The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  It seems we both unintentionally courted the fame now bearing down upon us like an asteroid from outer space. My hands are red with spite; his, I’m assuming, have been tied by the very same pit bull that fights all his battles for him, desperately striving to increase his brand awareness. It’s okay, though. D____, I’m addressing you now: it’s okay. Continue your vow of silence, or non-aggression, or whatever protective legalese Ezra’s using to keep you to a short leash. I understand. I won’t even hold it against you.

  * * *

  ††

  There are more holes in our shared past than days in a year. I’ve been digging around for answers about D____ – about who he really is, or was – since our very first meeting. And in that time I’ve found impressively little. His life before he turned twenty-four, when given his first chance to die for a living, is a series of loose threads and narrative inconsistencies – a class photo here, a college transcript there (first-year psych – oh, the layers), but nothing substantial, nothing that says, “this person existed and here is the life they led.”

  Aud tried to give me a hand with some of the research early on. Mostly it consisted of me googling his name(s) while she fast-forwarded through the mess of films I’d torrented, watching – cackling – at every single one of D____’s death scenes, the more gratuitous the better. Every now and then I’d glance up and see her on her laptop, sitting on the floor of my studio apartment, with both hands over her mouth to keep from bursting. “Look!” she said once, spinning the laptop around so that I could watch that scene from Desert Decapitators on the Loose where his character, Michael Steelwater, gets taken out by a maniac wielding a bo staff with motherfucking chainsaws attached at either end. Because that seemed practical to someone in the prop department, I’m sure. It wasn’t new to me, but Aud was losing her shit at the really, super, ridiculously low-budget rubber head they’d made for D____, and the way his body just erupted like an overripe tomato at the first touch from one of the blades.

  “This is too fucking good,” she said, over and over again. I’d seen it already, though. I’d seen all of it more than once and still knew so little. The less I’ve discovered about him through hours and hours of research, the more I’ve allowed my imagination to run feral. It wasn’t long after I began this blog that I started stitching him a sleeve of his very own – a Jungian archetype of the type of childhood I imagined, eventually, would direct an individual to his specific line of work. I envisaged him as a quiet boy, soft-spoken, maybe a little unsure of himself. He was probably small for his age, too, a bit soft around the middle and bullied for it, or maybe he had a face tragically oozing with whiteheads. Mom and Dad loved him, but just enough, just that little bit more than “like.” He wasn’t their concert pianist or star quarterback or future brain surgeon. At parent-teacher night he was that most unfortunate of things: adequate. No trouble, no excitement and absolutely not a trace of ambition. His parents likely did what they could to spark the renaissance soul they prayed was inside, somewhere, nesting, but nothing took; his bedroom was a dystopian junkyard of dust-covered guitars, drum kits abandoned and stacked against the wall, the floor littered with acrylic paints and briefly toyed-with chemistry sets.

  It was this sort of speculative attention to detail, which I employed in the making of every sleeve, that seized his thoughts as we lay in bed together for the second time, in the almost-blackness of our motel room, following our turn as doomed European tourists. As had happened previously, the flesh around my stomach and hips had loosened in the night, where he’d grabbed it, where there’d been friction. He toyed with a ripple of skin, smoothing it out over the hard, less-pliant surface beneath, like he was pushing his fingers through foundation clay, pausing with his thumb on a slight indentation in my flesh, right at the pelvis. Without looking at it, he asked what it was. It’s the seam, I replied, where I’d stitched together the different skin samples. He lapsed suddenly into an uncomfortable silence, and I could tell from the soft, distant glare in his eyes that he was working something out, trying to decide if what I’d said had been a breach of character, of trust. When he finally spoke again, it was the gentle, almost nasal pitch of his true self that I’d heard only once before: “How many?”

  “How many what?” I asked.

