Or She Dies

by Gregg Hurwitz

  I slotted the Camry into a space in front of Bel Air Foods. Walking the aisles, I gathered up a banana, a bag of trail mix, and a SoBe black iced tea, which came loaded with ginkgo, ginseng, and a handful of other supplements designed to kick-start the bleary-eyed. As I neared the checkout lane, my eye caught on Keith Conner, gazing from a Vanity Fair cover. He reclined in a bathtub filled not with water but with leaves, and the headline read, CONNER TRADES GREEN FOR GREEN.

  ‘How’s Ariana?’ Bill asked, cuing me to move along. A flustered mother with her kid was waiting behind me, grinning impatiently.

  A plastic smile flashed onto my face, instinctive as a nervous laugh. ‘Okay, thanks.’

  I set my items down, the belt whirred, and Bill rang me up, saying, ‘You got one of the last good ones, that’s for sure.’

  I smiled; Flustered Mom smiled; Bill smiled. We were all so happy.

  In the car I pinched the metal post where the button used to be and twisted on the radio: distract me, please. Down the hill I veered around the turn onto lurch-and-go Sunset Boulevard, and the sun came on bright and angry. Lowering the visor, I confronted the photo rubber-banded into place. About six months ago, Ariana had discovered an online photo site and had tortured me for a few weeks by reprinting flashes-from-the-past and hiding them in various places. I still found new pictures now and then, vestiges of playfulness. Of course, this one I’d discovered immediately. Me and Ariana at some intolerable college formal, me wearing a shoulder-padded blazer with, alas, cuffed sleeves, her in a puffy taffeta contraption that resembled a life-saving device. We looked uncomfortable and amused, painfully aware that we were playacting, that we didn’t belong, that we didn’t really fit in like everyone else. But we loved that. That’s how we were best.

  You got one of the last good ones, that’s for sure.

  I hit the dashboard to feel the sting in my knuckles. And kept hitting. The scab cracked; my wrist stung; the air-conditioner dial split. With smarting eyes, my chest heaving, I looked out one of my six windows. An older blonde in a red Mustang studied me from one lane over.

  I cranked that plastic smile onto my face. She looked away. The light changed, and we drifted back off into our private lives.

  Chapter 4

  After I sold my screenplay, Ariana was even more elated for me than I was. The production got fast-tracked. Dealing with studio executives, producers, and the director, I was intimidated but determined. And Ariana pep-talked me every day. I quit my job. That gave me plenty of time to obsess on the project’s almost daily ups and downs — interpreting the nuance of each two-line email, having meetings about meetings, taking a cell-phone call on a sidewalk while my entrée went cold and Ariana ate hers alone. Mr Davis, tenth-grade American lit teacher, was out of his depth. I had to choose roles, and I chose wrong.

  Follow Your Dreams, they say. But no one ever tells you what you have to give up in the process. The sacrifices. The thousand ways your life can go to hell while you keep your eyes on the horizon, waiting for that sun to rise.

  I was too distracted to write — or at least to write well. As They’re Watching progressed through development, my agent reviewed what I was putting out now, and it didn’t catch her fancy any more than the scripts that had been moldering in my desk drawers. I sensed a slow leak in my aspirations, like a tire with a nail through it, and my agent, too, seemed to be running out of steam. My lack of focus built to full-blown writer’s block, and still I couldn’t seem to find the time to pay proper attention to the people around me. I was lost in the typhoon of possibilities, unsure if the movie was actually going to move forward, if I had what it would take, if I was, at bottom, a fraud.

  Ariana and I never quite found our footing again after the shift our relationship took following the script deal. We harbored silent resentments, misread the currents of each other’s emotions. Sex grew awkward. We were too far in for lust, and falling out of love. We’d lost the connection, the heightened awareness. We couldn’t get it started, and so we stopped trying. We buried ourselves in routine.

