The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  “Do you know what Pete’s doing with his life today? He’s an investment banker, and he’s probably worth more than you, me and everyone in that school combined. And do you know how he got there? By cutting ties with everyone he’d ever known – his parents included – like they were nothing but a bunch of worthless skin tags. Now, can you really sit there and tell me he’d be better off today if he sat himself down and took a good long look at his past and all that shit he went through and readdressed it?”

  “Maybe not,” my therapist said, “but in this example you’re looking only at monetary success. You don’t know how Pete feels on the inside. It’s possible he regrets not taking more of a proactive approach with his parents. He might have a better relationship with them today if he’d done so.”

  I shook my head. “Pete’s dad decided at an early age that his own son was too much of a mess to even bother with. Pete moved on, and he did so on his terms. That’s all I’m trying to do, too.”

  “By doing the exact thing you claim to oppose.”

  “I’m not …”

  “But you are, M_____. You’re pouring out your entire life and history for the Internet, and by extension everyone you’ve ever known, to see because you were hurt, terribly, and continue to be hurt, by someone you love.”

  “Loved. Past tense.”

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business continued without pause. “You say you don’t want to dwell too much on the past, that you want to tell yours and D____’s story – which itself is in the past – yet so far you’ve written about yourself, your friend Audrey and your parents, all of whom are deceased, and your sister with whom you are no longer on speaking terms. But still you have not written about him beyond what you’ve revealed regarding his surface predilections and your small but integral shared interests.”

  “I’m building a story,” I said. “This is called laying the groundwork.”

  “No, M_____, it’s called delaying the point. You’re being suffocated by the things you refuse to address.”

  “You want me to admit I have daddy issues. You want me to say that maybe if he’d been more accepting of who I am I wouldn’t be so quick to fall for anyone willing to even touch me, and then I wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”

  “Are you talking about D____ or your father?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d like you to acknowledge your father’s disappointment in you weighs heavier on your heart than you’re willing to admit, and that it’s impacting your retelling of your relationship with D____. So I’ll ask you again: What was your father to you?”

  “He was a selfish shitting bastard,” I said, practically hurling the words. They tasted bitter, like the skin of an underripe orange. “He never hugged me, never laid a hand on me except that time he walked in on me in the bathroom and caught me wearing – He never came within five feet of showing me any kind of emotional support, unless you count telling someone they’re wasting their time on art as ‘support.’ The only thing he ever gave me was this faulty fucking body, rotting from the inside out. It’s the last thing I ever wanted from him, and it’s going to kill me by degrees. And if he knew that … if he knew what he’d done …”

  “What?”

  “I bet you he’d be thrilled.”

  “Are you being honest with yourself about that?”

  “No,” I said, more snidely than I’d intended. “I’m being transparent.”

  * * *

  ††

  Doctor None-of-Your-Business did have a point: until now I’ve been procrastinating, thinking I’ve been moving our story forward when really I’ve been avoiding the topic of you – of who you were beneath all the transient bullshit and the half-minute lives. Because if I’m honest with myself, there are still more questions than there are answers. And if I’m going to be super honest with myself, I’m still a little frightened by what some of those answers might be. But fuck it, she’s right: there’s no one left to disappoint. Legacies can’t cast aspersions.

  It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the more light I shine on things, the more things scuttle back under the cover of darkness. Aud claimed I was obsessed with death, and maybe she was right. Even if at the time I didn’t realize the master class in death and dying I was receiving simply by being in your presence, I was still taken in by the skill and commitment with which you chased the end of one life with the very short screen time of another. There was excitement in the idea that each new role brought with it a new way to live, if only for a few hours or days or even a week at a time.

  “Of course it’s exciting,” Aud said when I called her just a couple of days after we’d died in 1959. “What’s not to be excited about? Haven’t you ever dreamed of just fucking off to another part of the world where no one knows you? It’s like that, but writ large.”

  “I get that. I mean that’s pretty much exactly what I did when I first came here.”

  “Ya, but you didn’t have no choice.”

  “So you’re saying what he’s doing is more … romantic?”

  Aud laughed into the phone. “Your word, M_____, not mine.”

  What wasn’t clear to me in the beginning, and only became clear once I was too far gone to cut free, was that it was the only way you knew how to live, and that with each new role came a ticking clock that upon reaching zero would whisk you away Cinderella-style, leaving nothing behind to fill in the blanks of life number who-the-fuck-knows. And with no pair of throwaway lives was this idea more immediately enticing – and retroactively humbling – than with Richard and Eleanor.

  That night, our first together, I asked you over dinner at an Italian restaurant across the street and down the block from the studio lot – you-you, not Richard Thorn–you – how you got your start as an actor. At first you said nothing, and simply backstroked an accordion hunk of iceberg lettuce through a sea of Thousand Island dressing until it was heavy and leaden with flavour. I watched, waiting for an answer as you shoved the forkful into your mouth and chewed messily, like a kindergartener, specks of dressing staining the corners of your lips.