  “Sources,” he replied, tiptoeing with his fingers up the seam at my pelvis, stopping where it connected to another along my side, just above the waist.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “However many I need. Sometimes I leave a sleeve whole; other times I pick and choose which parts to keep, to best suit the narrative.”

  “So it’s like when you have a portrait that, when you go in close, you realize is actually a whole bunch of different images.”

  “A mosaic. Exactly.”

  I could see him quietly nodding in the dark as he listened, contemplating what I’d just revealed. While it was true that Eleanor had been a complete idea in and of herself, it was equally true that sleeves like hers did not often come around. In most cases, I’d been forced into crafting a pastiche from a wide array of influences: the limber arms of an eighteen-year-old Lithuanian gymnast studying political science at Vilnius University, vacationing in LA for the summer; the rough hands and fingerprints of a former member of the Ukrainian armed forces I met one night at a bar in Culver City; the scarred, hidden torso of a southern Californian socialite sitting alone in a bookstore, pretending to read a magazine, begging the world to leave her alone, just for a moment, just long enough for her to catch her breath. It usually took little more than a glance for me to parse the lives of the women whose skin I sheared from their bodies. I’d become a professional at stalking silently twenty or thirty steps behind a mark – close enough to keep my inspiration in view as I followed them home, but far enough away that I would not be seen were they to suddenly turn and look in my direction. Often I’d wait until they’d unlocked the door of their house or apartment and I’d come up from behind, wrap one hand around their mouth and the other around their waist and force them inside, kicking the door shut from the other side of the threshold. I’d push them to the ground, holding a chloroform-soaked rag over their faces while visually poring over their belongings, noting how they’d decorated their space, with pictures and colours and tchotchkes. I’d drink in the materials of their surroundings while opening each drawer in the kitchen, looking for a chef’s knife or a decent non-serrated blade that wouldn’t fray the edges of the tissue as I scalped and de-skinned what pieces I needed to complete the persona I’d already outlined in my head. I would use what they had on hand – plastic bins, discarded Amazon boxes, laundry and duffle bags lined with green trash bags or plastic tarps to prevent visible leakage, to transport them safely home where I could then transfer them into the solution I’d prepared. The inside of my fridge was almost barren of essentials: there were condiments, half-empty jars of pickles and peanut butter, while top to bottom the shelves were stacked with the United Colors of Benetton, sheared to the bone, organized by body part and Pantone swatch.

  The more patchwork characters I pieced together for myself, the better I got at seeing the gaps where my aesthetic – my narrow, jagged self – poked through, and the more efficient I became at patching from a greater accumulation of sources, to obscure any discrepancies between the sleeve and what resided within. The process of piecing together a sleeve for D____ was different, though, because beneath the nation state of ghosts populating his career is still only the barest assumption of a person – threads of detail and only just. And I couldn’t very well hide what I didn’t know. And with D____, I never really knew much of anything at all. The sole individual in his life who likely knows anything concrete about him is Ezra, but she won’t talk. She’s his enabler in all this. He said as much to me that night – the last of our time together, when he shattered both my jaw and his unspoken promise to me.

  * * *

  ††

  So here we are. The ground
rules have been laid out and introductions made. I know now, thanks to Ezra, that he’s out there, hiding among my readers in plain sight. Well, D____, you can tell your pit bull, the next time you see her, that she can push as hard as she wants but it isn’t going to deter me from stating my case, because a man without an identity has no rights to self-preservation.

  15. Commitment

  Posted: 01/25/2014

  We weren’t a couple, not even in the broadest definition of the term. There was something real between us that we both had silently acknowledged; still we remained untethered to one another. It was brutal, confusing, knowing you were there, with me, but also not, like having a parasitic insect relentlessly gnawing on my brain stem but not actually doing any damage, not letting my mind wander too far into what might have been. Lord knows commitment was never once discussed. Over the weeks that followed the start of our … the start of us, I tried to think of ways to bring it up, but the timing was never right; it never felt like it was something we could even begin to discuss.

