The Movie That No One Saw

by May Seah

  He had never thought of it that way. In fact, he had never thought of it at all, until now.

  “Well, the emotions are as true as truth gets. That colours all the other supporting players—plot, storyline, fictional characters— with reality,” he said slowly. “Stories provide that familiarity with emotions that people need but don’t necessarily always get in real life. Like me—I’m a really boring guy in real life. Without this job, you wouldn’t even look twice at me. I’m just somehow in this position where people can live vicariously through me. Those emotions I transfer to them are real and true, I think.”

  She nodded. “Sometimes untrue things are truer than true things,” she said softly.

  “You have a point. Maybe I’m just a two-dimensional guy playing three-dimensional roles.”

  “Tell me more,” she said, propping her chin on her hand and staring into his eyes, looking as if she were listening with all her might.

  That was the point he decided he was falling in love with the reporter.

  He was becoming aware that nobody else in his entire life had ever paid such careful attention to him when he spoke—not his parents, not his fan club president, not even his insurance agent. She showed such genuine interest in hearing his thoughts and opinions that he, too, began to find himself interesting in her eyes. And her questions, which engaged deeply with his responses, opened up roads to other questions, towards what seemed like the closest approximation to truth.

  As the interview progressed, he felt himself growing irresistibly addicted to the intoxicating feeling of being understood.

  This magnified him in ways he had not thought possible. And it was like an invisible magnetism drawing him towards her. So convinced was he that he had fallen in love at first sight with this reporter that he, who had thoroughly mastered the art of giving interviews that at first glance sounded full of marrow but during the act of transcription proved to be but handsome trifles, let his guard slip for one fateful, irretrievable instant, when she asked, “Do you feel like you’re pretending to be somebody you’re not?”

  “Oh, I’m always pretending to be—” He stopped so abruptly that he knew, in that instant, that a current of horror had pulsed through his face with the intensity of a ballerina who had trod on a stray Lego brick, and that it was not his words that had given him away but his visage.

  “…umm, someone I am,” he said. “I’m just pretending to be someone I am.”

  Her eyes narrowed before they widened. “You’re hiding something,” she said, in a manner that was less accusatory than enquiring.

  His brain did not know whether he should clear his throat, fake a laugh or stutter out some filler words, so it made him do all three actions at once, to damning effect.

  She leaned in so that their faces were almost intimately close. “Tell me,” she said.

  And at that moment there was nothing he wanted more than to tell her everything, including but not limited to his entire life story, what he had eaten for breakfast, the exact thread count of his linens and his thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life, and he knew that if he had looked into her eyes for one moment longer, he would have laid the whole truth of his acting prowess at her feet.

  But he broke her gaze and chuckled uncomfortably. “I’m as normal as they come,” he said lightly. “I just have a pronounced streak of megalomania, that’s all.”

  She sat back into the cushions of the couch and smiled, her eyes still fixed calmly on his face.

  “I’m glad you have a secret,” she said. “I was beginning to believe you when you said you were boring.”

  5

  The Lion City Lance’s full-page feature on Adjonis Keh hit news stands the day after, and for the first time, Keh himself scrambled to get his hands on a copy.

  He had never been interested in reading about himself—he thought the published interviews always made him sound stilted and unrecognisable—but he shook out that day’s issue of the paper with trembling hands and flipped its pages urgently.

  After he’d read April’s story in its entirety, he read it again, and then again.

  Paragraphs leapt out at him. “Keh feels that no scripted character can be portrayed well without the quality of empathy, rendering his craft far less about the art of successful imitation and far more about humanity. Entertainment, too, can be underpinned by art.

  “The characters he enjoys playing most, he reveals, are the ones whose lives are furthest removed from his own, such as sociopaths or axe murderers. ‘Inhabiting them gives me the greatest thrill and makes me feel alive,’ he says.

  “Having emerged against all odds from the shadow of a near-death experience, the actor remains approachable and down-to-earth despite his success. Yet there is a part of him that holds back, presumably because he understands that just as death can lend significance to life, illusions can lend significance to reality.”

  He did not know how she’d done it, but it was clear that she had accomplished for him what he could not have done on his own. She had taken his life and retold it so that it was better.

  In her hands, his words had weight; his work had significance; his story had a story. Her observations about him seemed to refresh his very soul, like a zephyr of lime droplets breathing life into barbecued stingray. And once he had tasted the feeling of seeing himself through her eyes, he began to crave more of it. It showed him a better, clearer, more acute and, yes, more honest version of himself— of what he could be.

  She gets me, he thought; and that knowledge was heady and compelling. Unbeknownst to himself, he had been waiting for somebody to come along and find him interesting for who he was, not for who they thought he was.

  From then on, he would spend every night reading and re-reading the words that she had written about him. As the newsprint slowly began to blur under the repeated brushing of his fingers against the pages, the power of her writing seemed to grow conversely larger, brighter and clearer. Her words became a map to another world.