  “Let me guess,” I said, playfully. “Walked off a bus on Hollywood Boulevard with just fifteen bucks to your name and a handful of scattered dreams?”

  “You might say that.” Your tone was harsh, and you seemed visibly annoyed.

  “Does that mean it’s true?”

  You shrugged. “You can call a duck a horse, if you like.”

  I cleared my throat. “I –” But before I could finish speaking, you reached across the table and wrapped your hand around my wrist.

  “Does it matter?” you asked. Your voice was different, higher, just a tinge nasally. Though I didn’t realize it in the moment, I was hearing you – the real you – possibly for the first time.

  “I … I was just going to tell you how I got started in the business,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “And … you don’t care?”

  You released my hand. Picked up your napkin and dabbed the salad dressing from your lips. “I just want us to enjoy the moment.” You leaned forward. “Be with me now. Right here, as we both truly want to be. Let’s just have a good time, all right?”

  “Oh … okay.”

  And then you leaned back in your seat and clapped, your demeanour changing on a dime. “Wonderful! Same book, same page. There’s nothing to it, Eleanor.”

  I saw it then, in how you smiled someone else’s smile, something no one watching you in a theatre would ever think to notice, if they noticed you at all: you were the sort of man who could be laughing hysterically on the inside while maintaining a perfect poker face to the outside world. I saw it but foolishly I didn’t care. I was already yours. When you reached out and took my hand again, creating the silhouette of a dove on the tablecloth between us, I blushed, wondering to myself if anyone was watching – more to the point, if
they were watching you, thumbing through their internal entertainment Rolodexes, knowing somehow, somewhere, they’d seen your face before but could not put their finger on where or when.

  * * *

  ††

  For twelve incredible hours, we were Richard and Eleanor. It wasn’t long after we’d left the restaurant that I started to feel inexplicably swept up in it all – in how empowering it was, stepping off the page and out into the real world with you. It felt like everything belonged to us because we were pretending we weren’t really anyone at all – whatever we did or didn’t do, by the morning it wouldn’t matter. We were Bonnie and Clyde, you said to me more than once that night. Just like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and there was nothing holding us back. “We could take on the world if we wanted.” And I believed it when you said it; it was one of only a few moments where I thought, just for a second, that you’d broken character and been with me as D____ and not as Richard.

  There was something to the story of Bonnie and Clyde that really resonated with you. I remember that night clearer than most, the two of us on our backs sprawled across a motel bed somewhere on Sunset Boulevard near West Hollywood. It was almost three in the morning and you were smoking a cigarette, and we were talking about our favourite films from the ’40s and ’50s. As Richard Thorn you seemed forceful and full of a type of confidence that I’d not seen in either Charlie the Chin or James Hildebrandt. It was intoxicating, the way you talked about movies and how you went to a different theatre in every town you travelled to, and that what you loved most was the idea that every new film introduced a different set of lives in a constant state of flux. Warren and Faye were your anti-heroes, in a sense. They embodied for you the excitement lacking in all of our lives – the ability to pick up a gun, get yourself a car and start doing whatever it was you so desired. I didn’t have the heart to tell you, 1959’s Richard Thorn, as I slowly drifted off to sleep with our legs tangled into a Christmas bow, that Bonnie and Clyde came out in 1967.

  You anachronistic twat.

  * * *

  ††

  I woke up the next morning alone in a king-sized bed with the sheets bunched up between my legs and around my waist. When I glanced at my hand, framed by the light streaming in through the second-floor window, I noticed my skin was paler than it had been the night before, dehydrated. The Eleanor sleeve seemed loose around my narrow hips and stomach, where you’d grabbed hold of my skin and tugged, forcefully pulling me on top of your lithe body. The only other pieces of evidence to your existence not currently solidifying in two quarter-shaped spots in the centre of the mattress were the raspberry croissant in a paper bag placed on top of the faux wood-panelled minibar and a folded piece of paper on the pillow next to me:

  My dearest Eleanor,

  It is with great sadness that we must part ways. The brief time we’ve shared together has been among the happiest of my life. Perhaps we’ll meet again soon in another.

  Yours,

  Richard Thorn, Esquire

  It’s a fair assumption to make that most people, upon waking up and finding a note of … well, gratitude, I suppose, would be the most apropos – most I think would experience an unexpected surge of hurt or inconsolable rage if presented with such a crass affectation. To the point: we’d fucked and you were thanking me for services rendered.

  So why wasn’t I offended? Because it felt like it was just an extension of the scene we’d played, drawn to its natural conclusion. You were telling me with that letter that Richard Thorn was done – he was a corpse already in the ground, never again to walk amongst the living. Hindsight, however, has altered my perspective on this matter – given it a much-needed adjustment, if you will – and what was at one point endearing is now laced with cold condescension.

  You slipped up.

  The croissant. It was from another life and another man who was long dead and buried in seventeen different fishbowls decorating the Don of New Jersey’s mansion, and I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this now because you’re still not reading these posts. You can’t be, oh golden child of Andreas Rain, because you’d never have let me get this far if you were.