  I heard the soft click of the door as you exited the motel room on our second night together, early in the morning. You thought I was still asleep. I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time; it was long past midnight and your carriage had already turned back into a pumpkin. I stayed in bed for another hour, in the cold, damp remains of our fantasy, until I felt chilled. Then, wrapping myself in the bedsheet, I zombied into the washroom. Flicked on the light there and was shocked by what I saw; staring back at me from inside the mirror above the sink was a police report personified. I stood up straight, turned to the left, to the right: the skin of my upper body was pale and elastic as if too little fabric had been stretched over too large a frame, while loose portions had collected like folded curtains around my midsection and the tops of my thighs, fingerprints pressed into the flesh like newsprint in Silly Putty; my hair had thinned, and the seams between the different types of skin were white and visible in a way they hadn’t been before, like the spine of a paperback novel that had been cracked one too many times. When I reached up and massaged the right side of my face the skin around that eye shifted in a circular motion, revealing the increasingly fragile body within the sleeve – pale and red and aggravated. I reached around to the back of my head, to the almost invisible zipper beneath what was left of my hair, and started to claw my way free of the tarnished, loose sleeve. The flesh around the opening was dry and flaked apart in my hands, turning into confetti that coated the sink, the counter, the white-tiled floor of the washroom.

  When all was said and done, what stared back at me from the mirror was an emaciated body thin enough to have been sleeved inside a waiflike figure; that smelled stale, like a pair of used gym socks lost at the bottom of an athletic bag – a narrow, hipless, nearly shapeless skeleton structure of thoughts and ideas upon which to build. I touched my almost non-existent chest, the hairs pressed down from sweat, and it hurt, like my bones had turned brittle while sheathed within my myriad sleeves, the muscles in my arms and legs all but evaporated, leaving behind only strings and sinew and the vaguest impression of a build.

  * * *

  ††

  I didn’t know where you’d gone or when – if – you’d be back, so that afternoon I went ahead and checked out of the motel. My first thought was to head home, but that didn’t feel right. Home was a walk-up in Culver City where several days’ worth of work writing obituaries had backed up on me. That place felt like a piece from a different life, one that didn’t quite fit the same as it once had; a plot thread tied to a character that no longer existed. What we’d done – what we’d had was … it was fake and made up and a total fabrication, yet … If I told you that, based on almost nothing real, the night we’d spent together seemed among the most authentic of my life, would you think that I’d lost my mind? Because I can’t think of any other way to describe how I felt after checking out, not wanting to return to the life I had, which had started to feel like the dream and not the other way around. Though the character I’d dressed in for the night had come to an end, the sleeve now a collection of dried and crumpled paper stuffed at the bottom of my overnight bag, it was still too soon to return to what I’d been before. I felt momentarily outside of myself, adrift in a neon haze.

  The next day, while standing in line at Starbucks, a woman I’d known for years came up and stood behind me. Her name was Joyce and she lived down the hall from me – we’d said our hellos every time we passed one another either leaving or coming home – but that afternoon, while standing side by side waiting for our Americanos, she wouldn’t face me, or even acknowledge me; didn’t smile or nod when I smiled and nodded. Our orders arrived at the same time, and she picked hers up, turned and looked straight through me as if I were a ghost.

  * * *

  ††

  You reappeared a week later as I was sitting on a concrete stoop outside the Starbucks at the Howard Hughes Center, drinking a latte and reading a by-the-numbers mystery novel I’d picked up from a discount table at a bookstore.

  “Excuse me,” you said, authoritatively.

  I looked up, surprised. You were dressed in black, from jeans to leather duster. Best guess: Eastern European hit man or two-bit cyberpunk castoff for whom a sense of humour was a potentially expensive proposition. I’d soon learn your new identity: Guard 528491 of the Kurzweil Corporation’s Galactic Prison franchise.

