenly frightened. “No,” I say. “Not at all.” Because if the deaths of Timmi and Mac are somehow connected to this, the situation is more weird and complex than I can possibly process, and I don’t have any idea who’s going to take the next shot at me.

  Dagmar swivels her chair toward Richard.

  “Find this Trishula,” she says.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” he says simply.

  Dagmar turns to me. “I’ve been in too many situations,” she says, “when people started getting killed. Maybe Jaydee’s death is an accident and maybe it isn’t, but I’m not about to let it go any further. We’re going to put you under protection.”