  * * *

  ††

  We didn’t see each other for another four weeks. I was on set for a single-day pickup shoot – bystanders in the middle of a riot for some superhero flick. I was skinless, dressed for once in my original wares. The job was simple: ten to twelve hours standing around on a street, waving poorly made placards and screaming nonsensical political slogans at the camera. At one point during a break in the chaos I glanced over and saw you from a distance, exiting Studio C on the far side of the lot. You were dressed in a grey business suit, a cigarette dangling saliva-limp from your bottom lip.

  Any other intelligent, semi-rational human being would have stormed over, stood face to face with you, and called you out for being an unfeeling prick. Not me, though. I shrunk down into the chorus of protesters surrounding me and watched as a woman with brick-red hair tied tight into a bun and dressed in similarly redolent attire slunk up next to you and lit your cigarette. Together the pair of you were a time capsule of American Psycho–era aesthetics: oil slick temperaments pressed up against the Studio C lot wall as if you were seniors ditching their final exams – because who gives a fuck, right? You smoked together in silence until she dropped her head to your shoulder and I saw you put your arm around her back, gripping her around the other side. The suit you wore was clean – there was no blood, no scuff marks or signs of struggle. Had it already happened? Had you been done away with yet?

  You hadn’t exaggerated anything in your note: Richard Thorn was indeed dead, replaced by someone pernicious, someone who looked as if they’d have taken great pleasure in telling a class of third graders that Santa died of a congenital heart defect. Feeling uncertain and a little afraid, I waited until red hair and disaffection had walked back inside the studio before making my way through the crowd of rioters and crossing the lot. I aimed straight for you. You looked up as I approached, the cigarette in your hands a mere thimble of what it had once been, a snake of ash hanging off one end.

  “Hey,” I said.

  You glared at me, steel eyes slicing my jugular.

  “Eleanor … remember?” I said when you didn’t respond right away. I was suddenly very aware of my appearance; I felt chilled dressed in my original wares, missing that extra layer of warmth provided by each new set of skin. “We were together a short while ago. You … you left me a note, said you hoped we’d meet again in another life.” I smiled against your silence; my cheeks reddened, a mix of anxiety and anticipation. “Well, here we are.” I extended my hand, cleared my throat and said, “Rioter Number One Hundred and Twenty-six. And you are?”

  You straightened up. Dropped your cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of your brown leather loafer. You leaned in and I was suddenly awash in smoke and perfume, sickeningly thick. Hers. Red’s.

  You – Unknown 1980s Asshole–you – sneered menacingly as you spoke: “I don’t know any Eleanor.”

  “Richard … I mean –”

  “I don’t know any Richard, either. Now fuck off and let me get back to work.”

  11. Donald Davies’s Dick

  Posted: 12/20/2013

  There are a ton of decent-to-good slasher flicks out there if all you’re interested in is a double-digit body count and blood painted on the walls. Most entries in a series establish a formula early on, populating the first act of each successive film with a cast of disposable boozing, fornicating twentysomethings acting as teenagers before moving forward and descending upon them all forms of carnage and dismemberment, the methods of which become increasingly absurd the longer in the tooth a series grows.

  The best of the best, though, the one by which all others are measured, is John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. Made for a paltry $325,000, it introduced to the world a youn
g, take-no-shit actress named Jamie Lee Curtis. The real star of the show, however, as with every film of this ilk, was the killer – a man named Michael Myers who wore a painted, stark-white Captain Kirk mask as he cut a swath through a small, select group of teenagers in fictional Haddonfield, Illinois.

  I was five the first time I saw Halloween. Louise and her friend had rented it on a Saturday night during spring break. When she left to go sleep over at her friend’s house, I stealthed into her room and stole the VHS cassette from her desk, and smuggled it downstairs where I hid it behind the TV stand. I waited then, until Mom and Dad were asleep, and crept downstairs to watch what I knew was forbidden to me. I kept the volume at a minimum and sat less than a foot away from the screen so as to hear without drawing unwanted attention. It was my first horror experience, and it changed my life forever. I knew, almost immediately, from the way the tension onscreen created in me a flood of emotions – anticipation, excitement at what would happen next – that I’d found my genre. My calling, as it were. Others would gain and lose my affections as time wore on – I had phases for both Freddy and Jason – but it’s Halloween that has stood the test of time.

  Halloween works because it isn’t interested in building a teetering stack of bodies but in crafting a believable, often overwhelming sense of dread. Myers is a psychopath, yes, but muted in a sense; no matter how gruesome his misdeeds, he doesn’t speak, doesn’t quip, doesn’t offer any motivation for his vicious actions beyond what snippets of info are provided by Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Sam Loomis – that he was, even as a six-year-old child, without reason or any understanding of life and death. When Myers strikes, it’s unexpected and without gratuitous buildup; it isn’t the exclamation point at the end of a long trail of expletives, but the period you don’t expect to appear in the middle of a thought.