  What he would quickly find out, as their friendship subsequently grew, was that April Mehta was actually the editor of the Obituaries section, a one-person desk at the Lance located in a dingy corner of the newsroom. Her daily duties had been to put together notices of death, announcements of funereal details, messages of condolence from friends and family, and the occasional comforting quote. She threw herself very earnestly into this job, having a naturally effusive sense of empathy.

  For the smaller obits, the ones that didn’t have long lists of mourners’ names and important companies printed under a huge photograph, she would put in lines of her own. Sometimes she would Google the names, find a detail here and there from a Facebook account or LinkedIn profile, and write a paragraph in celebration of the person’s life. In this way she had gotten to know complete strangers posthumously. They all had their stories, she thought, and it was up to her to make sure they did not leave this world in anonymity.

  If she couldn’t find any information, she would often make up a life for them based on their photograph or their name. “James Ong loved pouring his hot coffee into the saucer to cool it before sipping it. Watching the school children run out of the gates when the bell rang made him smile.” This text would appear under James’ black-and-white photograph, which had previously looked lonely without any submissions from those who survived him. None of the paper’s editors ever noticed.

  So she had been running the desk independently for a good while before they saw it fit to ask her to also fill in at the entertainment desk. Thrust into a world of celebrities, fashion shoots, movie reviews and red carpet ceremonies, she felt rather like an anglerfish out of its proverbial waters. But, as she got used to her new duties, it became apparent that the underrated art of asking questions came as naturally to her as breathing. Posing a question that requested an answer was one thing, but making someone want to offer up answers to questions that had not even been asked—that was a calling.

  The more of her questions Keh t
ried to field as honestly and entertainingly as possible, the better he thought he was beginning to know himself, and the more intriguing he found her. They started to run into each other often, at events and press conferences and when she conducted set visits. They had random conversations at all hours. He’d text her, confiding: “You’re cool to be around. People usually have all these expectations of me.”

  She’d reply, “You can’t blame them—you are named after a misspelled Greek god.”

  “Well, you’re named after the cruellest month.”

  “My parents told me I was named after April O’Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was destined to become a reporter. Haha.”

  “And I was destined to be fought over by women and then killed by a boar. But so far, only the first has happened.”

  “You’re young. Give it time. If I were you, I’d avoid Bishan Park on the Ides of March.”

  He still wasn’t quite sure why it was so easy to let his guard down around her, but he was deeply appreciative of the fact that she hadn’t made a big deal of that awkward moment when he had tacitly acknowledged that there was a truth he wasn’t telling her. A seasoned gossip reporter, he knew with the certainty of experience, would have found some breathtaking way to transform that moment into a headline, inflating it with hyperbole, hinting at unspeakable scandal and tweeting it into the stratosphere.

  His reckless slip-up was not the only thing that never became news.

  Because the videos of his heroic rescue of Holliday Heng had been swallowed by the Cloud, the incident might as well never have happened. Without a photographic record, Holliday couldn’t brag on social media that Adjonis Keh had willingly risked his own life to save hers. And Keh’s heroic act did not live longer than a day in oral history, being swiftly crowded out by the next morsel on the conveyor belt of celebrity gossip.

  When it eventually aired, the episode of The Second-to-Last Magistrate in which Holliday shed her fat suit and emerged a beautiful swan became the most watched on local television in two years. But it was not enough.

  6

  Adjonis Keh was at the peak of his career and it seemed as if nothing could ever diminish the radiance of his rising star. He acted in a series that became unimaginably successful, and the common consensus was that it was thanks to the power of his screen presence. Bishanian Boudoirs was a drama set in the heartlands about the forbidden passion between a bored lady of leisure and the strapping young durian seller at her local market. Keh played the improbably well-built purveyor of the infamously pungent tropical fruit, and his slightly older lover was played by television doyenne Decibelle Ding.

  It was never meant to be a huge blockbuster; it was actually allocated less funds so that The Second-to-Last Magistrate could have more.

  Decibelle was a deft actress struggling to come to terms with the evidence that she was no longer young. This battle was made no easier by the fact that she kept getting cast in roles that were either much younger or much older than her actual age, forcing her to live in an uncertain state of developmental limbo. And although she was still very attractive in her maturity, she often forgot that the power her youth and beauty had wielded over men had since morphed into a different kind of womanliness, and she would lapse into an uncomfortable brand of little-girl coquettishness, then wonder that people did not respond quite as ardently as they always had.

  Nevertheless, she looked fetching in a pink-and-red silk négligée, which was all that really mattered in Bishanian Boudoirs; the series leaned in to the suggestive bedroom scenes but never actually ventured into explicit territory, keeping its mass market audience in mind.

  Keh himself, at the behest of the executive producer, had been on a joyless diet and intensive training regimen, bulking and cutting until his already broad shoulders solidified further, his pectoral muscles strained his shirts at their seams, and you could do a rubbing over his abdominal muscles with a crayon and obtain a perfect imprint. He had done this so many times before—to play a lifeguard in tiny shorts, a Muay Thai pro in a competitive ring, a battle-weary commander with impractically cut armour in a fantasy drama—that it was just another work obligation to be fulfilled. His body had never been his own, anyway—not while he was a salaried actor. In any case, the wardrobe manager had an easy job on this show: so many of his scenes involved the sartorial choice of either a white towel or a beige towel when striding out of the en suite bathroom. And in the scenes of him at work at his durian stall in the markets of Bishan, he wore only a sheer white tank top, Bermudas and flip-flops as he hefted, tossed, chopped and prised open the thorny fruit in sweaty slow motion.