  Ariana had forged a friendship of commiseration with Don Miller, our next-door neighbor — coffee twice a week, the occasional walk. I told her she was naïve to think he didn’t have a thing for her and that this wouldn’t affect her relationship with his wife, Martinique. Ariana and I had never been controlling with each other, so I didn’t press her on it, but that reflected my own naïveté — not about Ariana, but in how far she and I could let things slide.

  Hard as it was to admit, I checked out on everyone but myself for the better part of that year. I lost sight of everything but the movie, which finally entered preproduction, and then production.

  Shipped to frigid mid-December Manhattan to fulfill my obligation for production rewrites, I had a kind of time-release panic attack. The director’s cell-phone ban on set made things worse, since I was way too timid to use the lines wired to the important people’s trailers to talk to my wife. Even though Ariana was worried about me, I managed to return her calls only a few times, and even those conversations were cursory.

  On the set, it rapidly became apparent that I’d been hired not as a production rewriter but to take dictation from the twenty-five-year-old lead, Keith Conner. Sprawled on his couch in his trailer, slurping a lumpy green health drink and yakking half the day on the sole ban-exempt cell phone, Keith offered endless notes and dialogue changes, interrupting them only to show off photos of naked, sleeping girls he’d snapped on his Motorola RAZR. The high weekly rate they were paying me was not for ideas. It was for baby-sitting. Tenth-graders were a lot less work.

  After a little more than a week of eighteen-hour days, Keith summoned me into his trailer to say, ‘I just don’t think my character’s dog would have a squeaky toy. I think he’d have, like, a knotted rope or something, you know?’ To which I’d wearily replied, ‘The dog didn’t complain, and he actually has talent.’

  The friction that had built up between us gave way like a crumbling of tectonic plates. Jabbing a finger at me, Keith lost his footing on the rewrite pages he’d thrown on the floor and banged the counter with his well-defined jaw. When his handlers rushed in, he lied and said I’d hit him. There were major contusions. Having the star’s face in that condition would mean shutting down the shoot for at least a few days. Given the Manhattan location, that would cost about a half a million per day.

  After realizing my lifelong dream, it had taken me just nine days to get fired.

  As I waited for the taxi to arrive to take me to the airport, Sasha Saranova empathized with me in her trailer. A sometime model from Bulgaria, she had a knee-weakening accent and natural eyelashes longer than most Hollywood prenups. Playing opposite Keith, she’d endured his personality in close-up. Her visit was motivated more out of self-concern than genuine friendship, but I was shaken and didn’t mind the company.

  It was just then when Ariana called the set. I had been off the radar with her, not returning phone calls for three days, worried that if I heard her voice, I might just crumble under all the pressure. And Keith happened to be on hand to grab the phone from the production assistant. Still icing his swollen jaw, he told Ariana that Sasha and I had withdrawn to her trailer, as we did every evening after wrap, and our standing instructions were that we were not to be interrupted. ‘For anything.’ It may have been his best performance.

  Ironically, I left Ariana a message on her cell at almost the same time, breaking the news and reciting my flight information. Little did I know that Don Miller had dropped by with the enrollment paperwork from the Writers Guild, accidentally messengered to his doorstep. I’d imagined her many times in the sweaty, regretful aftermath, listening to the voice mail from me and putting my miserable explanation together with Keith’s little ruse. A stomach-turning moment.

  I had a long and reflective flight home to LA. Pale and shaken, Ariana was at the Terminal 4 baggage claim, waiting with even worse news. She never lied. At first I thought she was crying for me, but before
I could talk, she said, ‘I slept with someone.’

  I couldn’t speak for the ride home. My throat felt like it was filled with sand. I drove; Ariana cried some more.

  The following afternoon I was served with my very first legal complaint, filed by Keith and the studio. Errors-and-omissions insurance, it turns out, doesn’t cover tantrum-inflicted injuries, so someone had to be held accountable for the shutdown costs. Keith had sued me in order to back up his lie, and the studio, in turn, had jumped on board.

  Keith’s version of the story was leaked to the tabloids, and I was smeared with such cold proficiency that I never felt the guillotine drop. I was a has-been before I’d really been, and my agent recommended a pricey lawyer and dropped me like a sauna rock.