  “This place isn’t safe,” you boomed. (Your baritone was impressive – not sure if I ever told you that.) “There are … unsavoury people around.”

  To both sides I saw families shopping up and down the promenade, pushing strollers, holding hands, rocking cut-off jeans shorts and pastel polo tees. My stomach dropped to my knees then, unexpectedly: I was naked. You were there for me, and I had on only my original skin, still slightly raw from contact. My throat dried up and I didn’t know what to say. As if aware of what I was feeling, you extended your hand, palm up.

  “Come with me if you value your life.”

  I took your hand then and you pulled me to my feet. “I’m … I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be.”

  “It’ll be okay,” you said. “Just take my hand. Stay close.”

  16. Zero Chance, Zero Escape

  Posted: 01/25/2014

  EXT: PAY BY THE HOUR MOTEL -- AFTERNOON

  GUARD 528491 leads M_____ to a motel three blocks from an abandoned warehouse that had been gutted and remodelled inside to resemble a twenty-third century prison complex -- complete with all manner of unfurnished piping and electrical wiring.

  M_____ (V.O.)

  You were a prison guard with a bar code tattooed on the back of your neck -- a number without a name, like they did in so many pre-Matrix dystopians that tried to prove how edgy and like Neuromancer or Snow Crash they could be without actually understanding what made either so iconic.

  (Beat)

  Tomorrow you were scheduled to die, to be thrown over the railing of the prison's second floor and into a waiting sea of thugs and villains with genetically enhanced bodies and cybernetic limbs.

  GUARD 528491 stops in front of ROOM 15 and inserts a key into the lock. He opens the door and M_____ follows him inside.

  CUT TO:

  INT: PAY BY THE HOUR MOTEL ROOM 15 -- AFTERNOON

  GUARD 528491 walks over to the bed and sits down. At his feet is a BLACK DUFFLE BAG.

  M_____ stands just inside the door, staring down at the BLACK DUFFLE BAG.

  M_____

  What's that?

  GUARD 528491 pushes the BLACK DUFFLE BAG with his foot.

  M_____ kneels down and hesitates briefly before opening the BLACK DUFFLE BAG.

  M_____ (V.O.)

  You wordlessly kicked the bag over to me. I glanced up and you were smiling the eager, almost childish smile of someone who knew, who just knew that they'd found the perfect Christmas gift -- smiling, but trying not to. Trying
to remain stoic and militaristic. The top of the bag bulged and I could see a damp patch where blood had soaked through. I knew what was inside before I'd even unzipped.

  Inside the BLACK DUFFLE BAG are the FLAYED SKINS of at least a dozen different women -- some full, some piecemeal. M_____ turns and COUGHS from the INTENSE STENCH within. Then reaches into the bag and pushes aside the SKINS at the top, noting the roughness of their edges.

  M_____ (V.O.)

  They were dry and at risk of becoming worthless -- I wanted to take them home right away, treat them, parse them as needed. Before I could, though, I took a moment to revel in … surprise. At what he'd done, the gift he'd given. Had he done this before? Was there method to his acquisitions or were they just what had come around?

  (Beat)

  I smelled memories of a carnival -- a thick combination of cotton candy, hot dogs and manure; another slip of skin smelled like a dry cleaner's, like nothing it had worn had ever been laundered at home. Another produced almost no olfactory response beyond that of viscera; however, its texture was especially rough and without give, without pliability. Whoever had worn this last sleeve had spent a lifetime attempting to mask their origins, whatever they might've been, wherever and why.

  (Beat)

  The flaying was quick work by an obviously unsteady hand, but it didn't matter. There was enough material in the bag that I could put together whatever I needed for … whoever I was supposed to be, now and for the foreseeable future.

  (Beat)

  When I looked up at you again, your excitement had dissipated and I caught you staring off into space.

  GUARD 528491

  (Unnerved)

  That place is going to be the death of me. I know it. I just … I'm sure of it.

  M_____ (V.O.)