  He had to learn the skills of the durian trade, which hadn’t been a difficult undertaking when he told himself that he was playing an actor who was playing a durian seller. It was easy, then, to grasp the showmanship of the profession; to make larger actions than he was accustomed to and to make them with loosened joints; to speak louder and more hoarsely and with more gregariousness; to grin more toothily; to have calloused hands that could tell so much from the heft of the fruit and its texture; and above all, to revel in its intense, pervasive, unmistakable smell—the pong of rotting garbage, night-blooming flowers, caramelised brown sugar and wet banana skins.

  There was no food or issue more divisive in Singapore than the durian; half the people you met hated it with a throbbing vehemence and the other half, like the character Decibelle was playing, lost all control in the face of its unctuous yellow flesh, scooping it out of its thorny husks with greedy fingers, smearing her lips and hands drunkenly with the pudding-like fruit and spitting the deformed, tan-coloured seeds out with reckless abandon; the fibrous creaminess was sweet and bitter at the same time, tasting alternately of coffee, molasses and, in rare and very good cases, of wine and fermentation.

  Here, behind the drawn drapes of the boudoirs of Bishan, their illicit love was supposed to be seeded, fertilised, pruned and harvested in front of the cameras, all according to the script.

  Keh himself, unfortunately, was not in the pro-durian camp—he had never liked the taste and recoiled from it in disgust. As a child, he could only watch his parents sitting in the kitchen and eating the fruit off newspapers spread over the tabletop. He refused to join them and hid in his room, but the smell always found its way all over the house, seeping under the door, clinging to the linens and filling him with revulsion.

  “But I’m not pretending to be a durian seller,” he told himself as he was preparing for the role. “I am acting as an actor who is acting as a durian seller. As an actor, I’d be so professional that no matter whether I loved or hated durians, I’d sell them like my life depended on it. In fact, I would make durians my life. I’d become one with the durian.” He knew this with absolute certainty and unshakeable confidence. And he was feeling invincible.

  His first few scenes were of his character at work at the durian stall. This was filmed on location at a heartland market, where a stall had been specially built for him in a quiet corner. It was walled in by tall wooden frames, on which stacks and stacks of thorny, dark green durians were neatly displayed. When he arrived on set, the smell of the fruit hit him before he even saw them, and the thought that he would have to spend the next few days surrounded by the noxious stink almost caused him to waver. But he hurriedly told himself to get into character. The actor that he was playing didn’t hate durians; he simply viewed them with the cool dispassion that someone who had spent his entire professional life profiting off them would have for the fruit.

  He kept repeating this to himself as he pulled on his tank top and allowed the make-up artist to slather his neck and shoulders in baby oil and spray droplets of water onto him so that it looked like he was perspiring in just the right quantities. And as the crew tweaked the lighting setup and the assistant producer fussed around making sure all the props were in place, he knew that he’d successfully launched himself into the zone.

  He spent hour upon hour at the stall, playing an actor playing
a durian seller, associating himself so closely with the fruit that before long, his hands no longer hurt when thorns pricked them, the knife became an extension of his arm and the malodorous emissions of the durians no longer registered in his consciousness.

  On the eighth day of filming, they moved the production to the sound stage and embarked on a bedroom scene.

  Decibelle, draped over the quilted bed in the master bedroom of her flat, had touseled shoulder-length curls and one négligée strap sliding off a slender, religiously moisturised shoulder. Her line was: “I don’t think I can buy durians from you any more, Ah Keong.”

  His went: “Is there another man in your heart?” The camera zoomed in on his clenched jaw.

  “There’s only you.” She sighed, turning her face away. “There’s no man but you. Every time I go down to the market to buy fish and vegetables, you and your durian stall are the only thing I see. Do you know how magnetic, how mesmerising, how maddening you are? Sometimes I come home without the onions and the garlic, or with the wrong change. Oh, Ah Keong…it was your durians I wanted at first. Now…it’s all you.”

  The camera followed him as he strode towards the bed to take her in his arms.

  “Cut. Good take,” the director called, and a small swarm of stylists descended on Decibelle and fluffed up her hair. A make-up artist dabbed a drop more baby oil onto Keh’s bare chest so that it would continue to glisten under the studio lights. Decibelle said she thought that the reflector should be held nearer to her face so that the light would soften her features. “Can you see the lines under my eyes?” she called out. But the director said, “Eh? No. You look fine. Next scene, please.”

  The scene that followed had Keh say, “You were the one who kissed me at the durian stall as I was closing up, Agnes. Tell me what I should do now that you’ve made me fall so completely and hopelessly for you.” His shoulders faced her almost aggressively as he sat across from her on the bed, and every eye on the hushed set was fixed on him.