  No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer find the interest to sit at the computer. My writer’s block had become fixed and immobile, a boulder in the middle of that blank white page. I suppose I could no longer suspend disbelief.

  Julianne, a friend since we’d met eight years ago at a small-time film festival in Santa Ynez, had thrown me a lifeline — a job teaching screenwriting at Northridge University. After long days spent avoiding my stagnant home office, I was thankful for the opportunity. The students were entitled and excited, and their energy and the occasional spark of talent made teaching more than just a relief. It felt worthwhile. I’d been at it only a month, but I was starting to recognize flashes of myself again.

  And yet still, every night I went home to a house I no longer felt I belonged in, to a marriage I no longer recognized. And then came the legal bills, more listlessness, the mornings waking up on the downstairs couch. And that feeling of deadness. The feeling that nothing could cut through. And for a month and a half, nothing had.

  Until that first DVD fell out of the morning paper.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Do it,’ Julianne said, rising to refill her mug from the faculty lounge machine. ‘One time.’

  Marcello rifled his blow-dried hair with a hand and refocused on the papers he was ostensibly grading. He wore tired brown trousers, a button-up and blazer, but no tie. This was, after all, the film department. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling it.’

  ‘You have a responsibility to your public.’

  ‘For the love of Mary, relent.’

  ‘C’mon. Please?’

  ‘My instrument isn’t prepared.’

  Standing at the window, I was checking Variety since I’d gotten distracted from the Times’ Entertainment section earlier. Sure enough, page three carried a fluff piece on They’re Watching — production had just wrapped, and anticipation was through the roof.

  I said, over a shoulder, ‘Marcello, just do it so she shuts up already.’

  He lowered the papers, letting them tap against his knee. ‘IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT NAGGING, ONE MAN STANDS ALONE.’

  The voice that launched a million movie trailers. When Marcello uncorks it, you feel it in your bones. Julianne clapped, one hand rising as the other fell to meet it, a hee-haw display of amusement. ‘That is so fucking fantastic.’

  ‘IN A TIME OF OVERDUE GRADES, ONE MAN MUST BE LEFT ALONE.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Wounded, Julianne came over and stood next to me. I dropped Variety quickly to my side before she could see what I was reading, returning my gaze to the window. I should’ve been grading papers, too, but in the wake of the DVD I was having trouble focusing. At a few points in the morning, I’d caught myself studying passing faces, searching out signs of menace or masked glee. She followed my troubled stare. ‘What are you looking at?’

  Students poured out of the surrounding buildings and into the quad below. I said, ‘Life in progress.’

  ‘You’re so philosophical,’ Julianne said. ‘You must be a teacher.’

  The film department at Cal State Northridge draws mainly three kinds of faculty. There are those who teach, who love the process, turning young minds on to possibilities, all that. Marcello is such a teacher, despite his well-cultivated cynicism. Then there are the journalists like Julianne, wearers of black turtlenecks, always rushing from class, on to their next review or article or book on Zeffirelli. Next, the occasional Oscar winner enjoying the dusk of his career, basking in the not-so-quiet admiration of adoring hopefuls. And then there’s me.

  I watched the students below, writing on laptops and arguing excitedly, their whole disastrous lives in front of them.

  Julianne pushed back from the window and said, ‘I need a smoke.’

  ‘IN AN AGE OF LUNG CANCER, ONE SHITHEAD MUST TAKE THE LEAD.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  After she left, I sat with some student scripts but found myself reading the same sentence over and over. I stood and stretched, then walked to the bulletin board and flipped through the pinned flyers. There I stood, perusing and humming a few notes: Patrick Davis, the picture of nonchalance. I was acting, I realized, more for my own sake than Marcello’s; I didn’t want to admit how much I was disquieted by the DVD. I’d been numbed for so long by dull-edged emotions — depression, lethargy, resentment — that I’d forgotten what it was like when sharp concern pricked the raw skin beneath the calluses. I’d had a rough run, sure, but this footage seemed to be signaling a fresh wave of . . . of what?

  Marcello cocked an eyebrow but didn’t glance up from his work. ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Are you okay? The screws seem a little tight. Tighter than usual, I mean.’

  He and I had forged an accelerated intimacy. We spent a good amount of downtime together here in the lounge, he’d been privy to plenty of my and Julianne’s conversations about the state of my life, and I found him helpful in his sometimes brutal and always irreverent incisiveness. But still, I hesitated to answer.

  Julianne came back in, cranked open a window irritably, and lit up. ‘There’s a parent tour. The judgmental stares wear on me.’

  Marcello said, ‘Patrick was just about to tell us why he’s so distracted. ’

  ‘It’s nothing. This stupid thing. I got a DVD delivered to my house, hidden in the morning paper. It kind of weirded me out.’

  Marcello frowned, smoothing his neatly trimmed beard. ‘A DVD of what?’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Brushing my teeth. In my underwear.’

  Julianne said, ‘That’s fucked up.’

  ‘Probably some kind of prank,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know that it’s personal. It could’ve been some kid skulking around the neighborhood, and I was the only jackass taking a leak with the shutters open.’

  ‘Do you have the DVD?’ Julianne’s eyes were big, excited. ‘Let’s look at it.’

  Minding the fresh divots on my knuckles, I removed the disc from my courier bag and slid it into the mounted media unit.

  Marcello rested a slender finger on his cheek and watched. When it finished, he shrugged. ‘A little creepy, but hardly chilling. The production quality sucks. Digital?’

  ‘That’s what I figure.’

  ‘Any students you’ve pissed off?’

  That hadn’t occurred to me. ‘No standouts.’

  ‘Check if anyone’s failing. And think if there are any faculty members who you may have rubbed the wrong way.’

  ‘In my first month?’

  ‘Your track record’s hardly been exemplary this year,’ Julianne reminded me, ‘when it comes to . . . well, people.’

  Marcello waved a hand to indicate the building. ‘Department full of people who make movies. Most of them just as accomplished as that one. Suspects abound. I’m sure it’s nothing more than someone having a little mean-spirited fun.’ Losing interest, he returned to his papers.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Julianne lit a fresh cigarette off the end of her last. ‘Why inform someone that you’re watching them?’

  ‘Maybe they flunked spy school,’ I said.

  She made a thoughtful noise in her throat. We watched students trickle out of our building below. With its giant windows, colonnades, and a me
tal swoop of roof, Manzanita Hall always struck me as oddly precarious, seeing that it was a product of the rebuilding effort after the ’97 quake.

  ‘Marcello’s right. It’s probably just harassment. If so, who cares? Until it becomes something else. But the other possibility’ — she blew a jet of smoke through the window slit — ‘is that it’s an implicit threat. I mean, you’re a film teacher and a screenwriter—’

  Over his papers, Marcello volunteered, ‘Screenwroter.’

  ‘Whatever. Which means whoever did this probably knows you’ve seen every thriller in the Blockbuster aisle.’ Wrist cocked, elbow to hip, cigarette unspooling — she looked like a film noir convention in her own right. ‘The recording-as-clue thing. It’s Blowup, right?’

  ‘Or Blow Out,’ I said. ‘Or The Conversation. Except I didn’t accidentally happen upon this. It was delivered to me.’

  ‘But still. They’d have to know you’d pick up on that movie stuff.’

  ‘So why do it?’

  ‘Maybe they’re not after the usual.’

  ‘What’s the usual?’

  ‘To reveal a long-buried secret. To terrorize you. Revenge.’ She chewed her lip, ran a hand through her long red hair. I noticed how attractive she was. It was something that took effort for me to notice. From the first we’d had a sibling-like rapport. Ariana, even with her southern Italian sensibilities, had always been notably unjealous, and justifiably so.

  ‘Someone at the studio could be behind the DVD,’ Julianne added.

  ‘The studio?’

  ‘Summit Pictures. There is this little matter of a lawsuit . . .’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘The lawsuit.’